In the streets they gathered in their thousands, banners of revolution held above their heads. Their singing echoing off the walls, their breaths freezing in the night air.
Arm-in-arm, in lines, hundreds upon hundreds of them, they swayed from side to side. A symbol of united defiance to the regime of Bashar al Assad.
It was moving beyond description really, and as a huge man hugged me, we shed tears together. He was dead within a week.
Syria latest – PM agrees to hand power to rebels
I was in the city of Homs, it was 2011 and the first days of Syria‘s own Arab Spring. Many colleagues doubted I and a handful of other journalists would even be able to get into this country, let alone report on the uprising in what was a police state.
For context, at that time, there were more than 80,000 interior ministry spies on the government books – that’s not even including the large numbers of police and military – all signed up to protect the regime.
Getting into the country was always difficult, as the uprising spread, our trips from neighbouring Lebanon on the backs of motorcycles moved to six-hour treks across the mountains of southern Turkey.
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The revolution grew in strength, within years though its momentum was stymied by the emergence of Islamic militant forces that later morphed into the truly awful Islamic State.
Disunity spread among the revolutionary movement while Russia stepped in to bolster Assad with a brutal campaign of aerial bombardment. Millions had left the country, and hundreds of thousands of those who stayed behind were killed.
I thought then the revolution was dead. The momentum had gone, and while a hardcore of resistance bedded down in Idlib, it never seemed likely that the regime would be vulnerable, supported as it was by Russia and Iran.
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The key is that support unexpectedly weakened to the point that the rebels, initially on a relatively modest raid to relieve shelling on parts of Idlib, realised that the barricades were unmanned, that regime forces were not holding their lines.
In a lightning advance they took back Aleppo, Hama and Homs, and finally Damascus.
Stuart Ramsay in Umayyad Square
Today in Umayyad Square in the capital, I met men who had been fighting ever since those cold nights in Homs in a cacophony of noise, of shooting into the air, of shouts and cheers.
Perhaps this is finally their Arab Spring realised.
We don’t know what the government will be like, or what Syria will become.
But I thought about the huge man in Homs and his tears. His revolution is done.