‘You can breathe’: On the streets of Damascus after Assad

There was a snarl of cars when we arrived. We could hear chanting. Someone was waving a rebel flag. Overnight news that Damascus had fallen and Syria’s president had fled spurred Syrians in Lebanon to rush to Masnaa, the border crossing closest to their capital.

We’d been planning to spend a day reporting from there, but packed a small overnight bag when we heard the Syrians had abandoned their side. Maybe we would be able to get to Damascus ourselves.

Amid the excitement around us was a tall man with curly hair who was trying to go the other way. I could see he was crying.

He told me his name was Hussein and that he was a supporter of President Bashar al-Assad. He was afraid.

“We don’t know anything about what is going to happen inside. They might kill us, it’s chaos,” he said.

“Anybody who used to work with the regime or the army, they say they are going to give them a safe exit, but nobody knows. If it’s not going to be true, they’re going to pay the consequences.”

He had brought his family with him, but didn’t have the documents to cross into Lebanon.

An hour later, we entered Syria. The road to Damascus was wide open. As we neared the capital we could see signs of an army in retreat – military jeeps and tanks, abandoned. Army uniforms littered the road where soldiers had torn them off.

There was traffic in the streets but shops were closed. People had gathered in the central Umayyad Square, overcome by the extraordinary end to more than five decades of authoritarian rule by the Assad regime – father and son.

Armed men were firing into the air in a constant cacophony of celebration – we saw one little boy who had been injured carried away.

Civilians were driving around in their cars, flashing peace signs, saying things would be so much better now that Assad was gone. One elderly woman was crying.

“Thank you, thank you,” she exclaimed as if praying. “The tyrant has fallen. The tyrant has fallen!”

Many in her family had died under Assad’s rule, she said, some in prison.