When Syrian rebels roared into Damascus after a lightning advance on the capital, they exalted of their conquer President Bashar Assad and rejoiced on the sudden end of a 14-year civil war that laid waste to much of the country.
In images captured by Associated Press photographers in December, rifle-toting opposition fighters celebrated within the streets and stepped on a broken bust of Assad’s late father, Syrian President Hafez Assad.
The toppling of the Assad family also unleashed a seek for answers in morgues and prisons where families went in the hunt for family members who disappeared under the Assad police state. At the infamous Saydnaya military prison, a person found two ropes tied into nooses. At a hospital morgue, a Palestinian mother wept in a dingy identification room after finding her son’s body.
Meanwhile, wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon upended more lives in the ultimate weeks of 2024. A Ukrainian military chaplain held a church service for an infantry unit during Christmas near the front-line town of Chasiv Yar. A large-eyed Palestinian child wounded in Gaza received treatment at a hospital. A person decorated a Christmas tree atop a pile of rubble inside a Catholic church hit by Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon.
In the U.S., Americans watched because the suspect within the fatal shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO returned to New York surrounded by police. On the West Coast, firefighters battling a wildfire in Malibu, California, were photographed under a rain of embers within the eerie orange glow of the flames.
There were moments of joy, too, especially as Christmas drew near.
In Nairobi’s Kibera slum, one among the busiest neighborhoods of Kenya’s capital, young dancers in sparking outfits performed a Christmas ballet. In London, a butcher hurled a turkey to customers through the annual meat auction at Smithfield Market, and young choir singers at St. Paul’s Cathedral rehearsed for a Christmas performance that was to incorporate girls for first time within the church’s 900-year history. In New York, the Radio City Rockettes danced within the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall.
