The collapse of Bashar Assad’s regime has led to a sharp rise in preventable diseases that festered during the 14-year war in Syria, with new research warning of a tuberculosis resurgence and a cholera outbreak amid fresh displacement in some regions and a broken health system.

In northwest Syria, more than 2,500 TB patients were identified between 2019 and 2025, including 47 cases of multidrug-resistant TB, according to the World Health Organization.

Similar gaps in TB care have plagued the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, where diagnostics and treatment programs launched in 2018 collapsed after the Daesh attack on the Hasakah prison in January 2022.

Official figures under Assad consistently painted a far rosier picture. Before his overthrow on Dec. 8 in an offensive spearheaded by rebels now in power in Damascus, Syria’s Health Ministry said TB rates had dropped from about 21 per 100,000 people in 2010 to 17 per 100,000 in 2023.