Nicholas Nakoul can breathe a sigh of relief. This summer, after extending his studies to avoid military conscription, he will complete his economics degree at Damascus University.

Up until 8 December, when the 24-year rule of Bashar al-Assad ended abruptly, Mr. Nakoul had been failing exams deliberately to prolong his studies — a tactic used by many young men throughout Syria’s 14-year civil war — to avoid the draft.

The 24-year-old is among 150 volunteers at the Don Bosco Center in Al-Salihiya, a neighborhood northwest of the old walled city of Damascus, where he organizes sports activities for children and assists with administration.

His family is one of hundreds from the economically depressed suburb of Jaramana who come to the center regularly to benefit from programming offered by the Salesians of Don Bosco, a community of religious founded by St. John Bosco in 1859 to serve impoverished children during the Industrial Revolution — a period of frenetic change in the West. Now present in more than 130 countries, the Salesians are present throughout the Middle East, Northeast Africa, India and Eastern Europe.

Mr. Nakoul was 11 when a nationwide anti-government revolution swept Syria, later erupting into a civil war that killed more than 650,000 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, UNHCR, the war displaced more than 13 million people. The Syrian Network for Human Rights reports hundreds of thousands were arrested or disappeared. 

“It was a nightmare for us,” says Mr. Nakoul. “It pushed us to think about going abroad.”

As the war began, young Nicholas started attending weekly activities and catechism classes at the Don Bosco Center.

“The center changed my life,” he says. “It made me more social; it raised my awareness and understanding about my daily life.”

Mr. Nakoul intends to work in banking upon graduation. Although job opportunities are limited in Syria’s current economy, he remains optimistic — a testimony to the support offered by the center, which continues to be a lifeline for families nervous about Syria’s new government.

Syria plunged into a new chapter on 27 November, when the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (H.T.S.) spearheaded a surprise 12-day offensive that culminated on 8 December in the capture of the capital of Damascus, forcing the Assad family, who had controlled Syria since 1971, to flee. 

The group’s commander, Ahmed al-Shara, assumed leadership of the fractured nation and pledged to rebuild Syria as an inclusive society. Although concerns were raised over his past affiliation with Al Qaeda, he has told the country’s minority Alawite, Christian and Druze communities that their rights would be respected in the predominantly Sunni Muslim nation.

On 31 December, about a month prior to being appointed interim president of Syria, Mr. Shara held a cordial public meeting with senior Christian leaders. 

The Christian population in Syria, once estimated at 20 percent of the population, has dropped dramatically since the start of the 14-year war, from about 2 million people to less than 450,000, according to the European Union Agency for Asylum. 

Christian leaders in Syria say that, under the new government, they fear an implementation of strict Islamic law, which could encroach on religious freedoms. In March, two days of renewed internecine fighting, which killed more than 1,000 people, sparked fears of a return to civil war.

However, hope was renewed on 13 May, when U.S. President Donald Trump announced the lifting of sanctions against Syria, which church leaders and humanitarian organizations had been requesting for years. 

The U.S. first imposed sanctions on the country in 1979, imposing additional sanctions over decades. The most recent set of sanctions, known as the Caesar Act, which went into effect in 2019, includes a provision allowing the president to suspend it. However, congressional action would be required to remove other sanctions. At the time of publication, it was unclear how long the process of unwinding sanctions would take and whether only some or all sanctions would be lifted.

Archimandrite Antoine Mousleh, vicar general of the Melkite Greek Catholic Archeparchy of Damascus, says the Melkite Church — one of the largest churches in Syria — is working to reassure families during this period of transition.

“In Syria, we have lived for thousands of years with each other, with different ethnic or religious groups, and it is a unique society,” Father Mousleh says.

While families continue thinking about leaving, their main priorities tend to be daily needs, he says. It is too soon to compare life for Christians under the Assad regime with the current situation, he adds.

Years of conflict, international isolation and the magnitude 7.8 earthquake in February 2023 sank the country into one of the world’s worst socioeconomic crises. According to 2024 World Bank statistics, Syria’s gross domestic product — a monetary measure used to determine the health of national economies — contracted by 54 percent between 2010 and 2021, and its currency depreciated by 141 percent against the U.S. dollar in 2023. Inflation rose by 93 percent that same year.

Limited job opportunities have forced men, women and children into informal work, such as selling smuggled fuel in plastic bottles or reselling bread from bakeries on the street.

The Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarchate, along with the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, helps about 320 needy families each month with food, clothing and medicines.

Males are traditionally the breadwinners in Syrian society. During the civil war, however, many disappeared — forcibly conscripted or abducted — or died in the fighting, resulting in an increase of female-headed households.

Jacqueline Jirjis has been a single mother of three since 2013, when militants abducted her husband, Ghassan, along with others from their village of Maaloula. The ancient Christian village was overrun by the Syrian army, which at the time was fighting the Al Nusra Front, one of five Islamist militant groups that merged in 2017 to form the Islamic rebel group H.T.S.

The Lebanese army eventually found his body close to the Syrian border with Lebanon.

Ms. Jirjis and her children fled Maaloula in 2013 and have since lived in a one-room house in an alleyway in the old Christian quarter of Damascus.

Sara and Sidra, now 16 and 11 respectively, sit on the upper level of their bunkbed, their legs swinging. Azar, 15, sits on the floor beneath a framed image of the Virgin Mary and a photograph of his father. The paint is peeling off the wall and their few belongings are neatly folded on shelves above his head. Schoolbooks sit on a side table. The children just returned from their morning lessons.

Ms. Jirjis, 48, fiddles with her hands as she speaks of their daily struggles and the assistance she has received with clothing and occasional food vouchers from the Congregation of the Religious of Jesus and Mary, a community of religious women founded in 19th-century France by St. Claudine Thévenet to work with vulnerable people.

“We mainly eat vegetables, as meat is too expensive,” says Ms. Jirjis, as she slices and fries potatoes in the small outdoor kitchen for the children’s lunch.

Azar in the meantime kicks a soccer ball in the yard; he hopes to be a soccer player. Sidra, who shows off her schoolbooks, would like to be a teacher, and Sara hopes to be a translator.

While the sisters’ mission is dedicated mainly to children, they began to address the needs of mothers as well. At their Hope Center outside Damascus, the sisters launched a microprojects initiative last year to help women establish small sewing or catering businesses.

Some 300 children and their parents also visit the sisters’ music center in Jaramana. 

“When we healed the children with the music, we discovered that, in the end, it was really the parents who needed healing more than the children,” says Sister Insaf Chahine, R.J.M.

“Everyone has a story; everyone has a miracle. What we say now is that God really saved us many times.”

The United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, estimates that 85 percent of households in Syria “struggle to make ends meet” and more than 7 million children require aid, from nursing formula and clean drinking water to food, clothing and school supplies. As well, more than 2.4 million Syrian children, aged 5-17, are not in school, and more than 7,000 school facilities need repair after being damaged in the war.

Syria’s battered education sector also suffers from a teacher shortage, low teacher salaries and subsequently poor teaching.

Despite free public education, the cost of bus tickets, stationery and uniforms is still too much for many families to bear, says Marwa Alsharqawi, an education specialist with the Norwegian Refugee Council.

“Sometimes the calculation will make [parents] decide it is not worth [their children] going back to school, it is not worth the education,” she says.

The Don Bosco Center in Damascus is vital against this backdrop. The Salesians, who arrived in the city in 1990, have sought to alleviate some of the burdens on families and to increase educational opportunities for children through extracurricular activities, sports, art and music lessons, and catechism.

Some 860 children and 185 university students visit the center each weekend. During exam periods, the Salesians organize tutoring sessions in math, English, science and Arabic, run by the older students, many of whom came to the center as children.

“Families cannot survive to the end of the month, especially as the majority [of parents] are public employees,” says Salesian Father Miguel Ángel Condo Soto, one of four priests at the center.

With the depreciation of state salaries due to the collapse of the Syrian pound, many parents have taken a second job to make ends meet, leaving them with less time for their children, he explains.

“This is to the detriment of the young people; they cannot develop familial or social skills,” says Father Condo, a Bolivian, who moved to Syria in 2022. The programming at the Don Bosco Center helps to fill gaps in the children’s psychosocial and spiritual development.

In January, Edward Bitar and Bassam Jarouj from Jaramana were among dozens of parents in line at the Don Bosco Center to collect school backpacks for their children.

“For more than 11 years [of war], we had nothing to entertain the children, except this center,” says Mr. Bitar.

Salesian Father Pedro Garcia, rector of the center, says despite the many unknowns families face under the new transitional government, the change offers a window of opportunity for young people to shape their future.

“We encourage the children to be the protagonists of their own lives,” he says. 

“This is a very historical moment for the country in which there are lots of opportunities. We must not sit in a corner waiting for the future; each person must make an effort.”