‘Miraculous’: Syrians in UK tell of shock, joy, hopes and fears after fall of Assad

Jubilation at the prospect of going home to a new Syria mixed with trepidation about what the future holds

Before she fled Syria and came to the UK in 2016, Raya Homsi was told her fiance had been tortured to death in the Sednaya prison run by Bashar al-Assad’s regime. All she had to go on was the word of one person who said he had witnessed it.

Now, after Assad’s fall, the human rights campaigner wonders if he might still be alive, among the thousands of people liberated in the last 24 hours from the facility near Damascus that Amnesty International called a “human slaughterhouse”.