AP PHOTOS: The month of December in pictures
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When Syrian rebels roared into Damascus after a lightning advance on the capital, they exalted in their triumph over President Bashar Assad and rejoiced at the sudden end of a 14-year civil war that laid waste to much of the country. In images captured by Associated Press photographers in December, rifle-toting opposition fighters celebrated in the streets and stepped on a broken bust of Assad's late father, Syrian President Hafez Assad.
The toppling of the Assad family also unleashed a search for answers in morgues and prisons where families went in search of loved ones who disappeared under the Assad police state. At the infamous Saydnaya military prison, a man found two ropes tied into nooses. At a hospital morgue, a Palestinian mother wept in a dingy identification room after finding her son’s body.
Meanwhile, wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon upended more lives in the final weeks of 2024. A Ukrainian military chaplain held a church service for an infantry unit during Christmas near the front-line town of Chasiv Yar. A wide-eyed Palestinian child wounded in Gaza received treatment at a hospital. A man decorated a Christmas tree atop a pile of rubble inside a Catholic church hit by Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon.
In the U.S., Americans watched as the suspect in the fatal shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO returned to New York surrounded by police. On the West Coast, firefighters battling a wildfire in Malibu, California, were photographed under a rain of embers in the eerie orange glow of the flames.
