“We are happy, the dictatorship is over, Assad is gone!”, says Ahmed, 39, in the crowd. Several hundred Syrians in Germany, their country’s largest diaspora in the European Union, celebrated the fall of the regime in the streets on Sunday.
“All Syrians are now together,” adds this railway technician, who fled Aleppo in 2015, but prefers not to reveal his last name.
To the sound of car horns and waving green, white, black and red flags in the colors of the Syrian opposition, several dozen people began spontaneously marching very early on Sunday on an avenue in the popular district of Neukölln in Berlin, where live many migrants, before converging on a square in the neighboring district of Kreuzberg for a demonstration which brought together some 2,000 people according to the police.
– Relief –
The atmosphere is one of joy, many make the “V” for victory while singing. They came as a family and the children had their faces painted in the national colors of Syria. The relief is evident.
Shouts of “Allah akbar!” (“God is the greatest!”), also echoed in the crowd.
“Finally this government has fallen,” says Ahmad al-Hallabi, 27, who bursts into joy, accompanied by his two children in Neukölln. “Ten years ago, I was in Syria and I saw things that no one should see, things that we don’t forget,” says this mechanic, originally from Aleppo.
Germany has more than a million Syrian refugees who arrived after the outbreak of civil war in 2011, with a large community settling in Berlin.
“Assad is the greatest terrorist imaginable,” adds Ahmad al-Hallabi, the man who fled Syria via Turkey and Greece in 2015.
“I hope for peace and that everything that Assad and his people destroyed is rebuilt,” he wants to believe.
– Concerns –
The German government issued a warning on this subject on Sunday.
“The country must not now fall into the hands of other radicals, whatever form they take,” said Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, the day after the end of half a century of rule of the Assad clan after a dazzling rebel offensive.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke of “good news”, denouncing the “brutal” oppression of the Assad regime.
Anwar al-Bunni, a Syrian lawyer who took refuge in Germany, met in Berlin by AFP just before the fall of the regime in Damascus, knows something about this.
Imprisoned for five years in Syrian jails, he contributed to the fact that in January 2022 German justice sentenced a former Syrian colonel to life in prison for crimes against humanity, in the first trial in the world on regime abuses. of Bashar al-Assad.
Anwar Raslan, 58, was found guilty of murdering 27 prisoners and torturing at least 4,000 others in 2011 and 2012 in Damascus’ Al-Khatib prison. Anwar al-Bunni recognized him in the street in Berlin.
Originally from Hama, scene of a massacre perpetrated in 1982 by the army during the reign of President Bashar al-Assad’s father, he says he is “not at all surprised” by the lightning offensive of the coalition of rebels led by the Radical Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
“I knew that this moment was coming and that the Syrian people who are asking for freedom were going to get it,” says this man who has devoted his life to defending human rights, first in Syria and then in Germany where he has been a refugee ever since. 2014.
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