A month ago, during a meeting in Beirut, a senior Western diplomat expressed his frustration: when will international sanctions against the Syrian president be lifted Bashar al-Assad; Although the dictator had few friends, it seemed that the brutal killings and torture of hundreds of thousands of protesters had finally crushed the 13-year-old revolution. Syria.

It was time to face the facts, said the diplomat, notes The Guardian. Assad had won the war and the world had to move on.

While diplomats in Beirut were deliberating, rebels in Syria were planning. A year earlier, operatives of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in northwestern Syria had sent a message to rebels in the south: Get ready.

On November 29, HTS-led rebel forces captured several towns on the outskirts of the northwestern city of Aleppo in the rebels’ first victory over the Assad regime in five years.

Watching from Damascus, Mohammed, a truck driver, said that once HTS captured the first towns, he knew what was coming. “From the first moment, I knew this was it. The regime would fall”he said as he drove through empty checkpoints and swerved to avoid abandoned tanks on the highway leading to Damascus, less than a day after Assad fell.

The insurgents fighting on the front lines were not so sure. “The first line of defense fought hard. They were made up of fighters backed by Hezbollah and Iran, and they resisted fiercely.”said Abu Bilal, a rebel who fought alongside HTS in northwestern Syria. However, once they broke through the first line of defense, “the army just left”.

The rebel advance was initially met with silence from Damascus. Afterwards, the Ministry of Defense spoke of a strategic retreat in order not to cause civilians to mourn. Syrian state media said videos of opposition fighters entering former government towns were staged: rebels would enter towns, ask residents if they could pose for a few photos, then withdraw.

But one after another, the cities held by Assad’s forces fell to the opposition. First they entered Aleppo, which it took the Syrian government four years to wrest from opposition control in 2016. Then, four days later, they captured Hama, where Assad’s father, Hafez, had put down an uprising in 1982, killing 40,000 people. Finally, they prepared for the Battle of Homs – where the regime was to make its last stand. The rebels captured the city within hours.

“Our fighters were supposed to wait until Homs fell before entering the battle – but once they saw the fighters approaching the city, I couldn’t control them anymore and they all took up arms.”said Abu Hamzeh, commander of the rebel operations room for the liberation of Damascus.

The operations room brought together the leaders of 25 opposition factions in three southern provinces. It was created a year ago with the help of HTS and has provided a sense of order to disparate factions in southern Syria. Clan leaders communicated with each other in a WhatsApp group and then relayed instructions to their respective bases.

Fighters in the south were supposed to wait until rebels in the north captured Homs so that the two groups could approach Damascus at the same time – but out of excitement, they moved faster. Rebel groups issued notices encouraging Syrian soldiers to lay down their weapons 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 it was their family that urged them to surrender”said Abu Hamzeh.

Soon, the fighters advanced towards Damascus. Assad made no statement, and although state media insisted he was hard at work in his office, he had not been seen for days. The soldiers were left without a leader.

“I was the only one left in my barracks, everyone else was gone”said Ziad Soof, a Syrian army general serving 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 passers-by told him that Assad had left 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 felt was frustration. 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 television channel in the early hours of the morning and announced that the 54-year Assad regime was over. They hung the Syrian opposition’s three-star flag, replacing Assad’s flag.

Syrians woke up to a new country and a new reality on Sunday morning. “It’s like living in a dream” – the phrase was repeated over and over by residents throughout the nation’s capital. In Omayyad Square in central Syria, crowds began to gather, cheering and raising the revolutionary flag. The rebels raised their rifles, firing into the air, leaving Damascus riddled with bullet casings.

It is a 13-year victory that, 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 – were heard across the country as people celebrated.

Images of Bashar al-Assad in a jacuzzi, flexing his biceps, began circulating on the country’s social media after rebels found them hidden in the many abandoned palaces – in contrast to his usual stern image in military uniform.

Residents of Damascus asked the militants where the “donkey’s house” was, asking for directions so they could finally see the presidential palace, which cost $1 billion to build. dollars from their taxes.

Prisons

Although Assad is gone, the burden of his violent legacy remains. As the rebels advanced, they opened prisons where tens of thousands of Syrians had been imprisoned. Syria’s vast network of detention centers was notorious for torture – here the regime broke the will of anyone brave enough to resist.

Families descended on the prisons, searching for their loved ones. At the Sednaya prison on Sunday night, a long line of cars formed as tens of thousands of people arrived from all over the country to see if their missing relatives were there.

Ignoring the militants’ call for order, people poured into the prison and swept through the massive compound nicknamed “the human slaughterhouse”. Crowds streamed in and out of the cells, lost in the prison corridors guided only by the flashlights of their phones.

Almost all the prisoners had already been released from Sednaya earlier in the day. But people kept looking, convinced that there must be some hidden facility, some door that, if unlocked, would reveal the people the Assad regime had seized from them years before.

Eventually, about 30,000 people were released from prisons across the country, said Fadel Abdulghani, director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights – leaving more than 100,000 detainees missing.

Unwilling to believe, the families continued to search. Four days after prisons across the country opened, only a few more people had been found, suggesting a harsh truth about the fate of the 100,000 who remained missing.

Transitional government

On the streets of Damascus, life began to return to normal. HTS fighters withdrew from the city – the rebel group’s leader, Mohammed al-Golani, announced the formation of a civilian, transitional government.

People began to rejoice at the possibility of being able to speak freely. Intense discussions about the future of the country followed. In coffee shops, over cups of coffee and cigarettes, there were arguments about the direction the rebel-led government would take, voices rising as people tested the new limits of their freedom.

Still, it was not easy to shake the feeling that the Assad regime was watching. During a Guardian interview with a public sector employee who preferred to speak on condition of anonymity the employee paused when asked what he thought of the new government. He excused himself and went to the next room, where he vomited. Returning to the interview with red eyes, the employee apologized. “Are you asking me if I’m afraid? Of course I’m afraid. I am 53 years old. And in 53 years, it’s the first time I speak freely”they said.