‘We thought we’d be slaughtered’: Assad critic returns home to wailing relatives after 14 years

The last time I came to Homs, I crossed the border from Lebanon on the back of a motorbike.

I recall ducking beneath somebody’s washing hanging on a line and crisscrossing through a minefield, the driver shouting: “Don’t worry, Habibi, I do it all the time!”

This time, I drove past the burnt-out hulks of Syrian tanks and grad missile launchers through a once-feared, but now destroyed and abandoned, checkpoint – and into a free city.

On a roundabout, where a huge statue of Bashar al Assad used to dominate the city centre, men, women and children were singing, laughing and taking selfies.

The statue, like the regime, has been toppled.

During my last trip to Homs, I couldn’t even approach the city centre because it was controlled by the regime.

I was confined to a district known as Baba Amr, the home of the Homs uprising against Assad that started in 2011 and which became the scene of unbridled slaughter in 2012.

And now, coming back has been one of the single most moving experiences of my life.

The regime was powerful in Homs because it destroyed the opposition. Some of the most appalling attacks on civilians happened here.

Barely a building in Baba Amr was left undamaged in a campaign of blanket bombing and targeted attacks by the Syrian Army in 2012. It’s not been rebuilt but people are returning now, living amid the rubble.

The fall of Assad is being greeted here as the start of a new life.

“We feel we’ve been born again,” Maher Hassan, a resident of Baba Amr, told me.

“I went to the square, and it felt like I was seeing it for the first time, I used to pass it all the time, but there was a celebration and when I looked over, I felt like I had never seen it before.”

People are now on the streets, free of the fear of being arrested, imprisoned and murdered. That was an everyday threat, and these scenes of ordinary life just didn’t exist in Baba Amr since 2011 – until now.

At every corner, I was stopped and surrounded by people telling us of family members either murdered by the regime or still missing.

As I was interviewing two women, who were describing the arrest and gruesome murders of so many of their male relatives, a man suddenly emerged from the crowd and began to hug them. The women started to wail.

Ahmad Hasan Nheimy was a protester at the start of the uprising in 2011, who was jailed, and then fled the country after release. He has finally been able to return home for the first time in nearly 14 years.

“I still can’t believe it, I can’t believe, I’m saying hello to everyone still, I’ve seen my mother for the first time in 14 years, my house is destroyed,” he said through tears.

“They used to arrest and report protesters, there were spies within, and I got a notice that my name was on a list, and my name was distributed to soldiers at checkpoints, so I couldn’t cross checkpoints anymore.”

I asked him if he thought he would ever be able to come back.

“It crossed my mind that I would never come home, because whenever we crossed the borders, we thought we would be slaughtered or put in prison, and in prison we would be tortured,” he replied.

In those early days of the uprising, the “media centre” – the top three floors of a house in Baba Amr – was the very heart of what the activists who manned it believed was to be a revolution.

We were welcomed there and the movement – all young men and women – looked after us. They linked us up with the swelling protest marches that took to the streets every night.

The Free Syrian Army was still in its infancy, and there were very few of them, with hardly any weapons. But they gave the protesters as much protection as they could.

One of those was Abu Firas, who was just 22 at the time. He had deserted the Syrian Army to join the FSA.

I met Abu Firas and, though we are both older, the memories from that time were vivid.

He wanted to show me around the streets where we took refuge and buildings where they had tried to hold off Assad’s forces.

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We ended up outside the “media centre”. In early 2012, the building and streets around it were targeted by the regime and its rockets.

During one attack, The Sunday Times foreign correspondent Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik were killed. With Colvin was photographer Paul Conroy, who spoke to Sky’s Yalda Hakim on Wednesday night.

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What I learnt was that Abu Firas was one of those who had tried to save Marie and Remi. He also helped their colleagues who had been badly injured in the direct, targeted attack on the “media centre”.

“They were heroes to us, we will never forget them,” Abu Firas told me. “They told the world what was happening, they are famous here, they will forever be part of our revolution.”

Countless civilians and activists have died in Baba Amr and across Syria and these journalists would never have wanted to be at the centre of any story.

But here, in Baba Amr, their reporting was the link to the outside world and their courage is part of folklore.

There were times I thought I would never see normal life in Homs, or even visit it again, but so many things have changed.

Syria is free now from Assad’s long reign of terror.

The future is far from clear of course, but the present feels very special in Baba Amr.