The militants do not appear to care about the luxurious details of Italian crystal chandeliers, furniture, silk curtains, plush beds, or the warehouse of imported alcohol, some of which contain boxes of fine wine, of which a bottle costs $2,800.

All of this, to them, is further evidence of the extravagant life that the men of power lived at their expense.

One of them says: “When their army enters our houses and our areas, they did not leave doors, tiles, pipes, or electrical wires inside the walls. They systematically looted our homes, leaving only skeletons... Did they really need that?”

He poses his final question as he points to the luxury of Hassan’s four-story home, which can be navigated by elevator and has a private gym, a large garden, and a swimming pool, as shown in the video below.

While small signs point to alleys leading to some villas and private farms, the palaces of the inner circle of the entourage stand behind high walls, with only their roofs or the trees in the ornate gardens visible. Identifying them requires careful cross-referencing of information with multiple parties.

An example of this is the luxurious Al-Qatirji complex, which belongs to the Syrian businessman close to Assad, Muhammad Baraa Al-Qatirji, who was on the US sanctions list and was killed by a suspected Israeli airstrike targeting him in this area in mid-July.

The white walls of these palaces, decorated with tall trees, ornate plants, and the statues of two lions placed on both sides of the huge gate, contrast with the barren and neglected areas surrounding it.

The complex is distributed on both sides of the road known among the residents as “Al-Qatirji Street.” It seems that more construction work was taking place there until recently, as this video shows.

The leader of the group tasked with protecting “Assad’s villages” told Asharq Al-Awsat that “most of the palaces whose owners fled were emptied of everything that could be carried and used.” The Syrian villages surrounding Assad’s villages, even though housing loyalists, are living in abject poverty.”

While “Assad’s villages” or the palaces area as it is called, appear to be a spot at odds with the rest of Damascus in terms of good civil organization, the sequence of palaces and luxurious houses and their numbering, the dense trees and plants and general cleanliness, the areas and villages adjacent to them shock you as belts of blatant misery by all standards.

Even the electricity that used to feed that wealthy area with an uninterrupted “golden line” did not include these destitute neighbors who formed a solid base for the regime, on sectarian grounds in most cases.

At the entrance of “Assad’s Villages,” stands a police headquarters in a modern building, unlike the police and security branches in the rest of the capital’s areas. However, the security of the area did not depend on it, but on the headquarters of the “Fourth Division” that extends along the highway leading to it, and the many military checkpoints affiliated with it, which were taken over by factions from the General Command of “Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham.” However, the tanks of this division are still scattered on both sides of the road, as this video shows.

As the car drove us between the palaces hidden behind high walls, my companion pointed to a site where a Captagon warehouse was found two days ago and said: “We received news about a Captagon lab here among these palaces. An armed force went to raid it, but it was empty and all that remained of it were traces of bags and packages.”

 “Most of the informants and snitches who used to work for the regime have raised the new flag and are now courting us and want to work for the organization now, but we cannot trust them much,” he said.

“The best thing they do is inform about a theft or someone entering a palace to burn evidence and hide documents,” he added.

Indeed, after days of searching for the palace of Yasar Ibrahim, the financial arm of former first lady Asma al-Assad and who reportedly accompanied Bashar to Moscow on the day of the escape, news came that there was a fire in his palace’s garden.

A group of the gunmen headed there and found a woman who works for the Ibrahim family, accompanied by a member of the Republican Guard, according to his military identification, burning all the documents and papers left in the house. They were terrified and handed over the remaining papers, their car, and weapons to the gunmen.

It is noteworthy that much of what Asharq Al-Awsat saw among the seized documents and papers was related to Lebanon, including maps of specific areas and detailed newspaper clippings of press coverage of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and its repercussions.

Yasar Ibrahim is a businessman whom Asma al-Assad tasked with the overthrow of the empire of Rami Makhlouf, Bashar’s cousin, and he was the economic and financial front for the ruling family’s new empire.

Ibrahim began his career by establishing a telecommunications company, a large part of which was owned by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, then he seized control of the two main telecommunications companies in Syria, MTN and Syriatel (which was part of Makhlouf’s share). He also established several companies in tax havens to circumvent international sanctions and manage the money generated from the Captagon trade.

It is interesting that a man of Yassar Ibrahim’s caliber would keep newspaper clippings about the Hariri assassination and a map of the Lebanese towns of Marjeyoun and Hermoun, carefully archived with handwritten notes at the top of the pages.

The confiscated documents at his palace raise questions about other’s archives. What do the destroyed papers and documents hide or what has yet to be discovered?

Many questions may not be answered unless these men and women of Assad’s brutal regime are prosecuted and referred to trials in which they reveal their past and the past of two countries whose fates were sometimes linked by desire and sometimes by coercion.

A distant possibility. At least for now.