One of them was Ahmed al-Awda, a poet who studied English literature at university before becoming an army officer and then a rebel leader – now head of the Deraa provincial militia.
“You can’t imagine how happy we are,” he told me in the nearby city of Busra. “We cried for several days. You can’t imagine how we feel. Everyone here in Syria has lost a family. Everyone suffered.”
Mr Awda said he was one of the first to enter Damascus on Sunday, along with HTS. The first thing he did, he added, was go to embassies and government buildings to protect the people inside.
“We took a lot of civilian government people to the Four Seasons Hotel and put a very large force there to protect them,” he said.
“You know it’s going to be a crazy time, so I did everything I could to protect everyone there, even the government guys. I don’t want to punish them, they are Syrians.”
But he says he won’t forgive Assad that easily.
“I will do everything I can to bring him to justice so that he faces the punishment because we will not forget what he has done to the Syrian people and how he has destroyed Syria.”
Assad’s departure has given a fragile unity to Syria and its diverse opposition forces. But they no longer have a common enemy, and due to the fact that outside forces are still invested here, their differences may intensify.
There are fears that Syria could follow the path of Iraq and Libya and descend into chaos.
“We saw what happened in Iraq, and we reject it,” Mr. Awda said.
Assad’s forces were not the only ones he had fought here in the past few years. Islamic State (IS) cells still scattered across the east of the country also posed a threat.
