SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
It has been a historic week in Syria, the first week in a half-century that the Assad family did not rule the country. As rebels took hold of Damascus and Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, thousands of political prisoners were released into freedom, and Syrian people were dancing in the streets.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Whoo (ph).
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DETROW: Morning Edition host Leila Fadel is in Damascus, and she joins us on the line now. Hey, Leila.
LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: Hi.
DETROW: What's Damascus like? Let's just start there.
FADEL: I mean, it's actually really hard to describe. It's this place of extreme happiness - people for the first time having a taste of freedom, being able to tell their own children what they really think - because this was a country where people said the walls had ears. They were afraid even to speak freely at home in case something was said at school, for example...
DETROW: Yeah.
FADEL: ...And that would put them in prison - any type of criticism of the Assad regime - and now people can speak freely. They can chant. They can dance in the streets to songs that curse the Assad family. And I want to talk to you about Friday prayers at this historic Ummayed Mosque in the old city where there's the Saladin tomb. And people just thronged inside, some who could never pray there because of security reasons, scared that they would be taken. And it was just thousands of people trying to get into the prayer room. And we got ourselves in. We're sitting among these thousands of people praying. And at the end of their first Friday prayer on what they're calling the Day of Victory, the crowd burst into cheers.
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FADEL: It still gives me chills. I've never heard anything like that. But within this happiness, there is grief because so many - thousands and thousands and thousands of people - disappeared during this 14-year civil war that started as peaceful demonstrations, was met with violence and turned into civil war. And so they're searching for their loved one that're missing, that went to prison, and they don't know where they are. Some are finding bodies. Some are finding nothing. And the really lucky ones are finding their people broken but alive. And so those searches continue for so much of the city. And it's also a city that's holding its breath about what may come next because the new authorities are unknown to them.
DETROW: Right. And let's turn to that because so much emotion is being let out, but there are a lot of questions about the future. With Assad now gone...
FADEL: Yeah.
DETROW: ...Who's in charge?
FADEL: Yeah. I mean, the opposition, which is now the de facto government, is being led by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist group that was once linked to al-Qaida but broke ties years ago and have sort of rebranded. And now they've gone from ragtag fighters born in a brutal war against Assad's regime to the de facto government. And now they're working on governing, securing the city. They've got checkpoints looking for weapons among civilians because so many of the military bases just opened up, and people took weapons. They're - they've got a transitional government for three months, and they say they want to focus on Syria and rebuilding and they want to be welcomed into the global community.
DETROW: Have you met and talked to anyone from HTS during your time in Syria?
FADEL: Yeah, I mean, I've talked to a lot of the rebel fighters. And I don't even know should - if we call them rebels anymore because they're really the de facto authorities, and they're at these checkpoints all through the city. I was at the Air Force Intelligence building in Damascus, and I met this young rebel who goes by Abu Mustafa. He's from Idlib, which is in northwest Syria, and he was a child - he was 11 years old when the uprising began against former President Bashar al-Assad's repressive government. And I just want you to hear what he says.
ABU MUSTAFA: (Non-English language spoken).
FADEL: So right there, he's telling me he was 11 when it started, and three years later, he took up weapons without the permission of his parents, he ran away from home because he says he had to defend his family, his land, that air strikes were destroying his city, killing his people. And so he decided he needed to fight. And so this young man, who's only 24 years old, was fashioned under this kind of brutality. And today, these young people, many of who had really never been to Damascus, are now in charge of securing the capital city.
DETROW: I mean, Leila, that just gets to the fact that this has been going on for so long now. The initial beginning of the end of the Assad regime began in Arab Spring more than a decade ago. That is something you covered so closely.
FADEL: Yeah.
DETROW: You look at so many other countries that changed leadership in very different ways during that period of time. You know, Assad dug in and stay in power. But you saw the different directions that those new governments went. It was a lot of struggle. What do you think that says about what could come next for Syria?
FADEL: I mean, there hasn't been one true success story out of this wave of uprisings at that time in 2011. Libya - they got freedom, lived with repression but turned into chaos, and now are a divided state with all these militias. You look at Iraq, invaded and occupied by the U.S. and then had its own uprising and, again, is still struggling. There's been internal fighting among the Syrian opposition. It isn't united, and if you look across the country, that continues. There are issues with the security vacuum. Do foreign fighters, do ISIS, take advantage of this moment? Are there counterrevolutionary forces? So a lot could go wrong, but Syrians hope that they are the exception, that a lot could go right.
DETROW: That is Morning Edition host Leila Fadel talking to us from Damascus. Leila, thanks so much for your reporting.
FADEL: Thank you.
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