IIt would be difficult to put into words what the Syrian exiles felt upon the announcement of the sudden fall of the Bashar Al-Assad regime on December 8, 2024, unless we flatten everything with generalizations that do not reflect personal repercussions of years of dictatorship, revolution, war and exile.
Feelings mixed with exultation, joy, relief and astonishment no doubt, but also sadness and sorrow for the dead, the injured and the missing, not to mention anger for the immense human waste of this decade bloody (2011-2024). The flight of the dictator and the absence of bloodshed after the capture of Damascus were followed by scenes of jubilation throughout Syria during which the flag of the Syrian revolution was raised.
An atmosphere of liberation suddenly reigned, contrasting with the climate of fear and repression that the Al-Assad regime had established in Syria for fifty-three years. The first slogans of the demonstrators of 2011, “Free Syria” et “United Syria”taken up again and again, were also a way, for many, of warding off a future mortgaged by the past actions of the new masters of Damascus. Whatever the outcome of these first months of transition, the feeling of deliverance that has spread among the Syrian populations is actualized with the possibility of return to a Syria that some believed lost forever.
The dynamics of collective liberation
Living for more than a decade under the cover of an assumed name, to escape identification by the regime's intelligence services and avoid reprisals against the family remaining in Syria, required juggling a dual personality, a real identity in the country of exile and another, masked by an assumed name which guaranteed a kind of anonymity in interactions with Syrian society from inside and outside.
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