A few hours after the fall of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, thousands of members of the Syrian diaspora spontaneously gathered in the streets in Germany, Austria and Greece on Sunday, December 8, to celebrate what many of them already name “the end of the war”. In Germany, where nearly a million Syrians live, the largest Syrian population outside border countries, rallies were organized in several large cities.
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Horns, cries of joy and firecrackers resonated part of the afternoon in Berlin, in the mixed-race district of Kreuzberg, where some 5,000 people gathered on Oranienplatz – families, children with colorfully painted faces. of the Syrian flag, activists, sympathizers, Berliners from other communities.
“Fifty years of dictatorship! it’s over! »enthuses a 32-year-old father who arrived from Aleppo nine years ago, coming with his wife and baby. “ We want to help rebuild Syria, says Mohammed Urfa, 27, one of the few to agree to give his name. We studied here, worked, we want to bring democracy to Syria. » His family comes from a village in the Golan, in the south of the country, but his parents, a pharmacist and economist, were never able to work in Germany because they were unable to have their diplomas recognized. However, like many others here, Mohammed Urfa does not imagine leaving again in the short term.
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“I want to help, but I also have a duty towards Germany which welcomed and trained me”says Mohammed, 30, who came with his 75-year-old father. Arriving from Damascus in 2018, he mentions “Mama Merkel” whose photo was, he says, displayed in Idlib. “We want all communities to be able to live together, the Alawites, the Kurds, the Christians, the Druze… we are not Islamists! “, assures Ali, 24, whose mother, Maysoun Berkdar, is an activist figure across the Rhine, where she had received threats.
In Vienna, portraits of the dictator trampled by demonstrators
In Vienna too, more than 10,000 moved Syrians spontaneously took to the streets on Sunday. “We haven’t seen our families for ten years and we will finally be able to go back and see them”said a woman in tears after falling into the arms of a loved one.
Since 2015, the Austrian capital has welcomed more than 40,000 Syrian refugees, many of whom watched on social networks to follow the situation live in Damascus before finding themselves on the Ring, the grand boulevard surrounding the historic center of Vienna , waving flags of the Syrian revolution mixed with Austrian flags. On Sunday morning, employees of the Syrian embassy in Austria were even seen throwing portraits of the dictator out of the building’s windows, which were trampled by protesters.
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