At this time, the doors of the Syrian state radio were open for Mohammed Abu al-Zaid.
Entering the house, the rebel leader, camo-clad and pistol on his hip, saluted the staff of the channel. A warm welcome was a far cry from his entrance on Sunday morning, when he stormed the building and announced that he was alive on the air. Bashar al-Assadthe royal government had officially fallen.
“I did not think; I decided in a moment, before I do it” Zaid, the commander Southern Operations weekendhe said on Monday, sitting in the anchor seat of the public radio studio.
Behind him was the star-studded flag of the Syrian opposition, which had replaced the flag of the old Assad regime.
He told the story to his uncle Abu Bilal, a rebel fighter who had returned to Damascus from the northern front a few hours earlier.
“You know, we didn’t have much time to watch the news, we were a little busy,” said Bilal when he saw his grandson announcing. the fall of the 54-year-long Assad regime on a mobile phone.
Bilal was one of the thousands who fought Abdomen who returned to Damascus and his territory was fought on Monday, on the front lines against the Syrian army in Homs, in central Syria, two days before.
For years, nearly 4.5 million people – many of them displaced – living in northern Syria have been unable to see their family in government-held territory.
Half a dozen fighters arrived at a time, loaded on the back of lorries. The march of the southern fighters was accompanied by running with them, waving and waving the flag of the Syrian revolution.
But when Bilal returned with his brother Zaid and a large number of other brothers, in Eastern Ghouta, in the region of Damascus, half of the city was waiting for them. They embraced the military labors and wept openly, dropping their vessels on the ground and proclaiming. Bilal’s sister threw a yellow flower at the returning men.
I did not see my brother for eight years, nor for four. This is a happy day,” Zaid said during the famous gunfire dance. The last time the two men had seen each other, they were fighting against government forces in Eastern Ghouta.
Bilal had gone to continue fighting in Douma in the Damascus region, where he was forced to fly over to Idlib under a deal between the opposition and the Syrian government.
Much had changed since the rebel fighters were separated. Zaid was then 24; now almost 38 with four children. Bilal’s country was destroyed, Syrian government airstrikes had left almost all the houses broken and uninhabitable.
Since the fighting in Eastern Ghouta ended in 2018, there has been no reconstruction. Their streets and infrastructure were still lying unprepared for the explosions.
“Eastern Ghouta used to be famous for its trees, you know? Now it looks like a desert,” says Bilal as he walks through the city with his grandson. It shows the ruins that used to be built in Eastern Ghouta. “The bodies are still there, and we will not take them out.”
Bilal recounted the battles that would take him back to his homeland. Syra was present the use of weapons against its own population in Douma in 2013: “We could not contain the dead with so many women and children. we could not even bury them. He said the sound of helicopters usually scares him – the sound of rotor blades inevitably follows. barrel bombs.
Now back home, and gone with the Assad regime, both Bilal and Zaid hoped they could get on with their lives. Bilal had been a small restaurant owner before the war and his son was now studying dentistry at university. Zaid owned land in his hometown of Kanaker, southern Syria, which he hoped to return and worked as a farmer.
We shall once have our own state and army. We want this country to be one,” said Bilal.
The arrival of the fighters from the North puts Damascus They destroyed the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) directly in control. HTS fighters set up tanks and guarded major public buildings. Led by Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who promised a transition to a civilian, Islamist government, the force was seen as corrected by residents.
As HTS fighters spread across the capital city, the sound of gunfire that had been constant since Sunday morning began to fade. The people who started the fire in the air in Umayyad Square have now been killed and the guns released.
It was unclear how the different rebel groups would react to the HTS revolutionaries, but now worries about the future stopped as their families celebrated reunions with their loved ones – fighters and otherwise.
“Before the crisis, this place was always full – but there had been no one here for so long,” said Samira Abdul Rizk, Bilal’s sister, who had been living in Eastern Ghouta for almost a decade without seeing her family. On Monday, her house was full again, her nieces and nephews all grown up.