At Basel al-Sati's souvenir shop in a central Damascus market, socks bearing caricatures that ridicule ousted Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and his once feared family now sell like hot cakes.

All strongmen have an element of caricature about them, yet there was little of Assad that fit the kind of strongman Sacha Baron Cohen spoofed in his 2012 comedy, The Dictator. Instead ...

When Bashar al-Assad was toppled in December, the iconography of posters, billboards and statues emblematic of his family’s brutal decades-long grip on the country also came down. The images of ...