A Syrian former political prisoner says it “felt like a dream” when Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime lastly fell, bringing an finish to many years of dictatorship.

Firas Filfleh, 38, skilled each pleasure and grief as he watched footage of individuals being liberated from prisons together with Al-Ballouna in Homs – the place he too was as soon as tortured.

He stated: “The scenes of tearing down statues amidst crowds chanting for the revolution and its heroes felt like a dream.

“These moments had been deeply transferring and marked the realisation that the period of oppression had ended, paving the best way for constructing a free Syria.”

Firas, who lives in Idlib, joined protests in opposition to the Assad regime as a younger man and labored as a coordinator serving to troopers to defect.

He was arrested in a navy safety ambush in 2011 and endured 10 days of savage beatings, humiliation and interrogation.

Firas described one evening when he heard guards beat an aged man to dying in a close-by cell, earlier than calling to the opposite prisoners: “You’ll all die like this, beneath our boots.”

He was later transferred to Aleppo, then Damascus, and sentenced by a choose to 10 years in the notorious Sednaya political jail which was nicknamed the “human slaughterhouse”.

The liberation of inmates from the sprawling complicated at Sednaya was one of many defining moments of the astonishing insurgent offensive this month.

Firas’s sentence needed to be authorised by a choose in Aleppo and his household bribed a choose to safe his launch. Sentenced in absentia, he returned to Idlib, which was then the one a part of the nation held by rebels.

As his nation adapts to its new actuality, Firas stated life was already enhancing in areas of Syria beforehand managed by Assad’s forces. He defined: “Regardless of the instability Syria is experiencing now, most residents specific overwhelming happiness on the fall of the oppressive regime.

“Tangible enhancements embody the provision of electrical energy, bread, and meals provides in areas that had been beforehand beneath regime management—issues that had been as soon as only a dream for them.”

Nearly each family was touched by the earlier regime’s brutality and criminals and killers should be dropped at justice, Firas stated.

He added: “We aspire to construct a free, democratic, civil, and secular Syria – a Syria the place we are able to specific our views with out worry or hesitation.”

The horrors that Bashar al-Assad inflicted on his folks within the wake of the 2011 Arab spring have left deep bodily and psychological scars affecting each era.

Requested about her hopes for the longer term, Firas’s 10-year-old niece Razan stated merely: “That nobody bombs us.”

She went on: “That nobody bombs us from planes with rockets, missiles, bombs, tanks, I don’t know what they’re all referred to as precisely.”

The teen additionally hoped to go to Hama and Aleppo after beforehand feeling “imprisoned” in Idlib.

Razan’s mom, Firas’s sister Shaza, stated their lives had been as soon as “burdened with worry” and fixed fear about what would occur if Assad’s forces took management of Idlib.

She stated: “We used to get up to the sounds of plane, and we misplaced many pals and kin as a result of massacres attributable to the airstrikes.”

When the regime collapsed on December 8, mum-of-two Shaza woke to her husband’s voice saying: “Stand up, Bashar is gone!”

The 39-year-old added: “We felt that the dawn was completely different, the morning was stuffed with breaths of freedom.

“Our perspective on life modified, shifting from ideas of tips on how to safe our each day bills to planning how we might return to regular life.

“Forgetting the previous isn’t simple, however specializing in the longer term ought to occupy our minds extra.”

Firas’s mom Raghdaa Kashour, 64, stated life was as soon as “stuffed with worry and terror” and she or he may by no means forgive those that prompted such ache and struggling to the Syrian folks and “whose hearts knew no mercy or tolerance”.

The previous trainer added: “I hope {that a} new authorities will likely be born out of the struggling we have now lived by, to really feel the struggling of the folks.

“I hope that the brand new authorities will take away worry, oppression, and reverence for ‘the ruler’ from the minds of generations.”