Anti-government fighters pose for a selfie picture in one of Hama's water wheels after they captured the central Syrian city Photograph: Bakr Al Kassem/AFP/Getty Images
One month ago, during a meeting in Beirut, a senior western diplomat was venting his frustration: when would international sanctions be lifted from the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad? Though the dictator had few friends, it seemed that the brutal killing and torture of hundreds of thousands of protesters had succeeded in finally crushing Syria’s 13-year revolution.
It was time to face facts, the diplomat said. Assad had won the war, and the world needed to move on.
As diplomats in Beirut talked, rebels in Syria were planning. A year earlier, figures in the Islamist opposition group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in north-west Syria had sent a message to rebels in the south: get ready.
On 29 November, rebel forces led by HTS captured a number of towns on the outskirts of Aleppo city, in the north-west of the country, the first rebel victory over the Assad regime in five years.
Watching from Damascus, Mohammed, a van driver, said that as soon as HTS took those first towns, he knew what was coming.
“From the very first moment, I knew this was it. The regime would fall,” he said as he drove through empty checkpoints and swerved to avoid the abandoned tanks that littered the highway leading into Damascus less than a day after Assad fell.
Rebels fighting on the frontlines were not so certain. “The first line of defence fought hard. They were made up of Hezbollah and Iranian-backed fighters and they resisted, hard,” said Abu Bilal, a rebel who fought alongside HTS in north-west Syria. Once they broke through the first line of defence, however, “the army just ran away”.
The rebel advance was at first met with silence from Damascus. Then the defence ministry spoke of a tactical retreat designed to spare civilian lives. Syrian state media said that videos of opposition fighters entering formerly government cities were staged photo-ops: rebels were entering towns, asking residents if they could pose for a few pictures and then withdrawing.
But one after another, cities held by Assad’s forces fell to the opposition. First, they entered Aleppo, which had taken the Syrian government four years to wrest from opposition control in 2016. Then, four days later, they took Hama, where Assad’s father, Hafez, had put down an uprising in 1982, killing 40,000 people in the process. Finally, they geared up for the battle of Homs – where the regime was meant to make its last stand. Rebels took the city within hours.
“Our guys were supposed to wait until Homs fell before they entered the battle – but once they saw the fighters approaching the city, I couldn’t control them any more and everyone took up arms,” said Abu Hamzeh, a rebel commander of the Operations Room to Liberate Damascus.
The Operations Room gathered the leaders of 25 opposition factions across three southern provinces. It was formed a year ago with the assistance of HTS, and provided a sense of order to the disparate factions in south Syria. The faction leaders would communicate with one another in a WhatsApp group, then pass on instructions to their respective rank-and-file on a need-to-know basis.
Fighters in the south were supposed to wait until rebels in the north took Homs, so that the two groups could approach Damascus at the same time – but out of excitement, they jumped their mark. Rebel groups put out statements encouraging Syrian soldiers to lay down their arms and defect, with a phone number they could call. “I received 5,000 calls on Saturday night from soldiers who wanted to surrender – many of them said their family were urging them to surrender,” Abu Hamzeh said.
Soon, the fighters were marching towards Damascus. No statement came from Assad, and though state media insisted he was working dilligently in his office, he had not been seen in days. Soldiers were left leaderless.
“I was the only one left at my barracks, everyone else had left,” said Ziad Soof, a Syrian army general who was stationed in al-Nabek, in the countryside outside Damascus, on Saturday night. He remained at his station until two in the morning when a group of passersby told him Assad had fled the country. Soof, a 37-year army veteran, took off his uniform and left his post.
“I walked three hours until I reached Damascus,” Soof said. “The whole way, all I could feel was disappointment. If he had said something, if he had announced a transfer of power – that would have been different, but he just left.”
In Damascus, there was no disappointment. Rebels stormed the state TV channel at dawn and, reading from a piece of paper, announced that the 54-year-long Assad regime had ended. They hung the three-star flag of the Syrian opposition, replacing Assad’s flag that had been the backdrop of nightly broadcasts for half a century.
Syrians woke up to a new country and a new reality on Sunday morning. “It is as if we are living in a dream” – the phrase was repeated again and again by residents across the country’s capital city. In Omayyad square in downtown Syria, crowds began to form, cheering and hoisting the revolutionary flag. Rebels raised their rifles, firing in a deafening cacophony that would continue for days and left Damascus littered with bullet casings.
This was a victory 13 years in the making, which, after peaceful protests were met with regime bullets and the opposition took up arms, had cost at least 350,000 lives. The songs of Abdul Baset al-Sarout – a goalkeeper turned rebel commander who before his death became famed for singing protest anthems – were blared across the country as people celebrated.
The Kingdom of Silence had been broken. Pictures of Bashar al-Assad wearing Speedos in a Jacuzzi, flexing his negligible biceps, began to circulate on Syrian social media after rebels found them hidden in the many palaces left abandoned – a far cry from the usual stern picture of him in military fatigues that gazed from billboards across the country.
Residents in Damascus asked fighters where the “house of the donkey” was, asking for directions so that they could finally see the presidential palace that had taken $1bn of their tax money to build.
Though Assad had fled, the burden of his brutal legacy remained. As rebels advanced, they opened prisons where tens of thousands of Syrians were imprisoned. Syria’s vast network of detention centres were infamous for torture – it was here that the regime broke the will of anyone brave enough to dissent.
Families descended upon prisons, searching for their loved ones. In Sednaya prison on Sunday night, a kilometre-long line of cars formed as tens of thousands of people arrived from across the country to see if their missing relatives were there.
Ignoring fighters’ request for order, people poured into the prison and scoured the massive complex nicknamed “the human slaughterhouse”. Crowds surged in and out of cells, getting lost with only their phone torches to guide them through the prison’s dizzying, featureless corridors.
Almost all of the prisoners had already been released from Sednaya earlier in the day. But still, people searched, convinced that there must be some hidden facility, some door that, if unlocked, would reveal the people that the Assad regime had taken from them years before.
In Sednaya, the civil defence was looking alongside the families. After two days of work, they concluded that there was no hidden room, there were no underground cells. In the end, about 30,000 people were released from prisons across the country, said Fadel Abdulghani, the director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights – leaving more than 100,000 detainees unaccounted for.
Unwilling to believe, families continued to search, tearing up the earth on prison grounds, passing on online tips about where hidden facilities might be located. Four days after prisons were opened across the country, only a few more people had been found, suggesting a harsh truth about the fate of those 100,000 who remained missing.
In the streets of Damascus, life began to return to normal. Fighters from HTS withdrew from the city; the leader of the rebel group, Muhammed al-Jolani, dropped his nom de guerre and announced the formation of a civilian, transitional government.
People began to rejoice in their ability to speak freely. Furious debates over the country’s future ensued. In cafes, over cups of coffee and cigarettes, furious arguments were taking place about the direction the rebel-led government would take, voices raised as people tested the new limits of their freedoms.
Still, it was not easy to shake off the idea that the regime was watching. During an interview with a public-sector employee who preferred to remain anonymous, the employee paused as they were asked about their opinion about the new government. They excused themselves and went to the next room, where they threw up.
Returning to the interview with red-rimmed eyes, the employee apologised.
“You ask me if I’m afraid? Of course, I am afraid. I am 53 years old. And in 53 years, this is the first time that I am speaking freely,” they said.
