‘It has come at last’: Sydney Syrians celebrate Assad’s fall

“This is the day we’ve been dreaming of,” said Ammr Nakour, a Sydney cafe owner who escaped the besieged Syrian city of Homs as an eight-year-old boy. “It has come at last. We had faith, we believed in it, now it is here.”

Nakour and his cousin, Bilal Al Kesm, danced in the streets of Chullora on Sunday with other members of Sydney’s Syrian community after news broke that rebel forces had taken Damascus and dictator Bashar al-Assad had fled to Moscow.

Cousins Ammr Nakour and Bilal El Kesm are celebrating the end of dictatorship in Syria – a country they both fled when they were eight years old.Credit: Kate Geraghty

“Honestly, it just makes you feel free, to know that the regime is over,” Al Kesm said. “We were watching it day by day – every day they were taking new cities, in just a few days it happened so fast – phenomenal.”

The pair, both 22, escaped to the Lebanese port of Tripoli with their families during a brief ceasefire in Homs and made it to Australia in 2015. The cousins jointly operate a cafe in Greenacre and hope to visit Syria again one day to help rebuild.

“I see videos of what they’ve done to Homs – all these beautiful, sacred places completely destroyed,” Nakour said. “In my memory, it’s all happy things – family, seeing friends, playing soccer on the streets. My dad was a school principal. Now all that history has been wiped out – it only exists in our minds and our hearts.”

Australia’s Syrian community was cautiously optimistic about the nation’s future but expected a period of uncertainty as Syrian opposition forces jostled to fill the power vacuum left by the dissolution of the Assad regime, said George Alrahil, a businessman and community leader who moved to Sydney in 1998.

“Everyone is happy,” he said. “From talking to people in the community here, the main idea is that economically it will be better. Wages are so low you can barely buy a dozen eggs.

“A house in Damascus was $300,000 to $400,000 – now it’s $50,000. The Iranians were buying them up cheap. The people just want the basic things a human needs – water, food, electricity.”

Rebel forces led by former al-Qaeda commander Abu Mohammad al-Jolani have promised pluralism and religious tolerance. Alrahil said the rebel troops had given the impression they would not persecute minority groups or force Islamic law on non-Muslims.

“The way they are presenting themselves now is moderate,” said Alrahil. “They came to my [former] village and they spoke to our priest and said ‘we are here to protect people and help them live a normal life’. We hope that they will continue being moderate. In Aleppo, they closed all the liquor shops, but everything else is normal.”

The Elyas family are Syrian Yazidi Kurds. From left: Riehana, Abdulrahman, Elham and Borsin.Credit: Kate Geraghty

The news of Assad’s fall was less welcome to some in Australia’s Kurdish community, many of whom have family members cornered between hostile rebel troops and Assad’s forces in northern Syrian enclaves.

“Now the situation there is very bad,” said Borsin Elyas, who came to Australia from Aleppo in 2017 with her sister, Riehana, and parents Abdulrahman and Elham. The family are Yazidis, a Kurdish group that has historically faced persecution from both Arabs and Turks.

“All my family, my aunts and cousins, they are sleeping in the streets. It’s very cold in Syria at this time, it’s raining. They have no houses, no nothing. The Kurdish people just want to live in safety, like me, like you.”

Elyas, an NDIS educator who lives with her family in Blacktown, said she feared the future. Kurdish-led forces clashed with Turkish-backed rebel troops in the north Syrian city of Manbij on the weekend.

“They don’t like Kurdish people,” Elyas said. “I don’t know why.”