Hundreds of soldiers and police officers converged this week on a former security compound in the western Syrian city of Latakia, heeding the call of the country’s new rulers to relinquish their ties to the ousted regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

During its decades-long rule, the Assad government built a brutal security apparatus, detaining, torturing and executing opponents. Last week, the rebel coalition that overthrew him said it would hunt down senior officials implicated in crimes, while rank-and-file conscripted soldiers would receive amnesty.

More than 600 people came when the so-called reconciliation center first opened on Sunday in Latakia, in a province that has been an Assad stronghold. Many more followed on Monday, the line extending the length of the large security compound.

They hoped to clear their names and settle their status, though the centers are just the starting point and the full process to do so remains unclear.

Online and on television, the Syrian transitional government, led by the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, called for former soldiers, military officers and even medical workers in the military to hand over their IDs, weapons and vehicles.

Supervisors at the Latakia center, one of the first in the country, said similar ones had opened or would open in provinces across Syria.

After hours of waiting — and jostling to get a number — some of the men finally made it inside.

At a desk near the front entrance, a police officer with the new Syrian government wrote down each person’s name and a number in blue ink to create a temporary ID. After that, each arrival was told to stand against the wall and hold the number in front, for a mug shot.

The former soldiers and police officers handed in their weapons through two windows along a wall, protected by metal security bars. One man had brought a Soviet-era machine gun, but it was too big to fit through the opening so he had to hand it over at the front door.

Every few seconds came the sound of men cocking guns and checking to ensure their bullet chambers were empty.

Mohammad Mustafa, a 26-year-old security officer with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s interior ministry, dressed all in black, including a beanie and a face mask, stood in the middle of a room that under Mr. al-Assad was used for interrogations. Now, it had become an impromptu weapons depository.

The new authorities had collected dozens of AK-47s, handguns and other weapons, sorting them in piles by type.

This was just part of the process. Inside one of the intake rooms, Warrant Officer Othman Karoom, 40, until recently a traffic police officer in the rebel-controlled city of Idlib, filled out spreadsheets with the details of each person.

“What was your specialty?” he asked, as 28-year-old Mohammad al-Jarrah sat down in a ratty chair in front of his desk.

“Cannons,” Mr. al-Jarrah said, adding quickly in his defense: “I was a conscript.”

“How much did you shell Maraat Misrin and Jebel al Zawiyah?” Mr. Karoom said, mentioning his hometown and a nearby town. “He whose hands have blood on them … ”

“I swear to God, those who have blood on their hands,” Mr. al-Jarrah replied, “They will all be known.”

As the former rebels worked inside gathering information, the lines grew longer outside, the men — and a few women — hoping for their chance at amnesty.

Waiting hours in the cold, a group of men yelled and pushed forward, trying to force their way into the security building. A police officer of the new government rushed toward them, his rifle pointed. Soon order was restored, as police officers pushed many back outside the main gate.

Several people were injured in the crush. They were allowed to stay inside the complex to get processed.

It could be a while before any of the former police officers and soldiers know their fate.

Mr. Mustafa of the interior ministry said each person would need to report back in three months to a security headquarters to be fully investigated.

“Right now, we don’t have time,” he said.

An oasis stretched far into the desert, a vast sea of emerald stalks and scarlet poppy flowers that grew to the horizon.

The Taliban operated openly, running a social experiment unlike anything in the country. Tens — then hundreds — of thousands of people flocked here to escape the war and grow poppy, fleeing the American efforts to wipe out the crop.

The Taliban opened a trauma hospital to treat their wounded and earned a fortune, not just from opium, but also from methamphetamines and taxes on goods moving in and out of Afghanistan, bringing them millions upon millions of dollars every month.

During the war, this remote district became a laboratory for a future Taliban state, providing money for the war and a sanctuary for the men fighting it.

All that has changed. The Taliban boom town is rapidly going bust.

The same insurgents who embraced opium to help finance their war have put an end to it, ordering a ban that has all but cleared Afghanistan of poppy and other illicit drugs.

What the United States and its allies failed to do in two decades of war, the Taliban has managed in two years of peace. In an area where poppy once dominated the landscape, barely a stalk remains.

Hundreds of labs set up to process heroin and methamphetamines have been closed or destroyed. The drug bazaar that powered this part of southern Afghanistan has been all but emptied. And the nation, already reeling without international aid, has lost a sizable piece of its economy as a result.

On top of that, the Taliban government has stiffened its taxes, leaving residents bitter and angry. Many have moved away, except those too poor or invested to leave, like Abdul Khaliq.

“This is all coming to an end,” he said, waving his hand toward the emptying villages.

There was almost nothing in this district, Bakwa, when he arrived 25 years ago, just an empty desert plain. He built an empire out of sand, selling the pumps and solar panels that provided water for the opium boom, helping turn Bakwa into a frontier outpost for smugglers, traders and farmers.

Now his story, like Bakwa’s, has come full circle: the foreigners gone, the Taliban back in power, the earth stripped of poppy and the land returning to dust.

“It’s a matter of time,” he said.

The war in Afghanistan was many things: a mission to eliminate Al Qaeda and oust the group that gave safe harbor to Osama bin Laden; an ambitious drive to build a new Afghanistan, where Western ideals ran headlong into local traditions; a seemingly endless entanglement, where winning sometimes mattered less than not losing.

It was also a drug war.

The Americans and their allies tried again and again to sever the Taliban’s income and stop one of the world’s worst scourges: opium and heroin production.

The United States spent nearly $9 billion on heavy-handed eradication and interdiction, yet Afghanistan eclipsed its own records as the largest producer of illicit poppy in the world.

What did change was where that poppy was grown. Little by little, farmers flooded once empty deserts in southwestern Afghanistan, barren pockets of sand with almost no populations to speak of before.

Communities formed in starburst patterns along ancient irrigation lines, then moved farther into the desert to farm as they pleased. The Taliban followed, finding sanctuary in the utter remoteness of districts like Bakwa and their unnavigable roads.

At its height, the Taliban oversaw a narco-state here, a farm-to-table drug operation with hundreds of field labs processing opium into heroin and wild ephedra into methamphetamines for Europe, Asia and elsewhere. By the end of the war, Bakwa had become an entrepôt of the drug trade, home to the largest open-air drug market in the country.

The Taliban showed flexibility, too, both morally and financially. Despite banning poppy on religious grounds before the American invasion, the Taliban allowed farmers to grow as much of it as they wanted during the war.

And they taxed it loosely, often whatever farmers could afford, adopting a hearts-and-minds strategy. They also taxed smugglers, who were happy to help fund a Taliban war machine that didn’t interfere with business.

Bakwa soon became an incubator for governance. Taliban courts adjudicated all manner of disputes, while millions of dollars flowed monthly to help finance the Taliban mission beyond Bakwa and the southwest.

Western officials took aim at that money. They began with eradication, then tried persuading farmers to grow legal crops, and ended with fighter jets bombing makeshift labs made of mud.

“At least $200 million of this opium industry goes into the Taliban’s bank accounts,” Gen. John Nicholson, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan in 2017, a year of peak poppy production, said at the time. “And this fuels — really pays for the insurgency.”

But the Taliban’s customs checkpoints were just as essential in Bakwa, or even more so, taxing goods to the tune of $10 million a month or more, according to Taliban officials.

“The money from agriculture, poppy included, funded the war” in these regions, said Haji Maulavi Asif, now the Taliban’s governor for Bakwa District. “But the money from the customs operation helped fund the entire movement.”

Now that poppy has been banned, the farmers the Taliban once relied on feel betrayed, while the Taliban is trying to govern without the money it brings.

“While economically, the decision to ban poppy costs a lot, politically it makes sense,” said Mr. Asif. “We are silencing the countries of the world who say we are growing poppy and participating in the global drug trade.”

‘Desert people’ to opium entrepreneurs

When the war started in 2001, Mr. Khaliq barely noticed.

He had only recently bought land on a roadless expanse in Bakwa that cooked under the summer sun. But just beneath the surface, there was water, so bountiful that reeds grew in some areas. Mr. Khaliq, a mechanic, opened a tiny workshop to fix water pumps.

There were no phones and few neighbors back then, so when the Americans invaded, he heard about it only weeks later.

“We were desert people,” he said. “We didn’t care about the war. That was the concern of city people.”

That changed quickly. Before the American invasion, the Taliban had banned poppy production, sending opium prices skyrocketing. Now that they were gone, Mr. Khaliq switched from growing wheat to poppy.

Others soon joined, and the desert took on new hues. Bright flowers and verdant stems softened the landscape. The money was good — so good that the new Afghan government came knocking.

One day, Bakwa’s new police chief showed up to marvel at how productive Mr. Khaliq’s poppy fields were.

“I bet there’s over half a ton of opium here,” Mr. Khaliq recalled the chief saying.

“I told him it wasn’t that much, but he charged me for that amount anyway,” Mr. Khaliq said with a laugh. “And then he also asked for a bribe.”

With the Americans in control of Bakwa, eradication programs gained momentum. The district governor soon arrived with great fanfare, bringing a tractor, cameras and an entourage of police.

He gathered the farmers and announced there would be no more poppy because the foreigners were serious about getting rid of Afghan opium.

Mr. Khaliq and others watched with quiet indignation as the tractor plowed through a neighbor’s field. But after a short exhibition, the tractor stopped and a photographer was summoned.

“They took pictures of the small destroyed area,” Mr. Khaliq recalled. “Then, they took bribes and left.”

So went the early American-backed eradication campaigns in Bakwa, and the farmers adapted right away. They began pooling their money to compensate whoever’s crops were destroyed for show.

As word spread, newcomers began arriving in droves. Unfamiliar faces turned up weekly to Mr. Khaliq’s garage, dragging motors for him to fix. He stocked spare parts and water pipes, and began selling gas.

“Our business grew with the population, but we never expected it to grow so much,” he said.

The Taliban’s ‘pivot’

Mr. Khaliq didn’t care much for the Taliban at first. He found them harsh and overbearing, propagandizing about their faith while turning on the people around them.

“They were killing people and denouncing them as spies, even visitors who came to see family,” said Haji Abdul Salam, one of Bakwa’s largest landowners.

But they learned from their mistakes as they notched military gains. By 2006, a resurgent Taliban was carrying out its first major offensive since being ousted, laying waste to nearby districts in Helmand Province.

A steady stream of refugees arrived in Bakwa, and more Taliban followed, from fighters to mullahs, seeking shelter and opportunity.

“I moved to this area because it was safe,” said Haji Naim, Mr. Khaliq’s cousin, a Taliban fighter.

Bakwa turned out to be a great place to hide. The terrain was flat, making it easy to spot incoming raids. The ground was silty, which made planting roadside bombs simple. The roads meandered with such arbitrary vigor that only locals knew how to navigate them.

“There is not a single straight road in Bakwa,” said Mr. Khaliq. “If you spot a Taliban, you can’t even chase him.”

As they claimed more territory, the Taliban “learned to pivot,” said Mr. Salam, who helps oversees the main tribal council in Bakwa. “They began to prosecute their own officials, and brought real justice and accountability.”

The Taliban eventually squeezed the Afghan government into a tiny corner of the district, forcing it to abandon any pretense of control over the area.

Hundreds of workers descended on Bakwa to collect opium sap each harvest, while an industry of buyers and smugglers coalesced around an open-air drug market known as the Abdul Wadood Bazaar.

The bazaar drew thousands at times, a vast collection of frontiersmen trading in illicit goods. An entire logistics network developed to serve the trade.

The Taliban ran neither the market nor the drug trade but taxed all of it.

The money added up — and caught the eye of the Americans.

Solar panels and mobile courts

Eradication wasn’t working. In 2007, the peak of the effort — with officials reporting 19,000 hectares of poppy destroyed — Afghanistan still broke a record for poppy cultivation.

Increasingly, the Americans and their allies began prosecuting a more conventional drug war in places like Bakwa, staging raids on smugglers and their networks. Violent interdiction became the norm, infuriating residents.

The Taliban, by contrast, endorsed the drug trade, at least while it was serving their interests. Though they had banned poppy before, they didn’t seem to worry much about the contradiction during the war. To the contrary, they appointed Islamic scholars who delivered sermons on the importance of supporting the jihad and expelling foreigners.

“The secret to their success was religious propaganda,” said Haji Abdullah Khan, a lifelong Bakwa resident. “People didn’t like the Taliban, but they didn’t want Christians or Jews here.”

On more administrative matters, the Taliban also assigned a district governor. Such shadow governors, as they were called, were high-value targets for the Americans and Afghan forces. But Bakwa was so safe for the insurgents that it became a magnet for senior Taliban leaders.

The Taliban established mobile courts, with judges riding around the district, meting out justice on the road. Prisoners would be locked in cars while the officiants went about their business, including the execution of thieves and murderers.

Sometimes, the Taliban would ask locals to host the courts, including Mr. Khaliq. Too frightened to refuse, he said he held more than a few on his compound, just as he sold them gas and offered them tea whenever they came through. But he never warmed to the insurgents.

Which made it all the more frustrating to him when U.S. forces, who operated out of bases in nearby areas, raided his home on multiple occasions.

“I just did what I needed to do regardless of who was in power,” he said.

A constant stream of visitors came to Mr. Khaliq’s expanding compound, which by about 2014 included new storage units, a new garage and a small kiosk selling snacks and sodas.

Lines of customers waited in his courtyard — sometimes for days — to purchase the most revolutionary piece of farming technology to emerge during the war: solar panels to run Bakwa’s ubiquitous water pumps.

“We must have sold tens of thousands of units,” Mr. Khaliq said.

The desert was transformed once more, now with the black tiles of solar setups. Water reservoirs became the norm, an incredibly wasteful method of irrigation that uses open-air pools, which evaporate quickly in the desert heat.

Newcomers claimed even more pieces of desert. The growth was so rapid that international experts on poppy cultivation, like David Mansfield, tracked it via satellite imagery, monitoring the stamps of green invading a sea of brown.

“The Americans and their allies pushed the farmers and sharecroppers into the desert, where they were greeted by the Taliban and welcomed with open arms,” said Mr. Mansfield, an analyst on Afghanistan.

By 2016, he added, more than 300,000 acres of land were being cultivated in Bakwa, a sixfold increase from 2003. The population more than quintupled to an estimated 320,000 people.

The Taliban grew with it. That same year, they finally claimed the district center in Bakwa, the last remaining symbol of the Afghan government.

The squat concrete building had been constructed with American money just four years earlier, in 2012. (Insurgents had burned down the previous one.) Once in control of the $200,000 facility, the Taliban turned it into a hospital.

“The hospital would treat 200 to 250 patients a day,” said Abdul Wasi, a nurse there. “It was a trauma center for the Taliban. Fighters from all over the region would come here.”

The local Afghan government, having abandoned the district altogether, moved to a few containers along the side of a highway.

Heroin, meth and taxes

Bakwa became a Taliban financial capital, collecting taxes like any other formal authority.

Though the American-backed government controlled the official customs checkpoints in and out of Afghanistan, the Taliban set up their own.

They placed them on highways leading to and from Iran, Turkmenistan and Pakistan, charging hundreds of dollars per commercial vehicle. The Taliban even issued receipts.

The money, estimated at around $10 million a month, overshadowed the taxes from poppy farmers and smugglers, local Taliban officials say — and it was all administered from Bakwa.

The district changed yet again. Poppy had been like an anchor tenant in a vast drug emporium. Next, labs began sprouting up to process heroin, a more lucrative venture. Those, in turn, gave way to new labs producing methamphetamines.

The labs proliferated along the edges of the open-air market. Some used cough medicine, draining amber bottles of pseudoephedrine and cooking it down. But ephedra, a shrub that blanketed the central highlands of Afghanistan, soon transformed the industry.

Hundreds of people, if not thousands, worked in the burgeoning meth trade, transporting, milling and producing the drug from the wild ephedra crop.

Mr. Mansfield estimated that hundreds of tons of meth were produced in Bakwa alone, even as poppy continued breaking records. In 2017, Afghanistan cultivated more opium than in any year since the start of the war.

The United States, desperate for a forceful response, redoubled its efforts. Fighter jets and B-52 bombers launched a two-year campaign to destroy labs across southwestern Afghanistan, including in Bakwa.

An estimated 200 labs were destroyed, many of them mud huts and lean-tos leveled by munitions that cost many times what they had obliterated. Little changed. By 2020, hundreds of labs were still churning out heroin and meth.

A drug market turned ghost town

The collapse came as quickly as the boom. One year, it seemed to Mr. Khaliq, business was bountiful. The next, Bakwa was practically empty again.

He noticed the change before many of his neighbors. Fewer customers came. Solar panel orders got smaller. Some were being canceled altogether.

It was 2019, not long after U.S. airstrikes in Bakwa killed 30 people, including many women and children, he said. Yet all anyone wanted to talk about was water.

There had been so much water, for such a long time, that no one considered it might run out. Experts commissioned by U.S.A.I.D. in 2009 had found a huge aquifer under Bakwa, one that seemed destined to last.

“I was surprised at the amount of water they had in the area,” said Darren Richardson, who had commissioned the study. “That was a significant aquifer.”

And yet, only a decade later, the water was growing scarce.

Despite the American airstrikes and water worries, Bakwa remained a center of the drug trade. Poppy had a long shelf life once harvested. Its watering needs coincided with the spring snowmelt from the neighboring mountains. The trade could hold on, residents reasoned.

But then the war ended.

The Americans withdrew for good in 2021 and the Taliban took over. Months later, the supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, declared that poppy cultivation was “absolutely prohibited in the whole country.”

The Taliban claimed to have arrested numerous traffickers, seized nearly 2,000 tons of drugs and raided hundreds of heroin labs. In 2023, the Taliban destroyed dozens of labs in Bakwa, setting them ablaze.

Where the Americans had cherry-picked from the sky, killing or injuring innocents along the way, the Taliban removed nearly every laboratory in Bakwa. The Abdul Wadood Bazaar hollowed out.

With ruthless efficiency, the Taliban did what the United States had hoped for. They got rid of poppy farming, and in doing so, severed one of their economic lifelines.

The remnants of the boom haunt the landscape: abandoned well derricks, stark against the acid sky; old food wrappers and animal droppings desiccated in vacant courtyards.

Farmers blame the Taliban for their misery. For nearly 15 years, their poppy — and the taxes the Taliban collected from it — supported the insurgents’ war to establish a government.

Now that the Taliban got what they wanted, they have forgotten the people of Bakwa who made it all possible, residents grumble. Farmers too poor to leave now send their sons to work on harvests elsewhere, renting them out as labor.

“We have no choice but to stick it out,” said Haji Hawaladar, who had moved his entire family to Bakwa, trading his herd of goats for land. Now, he added, “we could not even give this land away for free.”

The Taliban seemed to have no reservations about leaving. Today, the district is largely empty of administrators and fighters. Many have moved on to bigger roles in other places.

“This was like a test, or an exam,” said Mr. Asif, the district governor. “Trusted people got important positions. The people who did well in Bakwa were top of that list.”

In Mr. Khaliq’s compound on a recent evening, as a honeyed light washed over the desert, nieces and nephews played in the courtyard, while a son stood idly by the gas pumps, waiting for customers who never came.

A few years earlier, his grounds would have been teeming with life. Today, he is selling a tenth of what he once did.

“The only thing that might help would be growing poppy with the water that is left,” said Mr. Khaliq. “But those who tried, the Taliban came and destroyed their crop.”

A few farmers have turned their fields to wheat, and shocks of green punctuate vast brown fields. Mr. Khaliq’s neighbors have moved away, leaving him alone with his crumbling fortune.

Like others, Mr. Khaliq holds the Taliban responsible. They could have enforced water rights agreements, as exist all over Afghanistan. They could ease their ban on poppy to keep the farmers afloat.

“The Taliban did not solve the biggest issues, water and the economy,” he said.

Like others, he knows some people are still hoarding opium reserves to sell at a high price, given the ban. Prices have more than quintupled since 2021, and some are still getting rich.

But everything he owns has lost value: his land and equipment, and hundreds of solar panels that sit in tidy rows, waiting for farmers who will never come back. The barren furrows of earth swirl like fingerprints over a monochromatic desert, a reminder of what was.

“This is life,” he says. “Everything ends. I will be done one day, too. But even if this ends, somewhere else will be beginning.”

The Russian authorities said on Wednesday that they had detained a suspect in the killing of a senior military officer, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, a major development in the most prominent political assassination case in the country since the start of the war in Ukraine.

The suspect, a 29-year-old citizen of Uzbekistan whose name was not released, was captured in a village outside Moscow, a spokeswoman for Russia’s prosecutor’s office said.

The spokeswoman said he had confessed that Ukrainian intelligence agencies recruited him to kill General Kirillov, 54, who was in charge of the Russian military’s nuclear and chemical weapons protection forces.

An official with Ukraine’s security service, known as the S.B.U., said on Tuesday that Ukraine had been responsible for the killing, which took place in central Moscow on Tuesday. He discussed sensitive intelligence on the condition of anonymity.

The general’s killing came days after reports began to emerge about the death of a rocket scientist in Moscow’s outskirts. The scientist, Mikhail Shatsky, worked for the state-run military industrial firm MARS.

One current and one former senior Ukrainian official said Mr. Shatsky was killed in an operation organized by Ukraine’s military intelligence service, known as the H.U.R., because of what they believed was his complicity in war crimes against Ukrainian civilians.

The Russian government has not commented on the death of Mr. Shatsky, and the H.U.R. declined to comment when asked about him.

The detainee accused of killing General Kirillov traveled to Moscow and placed a bomb under a scooter near the general’s home, the prosecutor’s office spokeswoman said.

He also installed a camera inside a parked rental car that transmitted the general’s movements to intelligence agents in Ukraine, she added. He was promised $100,000 and safe passage to Europe for carrying out the plot, she said. An aide to the general was also killed when the bomb was detonated.

“We got more proof that the Kyiv regime does not stop at anything, including terrorism,” Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told reporters on Wednesday. He added that President Vladimir V. Putin had offered condolences to the general’s family.

General Kirillov was the most senior Russian official to have been assassinated away from the battlefield since the start of the war. Previous assassination attempts have targeted Russian propagandists and more junior military officers.

On Wednesday, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said the country would raise the killing of General Kirillov at the scheduled meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Friday.

“We are certain that all the organizers and executors of the murder of Igor Kirillov will be found and punished, whoever they are and wherever they may be,” Ms. Zakharova said.

The general’s killing is the latest embarrassment for Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, the F.S.B., which has assumed greater power and influence since the start of the war in Ukraine nearly three years ago.

The F.S.B. has blamed Ukraine for most terrorist attacks and major accidents in the country since the invasion, usually without providing evidence.

Critics have said such tactics have allowed Russia’s intelligence agencies to deflect the blame for their own failures to detect domestic threats, often associated with Islamist groups.

Analysts have said that the F.S.B. has been blindsided by several attacks associated with Islamism, including the deadliest terrorist attack in Russia in more than a decade, because they were excessively focused on combating Ukrainian sabotage and terrorism operations.

The admission from a Ukrainian intelligence official that Kyiv orchestrated the killing of General Kirillov suggests that the F.S.B. has now failed to protect the country’s leadership from precisely such a threat.

After the killing, some Russian ultranationalist commentators accused the country’s secret services of ineptitude.

“The enemy’s secret services are acting with impunity on the territory of the Russian Federation, and above all in the capital and the metropolises,” Yuri Kotenok, a prominent Russian war correspondent, wrote on social media on Tuesday. “This is mayhem.”

The suspect’s citizenship of Uzbekistan could be consequential. A combination of nationalist war fervor and the participation of citizens of Central Asian countries in recent terrorist attacks have led to a rise in xenophobia and a tightening of immigration laws in Russia.

The backlash against Central Asian immigrants, by far the largest group of foreign workers in Russia, has come at a time of record labor shortages.

Russia’s business groups have been concerned that new measures against migrants would tighten the labor market further, with destabilizing effects for the economy.

Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting from New York and Milana Mazaeva from Istanbul.

The man most likely to replace Olaf Scholz as chancellor of Germany after the coalition government fell on Monday earned his fortune working in the private sector before returning to politics at 63.

That business background may be encouraging for many Germans as the political turbulence bedeviling one of Europe’s most powerful economies has been caused, in part, by the country’s stagnant economy.

If the polls hold, Mr. Scholz’s successor as chancellor could be Friedrich Merz, the now 69-year-old leader of the rival conservative-centrist Christian Democratic Union. He is offering to get the German economic engine humming again after years of stagnation.

“You are leaving the country in one of the greatest economic crises in postwar history,” he said to Mr. Scholz in front of lawmakers on Monday, shortly before he voted against him in the confidence vote.

“He’s trying to bring back the Germany that works,’’ said Sudha David-Wilp, the Berlin-based regional director of the German Marshall Fund, a research organization. She added that Mr. Merz was looking to create an environment “where the economy is producing and there’s high growth.”

How Germany got here

Mr. Scholz’s loss of the vote of confidence in Parliament on Monday means the end of his coalition government and an early vote for a new legislature, most likely by February. Polls show that many Germans hold him responsible for the failures of his squabbling, three-party coalition, which included the Greens and the Free Democrats.

Before this week’s no confidence vote, the country’s next elections had been set to be held in September, and the main political parties were already preparing, with the party candidates for chancellor already clear. The collapse of Mr. Scholz’s government only accelerated the timing.

Presently, about 18 percent of German voters say they would cast ballots for Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats, far less than the roughly 32 percent who say they prefer Mr. Merz’s Christian Democrats.

But when asked about his opponent, Mr. Scholz said recently that he was happy that it was Mr. Merz and not someone else from the deep conservative bench running against him.

“I think I’m somewhat cooler than him,” Mr. Scholz said on public TV in November.

Several candidates, but none are particularly popular

Among the four men leading the mainstream parties going into the elections, none are particularly popular, said Stefan Merz, a director at Infratest dimap, a polling company, who is not related to the leader of the Christian Democratic Union.

But in a recent survey by Infratest, 30 percent of respondents said they liked the work the other Mr. Merz was doing, putting him ahead in a field of four.

Stefan Merz noted that among a slate of unappealing candidates, the Christian Democrat leader was arguably the least weak. “If the Union should win the election, which at the moment everything points to, then it is mainly due to the political issues and not necessarily because of Friedrich Merz,” he said.

Rising through the ranks

Mr. Merz was born and still lives in the Sauerland, a district of western Germany known for hills, heavy food and picturesque nature. It was from there that he was first elected into the European Parliament in 1989 and then the German Parliament in 1994, which was then still in the West German capital, Bonn.

While he comes from the same party as former Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mr. Merz, a pugnacious old-school politician, is in many ways the polar opposite of Ms. Merkel.

He rose through the ranks to lead the Christian Democrats’ parliamentary group, but was soon ousted by another star in the party — Ms. Merkel. It was then that Mr. Merz pivoted from politics and started a lucrative law career.

“I liked the fact that he was also power-conscious,” Ms. Merkel wrote about Mr. Merz in her recently published autobiography. “But there was a problem right from the start: We both wanted to be the boss.”

Mr. Merz got rich working as a lawyer and a lobbyist. Before returning to politics, he was the supervisory board chairman of the German subsidiary of BlackRock, the American investment company.

It was only when Ms. Merkel was getting ready to retire that Mr. Merz got back into politics. When he returned to the political stage, in 2018, he promised he could reduce the success of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known by its Germany initials AfD, by moving his party further right on key issues like migration.

While his leadership has not resulted in lower poll numbers for the AfD, it might help stop his C.D.U. party from losing more voters, as it did to the far right during the Merkel years, analysts say.

Mr. Merz re-entered Parliament in 2021 and — after two failed attempts — won the party leadership in 2022 and worked to unify members around him.

“On the one hand, he has to get past his profile as being a man from yesterday and convince women and maybe some left-leaning voters that his brand of conservatism is not going to put those voters in jeopardy,” said Ms. David-Wilp. “And at the same time,” she added, “he also wants to convince voters of his knowledge of a Germany that worked well.”

Merz missteps

As party leader, however, Mr. Merz has made a number of gaffes and is known for statements that those on the left can find particularly irksome.

In September 2023, he claimed that refugees were having their teeth redone at taxpayers’ expense while regular German patients were unable to get appointments (the head of the German Dental Association denied this).

Early last year, he used an outmoded term for young immigrants in describing what he said was sexist behavior toward German teachers in school.

Despite his significant personal means, Mr. Merz, who has sat on the boards of nearly a dozen big companies and flies a personal two-propellor plane, has insisted that he is just a regular member of the middle class. This has angered many Germans, who see him as being divorced from the economic reality many members of the middle class face.

Despite those mistakes, Mr. Merz has managed to coalesce his party around him and shift it to a more traditional conservative posture after Ms. Merkel’s long tenure took the party further to the left.

“In the past few years, Merz has used his time in opposition to rebuild the C.D.U.,” said Marianne Kneuer, a political scientist at the Technical University in Dresden. “He has also had the time to gain his own experience and to learn from the mistakes of his political opponents.”

Ukraine’s brazen assassination of a Russian general on a Moscow street this week was a triumph for Ukraine’s intelligence services, showcasing a decade’s worth of investment in developing the skills, technology and ingenuity needed to operate successfully behind enemy lines in wartime.

But it was a limited triumph.

Killing the general, Igor Kirillov, 54, will no doubt enrage the Kremlin and spread a degree of fear among the country’s military and political elites, military experts said. It also eliminates a top military leader, who, according to Ukrainian officials, had ordered the use of banned chemical substances against Ukrainian troops.

What it will not do, according to Western officials and experts, is improve Kyiv’s position in its war with Russia. On the battlefield, Ukraine’s forces continue to steadily lose ground to their larger and better-equipped adversaries. On Tuesday, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander of Ukrainian forces, said active fighting was occurring along more than 700 miles of the front line, including major Russian offensive operations in several regions.

“I think there’s a psychological impact that suggests to the elites that we can find you wherever you are and you’re not safe,” said Douglas London, who served as a C.I.A. station chief three times before retiring in 2019, referring to the assassination. “I don’t think it’s really going to have an effect on their war fighting capability.”

On the battlefield, the situation has not looked this desperate for Ukrainian troops since the start of the invasion. Russian forces have moved into the outskirts of Pokrovsk, an important rail hub, and are threatening the major cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, all in the eastern Donetsk region. Things are so dire there that officials have ordered the evacuation of more than 300,000 residents still living in the region.

Meanwhile, Russian forces, augmented with fighters from North Korea, have launched a counteroffensive aiming at pushing the Ukrainians out of their foothold in Russia’s Kursk region, where they have occupied a significant patch of land since the summer. (Some North Korean soldiers have died in the fighting, American military officials have suggested.)

Given Ukraine’s struggles on the battlefield, assassinations and other covert operations like sabotage might be among the few useful tools in Ukraine’s arsenal, Western officials and experts said. They are skills that the Ukrainians have been honing for years.

Before President Vladimir V. Putin launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine and Russia engaged in a shadow war of tit-for-tat assassinations. Political and military leaders as well as intelligence commanders were blown up in car bombings or in more creative ways. In one famous case, Ukrainian operatives connected a remote trigger to a shoulder-fired rocket launcher aimed at the office of a Russian-backed rebel commander and killed him when he entered.

The bomb that killed General Kirillov showed a similar level of ingenuity. It was attached to a scooter placed next to a residential building and detonated, apparently by remote control, when the general exited the building early Tuesday morning, killing him and his aide. A camera set up in a car parked across the street apparently provided a video feed that allowed Ukrainian operators to observe the scene and know when the general was emerging.

Though there have been a number of assassinations in Russia since the war began, never has such a high-ranking military leader been killed so far from the battlefield. Ukraine’s domestic intelligence service, the SBU, claimed responsibility for the operation. The same agency was behind the remote-triggered rocket launcher attack, as well as other sabotage operations and targeted killings.

For Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, Tuesday’s assassination was the culmination of work he began as commander of the SBU starting in 2014. Under his leadership, the agency began to purge officers thought to have Russian sympathies and bring in young officers born after Ukraine gained its independence from Moscow in 1991.

Mr. Nalyvaichenko, together with his longtime aide, Gen. Valeriy Kondratiuk, created a new paramilitary unit known as the Fifth Directorate, which would eventually receive training from the C.I.A. to conduct covert operations behind enemy lines. Though American officials say they never intended such training to be employed in assassinations, the Fifth Directorate took a lead role in specifically those types of operations.

“We’ve spent a lot of resources and time,” Mr. Nalyvaichenko said in an interview. “I’m glad that it’s working and that all these efforts are starting to bring results.”

Russian officials vowed to avenge General Kirillov’s death. Dmitri Medvedev, a former president and currently the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, pledged “inevitable retaliation” against the “military and political leadership of Ukraine.”

Mr. Nalyvaichenko, who is now a member of the Ukrainian parliament, urged military and civilian leaders to be vigilant, but he and others said that the Russian security services appeared less capable of carrying out such operations on Ukrainian soil than they had been in the past.

Both the SBU and its sister service, the military intelligence agency, or HUR, have been linked to a number of assassinations on Russian soil and Russian occupied territory in Ukraine. U.S. officials believe Ukraine’s security services were behind the 2022 killing of Daria Dugina, the daughter of a prominent Russian nationalist. And last month the S.B.U. claimed responsibility for the assassination of Valery Trankovsky, a senior Russian naval officer, who Ukraine said had ordered missile strikes at civilian targets. Both were killed in car bombings.

In each case, Russian officials have vowed retaliation. But Russia’s intelligence services have so far failed to match the success of their Ukrainian counterparts. Ukrainian officials claimed to have thwarted plots against the life of President Volodymyr Zelensky early in the war, in at least one case with the help of the C.I.A. In an interview with an Italian television channel earlier this year, Mr. Zelensky said his security services had told him of 10 such plots.

Experts and intelligence officials credited Ukrainian counterintelligence for thwarting such plots, but said Russia was also less reliant — intentionally so — on covert operations than Ukraine. Unlike Ukraine, Russia can fire long-range missiles that can hit anywhere, and were likely using their operatives for intelligence gathering and weapons targeting, rather than assassinations, said Ralph Goff, a former senior C.I.A. official, who stills travels frequently to Ukraine.

For the Ukrainians, carrying out assassinations, he said, “is a strategy of necessity because it’s all they got.”

Still, the question lingers of whether such operations matter. Ukraine’s American supporters have long warned that assassinations of this kind might provide a quick jolt of satisfaction, but in the end are provocative, counterproductive and a waste of limited resources.

“The Ukrainians see an opportunity here,” Mr. Goff said. “They’re trying to turn the heat up on the Russian elites to force Putin to make a deal. I think it’s a flawed strategy. If they’re not careful they’ll create the opposite effect. They anger the Russians so much that they say we’re not interested in negotiating.”

The Biden administration has tried to use Ukraine’s dependence on American aid as leverage to curtail such operations, American officials have said, with obviously limited success. Should the Trump administration significantly cut back America’s assistance, Ukraine’s intelligence services may feel even less restraint, and see such actions as one of the few ways of continuing the war and inflicting harm on Russia, Mr. London said.

“With the Trump administration coming in the Ukrainians are looking at how they can more effectively leverage asymmetrical operations, both assassination operations like they’ve been doing as well as long-distance strikes using their own homegrown developed drones and missiles,” he said.

Even inside Ukraine, though, some question the wisdom of such operations.

A senior Ukrainian special forces officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide a candid assessment, said they have “zero” impact strategically and tactically.

They will find a replacement for that general, the officer said, predicting that as a condition of any peace settlement Russia would insist not only on a cessation of military operations, but also of secret operations that kill their generals.

Shortly before the first domestic flight since Bashar al-Assad’s fall landed at Aleppo International Airport late Wednesday morning, the final preparations were still being made. Workers rushed to remove about a dozen empty ammunition boxes, gas masks and helmets from a grassy patch next to the runway.

When the Syrian Air flight from Damascus landed, more than an hour behind schedule, it was greeted by a large crowd of journalists and a phalanx of security personnel, including military police officers and civil defense workers, standing by in case anything went wrong.

But its arrival was otherwise smooth — a sign, the rebels who ousted Mr. al-Assad as president 10 days ago hope, that Syria’s new transitional government will be able to run the country. They want to prove they can provide Syrians with basic services, including domestic and international flights.

“We consider this a big accomplishment — we are coming to rebuild this country,” said Anas Rustum, who was appointed to oversee the Aleppo airport by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel group that led the offensive against the Assad government and now leads the transitional government in Damascus.

Mr. Rustum, speaking outside the airport terminal as the just-landed Airbus A320 sat on the tarmac behind him, said Syria’s leaders were open to welcoming flights from all countries and airlines, touting “these results you are seeing in front of your eyes.”

In another sign of the new government’s efforts to restore services, Syria’s central bank said on Wednesday that A.T.M.s and electronic payment services had been brought back online.

But the challenges remain immense.

The new government does not control all of Syria. The rebel alliance that ousted Mr. al-Assad holds much of the northeast and parts of the east and south, but other groups hold large parts of the country. Israel’s military seized territory in southern Syria last week, and its prime minister signaled on Tuesday that it would occupy the area for the foreseeable future.

The transitional government has also inherited crippling sanctions imposed on the country during Mr. al-Assad’s rule. And the United States, the United Nations and others continue to designate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham a terrorist organization, which could prevent the country from getting help with reconstruction and make it harder for governments to send aid. The group’s leaders have called for the sanctions to be lifted, and pledged that all armed groups would be dissolved.

Reminders of the war were close at hand on Wednesday, even as the Aleppo airport marked a new chapter. Throughout Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war, the civilian facility was used by the Assad government to stage attacks on rebels and civilians living in rebel-held areas.

Ahmed Ibrahim, an airport control tower operator for nearly three decades, said the Assad forces had positioned a machine gun atop the control tower to fire on nearby neighborhoods, and rocket launchers on a grassy patch near the runway.

Airport staff removed the launchers a few days ago. The empty ammunition boxes that had been left there were taken away on Wednesday morning. The flight itself was directed from a backup control tower as the primary one was damaged in an earthquake last year — and again during brief battles after the rebels captured the city on Nov. 30, leaving its windows pocked with bullet holes.

The rebel offensive, and the fall of the Assad regime, grounded Syria’s flights. Until Wednesday, the only aircraft flying over the country had been Israeli warplanes carrying out hundreds of strikes on Syrian military and naval positions. The United Nations has called on Israel to cease its attacks on Syria and to respect the country’s sovereignty.

“Operating the airport is connected to operating the skies,” Mr. Rustum said. “And the air corridors are connected to neighboring countries.”

Mr. Rustum, a small, smartly dressed man who had served as the airport’s communications manager until 2012, a year after the civil war broke out, brimmed with excitement on Wednesday. He said Syrian officials had been in touch with neighboring countries that were ready to resume flights to Syria.

When the rebels captured Aleppo, the airport’s employees were initially afraid, Mr. Ibrahim said. But they were soon reassured as the rebel leadership called on all airport staff members to return to work.

He said that domestic and international aviation could be a symbol of the new, post-Assad Syria.

“We’re hoping for there to be an opening to other countries,” he said.

Syrian Air is one of the country’s two national airlines, but because of years of international sanctions, many of its planes could not be kept in operation for lack of parts, he said.

Abutting the civilian airport in Aleppo is the Nayrab military airport, which during the Assad years housed Soviet-era warplanes and helicopters of the type that government forces used to bombard rebel-held areas, killing untold numbers of civilians.

The military side, which was also used by the Russian forces that backed the Assad regime, is now deserted. Pro-Assad graffiti is scrawled on a wall. In a Russian outpost at the military airport, Russian-language newspapers are splayed across a desk. Crude dumbbells — fashioned from scrap metal and concrete — sit in a corner.

In the courtyard of the military outpost lay a poster of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, his face ripped. Inside, a photo of Mr. Putin meeting with Mr. Assad had been smeared with eggs.

Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting.

Dominique Pelicot is France’s most infamous predator. He admits that he surreptitiously drugged his wife for almost a decade so that he could rape her, and that he invited dozens of strangers he met online to violate her limp, snoring body.

And yet, for more than three months, Mr. Pelicot, 72, has sat in the courtroom where he is on trial with 50 other men and painted himself as the honest one. The rapist among 51 rapists, he says, who had the courage to deliver the truth on what they all did. The one who loved his wife and family desperately but, after 40 years of resisting, was overcome by perverted impulses.

He is also the one who had nothing left to lose: He said he expected to receive a maximum sentence and spend 20 years in prison after the verdict is delivered this week.

“No one belongs to anyone else, but I did what I wanted when I had the urge,” Mr. Pelicot said one day during the trial, leaning back in his chair in the prisoner’s box, the same gray fleece jacket he had worn every day zipped up. “That’s what’s at the heart of this story.”

He told the court that he had felt remorse the mornings after he drugged his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, but that had not stopped him. “The next day was terrible, because I saw what a bad state she was in,” he said, “but I won’t complain today, because that would be indecent. She is the one suffering, not me.”

During the trial, the judges and lawyers in the court in the French city of Avignon tried to grasp the enigma that is Mr. Pelicot, with only modest success.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.