Syria Faces Its Past and Its Future

In the field, Moises is restless and relentless, working from early morning till late at night with a professional’s calm. But his eye is unfailingly compassionate, and at times his scenes can summon the power of a religious tableau. On our trip in 2012, we visited a village outside Aleppo, where he photographed a mother mourning over the tortured body of her dead son. Her face, with empty eyes cast to the sky, summons a grief as old as time.

The images from our recent trip offer stark testimonials of the cost of Assad’s rule: the prematurely hardened faces of boys waiting to buy bread for their families at a bakery on Damascus’s outskirts; the ghastly visage of a murdered man whose killers had gouged out his eyes; the painfully legible despair of Majida Kaddo, whose brother-in-law, the activist Mazen al-Hamada, was detained and tortured for years, only to be killed just days before Assad’s fall.