Even as many Syrians celebrated the rebels’ advance into Damascus on Sunday morning, they were reminded of all they had lost over 13 years of civil war.
The loved ones who were killed, tortured or disappeared into the regime’s labyrinthine prison system. The homes they lost to airstrikes and shelling. The lives they had to abandon.
“Thank God, thank God,” said Eman Ouad, whose husband was killed in the civil war. Her voice was close to breaking.
“Our freedom has returned,” said Ms. Ouad, 44, who was displaced from her home in Damascus and now lives in Syria’s northwest. “Thirteen years of subjugation. Thirteen years of displacement.”
Other Syrians in the northwest said they were playing close attention to the rebels’ capture of the Sednaya prison complex outside Damascus because their friends and family members had been imprisoned there for years.
Ahmed al-Misilmani, a journalist, said he ran onto his balcony yelling for joy when he saw reports that President Bashar al-Assad was fleeing the country. At the same time, he was thinking of friends who had been imprisoned at Sednaya, a prison notorious for torture and mass executions.
“We hope to God they are still alive,” said Mr. al-Misilmani, who was displaced from his home near the city of Homs six years ago.
Anas Khoury, 24, an opposition activist who fled his Damascus suburb with his wife after a 2013 chemical attack, said he was scanning lists of prisoners freed from Sednaya. His brother was detained there in 2011, and the family does not know if he is still alive.
Mr. Khoury said he was struggling to express his sense of shock at the latest twists in a conflict that has created so much upheaval for his family. His children were born in Idlib and don’t know their grandparents.
“They were born in displacement,” he said. “They were born among the tents.”
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