Inside Aleppo: The first city to fall to Syrian rebels

“We’re happy, but there’s still fear,” Samar said. “Why are we still afraid? Why isn’t our happiness full? It’s because of the fear they [the regime] planted inside us”.

Her brother, Ahmed, agreed. “You could be sent to jail for saying simple things. I’m happy, but I’m still concerned. But we’ll never live under repression again”.

His father intervened, to agree with him. “That’s impossible.”

The family lived in a small flat, where electricity was intermittent and heating, inexistent.

Now that they had returned, they did not know what to do, like many others here. More than 90% of Syria’s population is estimated to live in poverty, and there are broader concerns about how HTS, which started as an al-Qaeda affiliate, will run the country.

A woman who lived in a flat nearby said, “No-one could take away my happiness. I still can’t believe that we came back. May God protect those who took the country back.”

At the main square, a man told me, “I really hope we get it right, and there isn’t a return to violence and oppression.”

At Mahmoud Ali’s flat, an “independence flag”, with its four red stars in the middle, had been drawn on a white paper, and put on the coffee table in the living room.

Samar, one of his daughters, told me, “We still can’t believe that Assad is gone.”