Like most people from Zahle and its surrounding areas, I grew up hating the Assad regime. I was raised in the shadow of the terrifying Syrian army posts during the years of Syrian tutelage over Lebanon.

I recognize their eyes and their military uniforms. I know the danger that simply passing by the houses they had seized in our town could pose. I memorized the slogans they wrote on the walls, the messages they carved into us, and the destruction they inflicted on the railroad tracks near our home.

For several years, I attended summer camps at a school where the Syrian army had occupied some buildings, turning them into a military base and a torture center. Fortunately, I didn’t know at the time that I was playing next to a torture center! I only learned this later, after they had left and finally allowed us to live in peace.

In those days, there was no distinction between the Syrian regime and Syrians themselves. Even the kaak vendor was suspected of being an informant for Syrian intelligence. The walls had eyes and ears, and we could not have imagined that there was a single Syrian who, like us, hated the regime and suffered under it.

We believed that all Syrians were soldiers for the Assad family—a belief that did not arise from nothing. It was part of the “package of terror” the regime imposed on us: to fear an entire people.

When the Syrian revolution began in 2011, I didn’t understand it at first. It took time for me to grasp that the Syrian regime could actually fall, and that Syrians were not the regime—that they were not all soldiers of the infamous Ba’ath Party, which had inflicted so much death, torture, and brutality on the Lebanese.

Later, I was assigned to work on issues related to the conditions and struggles of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. I had no choice. The organization I worked for at the time was focused on covering the distribution of aid to families and tracking where Syrians were settling across the country. I did my job as a young journalist, following instructions and carrying them out.

But time passed quickly, and I became deeply immersed in it all. I was consumed by the stories of the people, by cases that shocked me—stories of prisons, the constant threat of arrest if they returned to Syria, the hidden dangers behind deportation decisions, displacement, starvation, the persecution of dissidents, and people disappearing “behind the sun.”

The issues I worked on were unfamiliar to many of my acquaintances, who had never had the opportunity to realize that Syrians were not the regime, that their stories deserved to be told, and that their cause was both just and true.

The memories of the Assad occupation haunted many people in my town whenever they saw a Syrian citizen or heard their story. As for me, I was already too deep—I had drowned in it. I kept digging, relentlessly uncovering cases, chasing stories. I had friends in prison, others who were families of detainees. Many called me, telling me they were terrified of being forced to return to Syria.

One father told me how he hid his son in a cave in the mountains so the regime wouldn’t reach him, then he broke down, pleading with me not to tell anyone. I hung up and locked myself in the bathroom to cry freely, without anyone asking why.

I remember Haifa, who told me everything: how she fled from the regime in Syria, how she was harassed in Lebanon, and how she raised her children alone after her husband disappeared.

I remember one Syrian prisoner in Lebanon, recounting the torture he endured. His voice still echoes in my head. He repeatedly begged me never to mention his name to anyone, fearing it could cost him his life.

So many stories, and their protagonists became mine too, sometimes even becoming my friends. Now that the Syrian regime has fallen, they all dance in my heart, and I hope they thought of me in the past few days, just as I have thought of them. Perhaps they feel, like I do, that we fought for a single moment—a moment that has now arrived.

The Syrian Civil Defense has confirmed the completion of searches for detainees in Saydnaya prison. It was said that those who made it out, made it out. As for the rest, it is believed the regime killed them during the war. I know the stories of some of these Syrian and Lebanese prisoners, and I hope they are all among the survivors. But knowing how slim the chances are, I hope that wherever they are, they have finally found peace.

With Assad’s fall, so too have the masks he hid behind—resistance against the enemy, the fight against terrorism, the safeguarding of the nation’s security. The gates of hellish prisons have been thrown open, and the world has now seen that all who lived under Assad were victims. Those who survived did so only by sheer miracle.

Perhaps my work allowed me to understand what it truly means to be Syrian. I have come to grasp the weight of the suffering and oppression Syrians have endured for fifty years. I have looked into their eyes, I have listened to them. Some told me they had never known about the injustices their regime inflicted on Lebanon, and they were shocked when they learned.

A Syrian colleague told me on the day the regime fell, “It’s over… I’m sorry for all the suffering we caused you.” His words carried great weight. Just as many Lebanese struggled to distinguish between the regime and the Syrian people, perhaps not all Syrians had realized before now that the hearts of Lebanese people carried wounds identical to theirs—that the moment of the regime’s collapse was like a warm kiss over two identical wounds. And sometimes, warmth can ease the pain.

In the streets, Lebanese and Syrians alike exchanged words of congratulations. Even the taxi driver who delivered something to me yesterday didn’t say “Good morning” when I greeted him. Instead, he said, “Mabrouk.”

Yes. A thousand congratulations.

Assad has fallen.