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.

"U have no idea how ecstatic I am," he writes.

No one I know believed that this day would come. And, at what cost? "I'd written off a future without Assad," WhatApps a former human rights colleague who, in 2016 interviewed survivors of Saydnaya Prison. I recall her saying that the investigation had almost folded as they could not find enough interviewees because so few people left the prison alive.

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.