I lean out of the hotel window to catch a noisy signal. The signal and noise come in waves: signal rising, noise rising, signal rising, rising, rising, rising. "Assad’s gone." "I told you," my closest Syrian friend writes from Hong Kong. "How are you celebrating?" I ask. He sends a photo of him looking sharp, wearing a Mercedes cap, with a keffiyeh draped over his shoulders, holding a slice of red velvet cake. A gentle smile on his face is directed at the cake, not the phone camera.

"U have no idea how ecstatic I am"

No one I know believed this day would come. And, at what cost? "I'd written off a future without Assad," WhatApps a former colleague who, in 2016, interviewed five survivors from Saydnaya Prison. I recall her saying that the investigation almost folded because because so few people left the prison alive there was barely anyone to interview. I watch on Al Jazeera as a stream of men and women walk up a dirt path between mine fields, into the open gates of Saydnaya.