Soldiers at this base in Eastern Ghouta used to “step on us”, one local said, angry about the bribes he was forced to pay, money he wanted back. Some time between last Saturday and Sunday, as Bashar al-Assad ’s reign crumbled, the base’s population of roughly 60 gave up their posts, discarded their uniforms and made off – “back to their parents’ homes”, a local man suggested. The Assad regime had fallen.
A short drive away in the capital Damascus, where the internet was down, people called each other on landlines, in the dark, asking whether anyone had any idea what was going on. They thought they heard rockets; some saw military figures running outside. “We thought they were coming to kill us,” one recalled.
Then they heard another noise: gunfire – so much of it that it could only be celebratory. That was when people ran on to the streets, towards army checkpoints and intelligence branches: all the places they would have averted their eyes from before. The time had come to reclaim their country.
Now, regime military-associated sites are identifiable across Damascus by their burnt out facades, while everything has been looted from Assad’s presidential palace except the chandeliers (“too high, too difficult to take without breaking them” explained a Syrian, eyeing them up). On Assad’s walls there was new graffiti reading “f*ck you, dog” and “f*ck your father”. Back at the military base, Mohammed explained that he had long dreamed of firing.
