As I walked through Vienna last weekend, I happened upon several protests organised by Syrian refugees celebrating the downfall of Bashar al-Assad, the butcher from Damascus. People were singing, some even crying, as they rejoiced the end of the father-and-son al-Assad dictatorship, which had lasted 53 years.
The protestors had not yet seen the images of tens of thousands of released political prisoners, the slaughterhouses, or the underground torture chambers, but they had already seen enough. They were among the 12 million people who were displaced during the Syrian civil war and many of them undoubtedly had family members or close friends who had been among the over half million Syrians who had been killed. It was a rare moment of total jubilation.
Following the successful revolt, the head of the rebel army Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Ahmed al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has been trying to stabilise Syria. He has appointed a caretaker prime minister who has been charged with creating a transition government, given amnesty to soldiers who served in the Syrian army, and against all odds is attempting to unify the different military and political factions in this war-torn country.