A few hours after the fall of Bashar Al-Assad's regime, thousands of members of the Syrian diaspora spontaneously gathered in the streets of Germany, Austria and Greece on Sunday, December 8, to celebrate what many of them are already calling "the end of the war." In Germany, home to almost 1 million Syrians – the largest Syrian population outside the border countries – rallies were held in several major cities.

Car horns, shouts of joy and firecrackers echoed for part of the afternoon in Berlin's Kreuzberg district, where some 5,000 people gathered at Oranienplatz – families, children with their faces painted in the colors of the Syrian flag, activists, sympathizers and Berliners from other communities.

"Fifty years of dictatorship! It's over!," enthused a 32-year-old father who arrived from Aleppo nine years ago with his wife and baby. "We want to help rebuild Syria," said Mohammed Urfa, 27, one of the few to agree to give his last name. "We studied here, we worked here, we want to bring democracy to Syria." His family comes from a village in the Golan Heights, on the border with Israel, but his parents, a pharmacist and an economist, were never able to work in Germany because their degrees were not recognized. Like many others here, however, Urfa has no short-term plans to leave again.

"I want to help, but I also have a duty to Germany, which took me in and trained me," said Mohammed, 30, who came with his 75-year-old father. Having arrived from Damascus in 2018, he refers to "Mama Merkel," whose photo he said was on display in Idlib. "We want all communities to be able to live together, Alawites, Kurds, Christians, Druze... we're not Islamists!" assured Ali, 24, whose mother, Maysoun Berkdar, is an activist figure who has received threats.

In Vienna too, over 10,000 emotional Syrians took to the streets spontaneously on Sunday. "We haven't seen our families for 10 years, and now we'll finally be able to go back to them," said a tearful woman, who had fallen into the arms of a relative.

Since 2015, the Austrian capital has welcomed over 40,000 Syrian refugees, many of whom kept a vigil on social media to follow the situation live in Damascus before gathering on the Ring, the grand boulevard surrounding Vienna's historic center, waving Syrian revolution flags mixed with Austrian flags. On Sunday morning, employees of the Syrian embassy in Austria were even seen throwing portraits of the dictator out of the building's windows, to be trampled underfoot by the demonstrators.

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