Gradually, and then suddenly, the regime of Bashar al-Assad has collapsed. This century’s most evil tyrant has fled Syria, and Damascus has fallen to the opponents of the regime. Across the country, a new political reality reigns. In towns and cities across Syria, the regime’s torture chambers are being opened, and the prisons liberated.
Men whose adulthoods have been stolen from them by the tyrant are emerging into the fires of day. Brothers are being united after being separated for 40 years. They were separated when one was 18 and the other younger, because the elder of them fell foul of a regime patrol and was taken away for torture for the remainder of his natural life.
There is a mother who lost her son 15 years ago, because he was accused of daubing some anti-dictator graffiti, or not reciting the right words in school, or conspiring to run a radio station that did not sing the praises of the leader, or demonise his enemies, or was conducted in a banned language, or contained the wrong history, the unapproved history, the things you were not then permitted to say.
The petty criminals, denied a stake in the economy because of their race or faith or region of birth, imprisoned for so long their whole families have died of old age and grief.
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