December 8, the anniversary of liberation for the capital and the country as a whole, was two days away, but crowds had already begun to gather in the square. Nearby, standing alone and watching the festivities, stood Abu Taj, 24. Ten years earlier, he had left his home in the Aleppo countryside when his house was destroyed in fighting between the regime and anti-Assad forces.

From there, he fled to Damascus and then Beirut before flying to join his father in Saudi Arabia. After a decade in exile – eight years in Saudi Arabia and two years studying in Egypt – Abu Taj moved back to Syria. He arrived just more than a week before people from all over the country gathered to celebrate the operation that stormed Damascus and forced Bashar al-Assad to flee, in the early hours of the morning, to Moscow. On the last Friday before the anniversary, Abu Taj prayed at the Umayyad Mosque before coming down to Damascus’s main meeting point to see the festivities. “The culture of the country is now for the people,” he told Al Jazeera, overjoyed by the direction the country is going.

A year ago, the reign of the al-Assad regime ended. With it fell a brutal police state, notorious for its use of torture and disappearance. For many in Syria, the regime’s collapse brought with it an exhalation – the first in decades since Bashar’s father Hafez came to power in 1970. The early days following the liberation were marked by elation in many parts of Syria, but also by concern over what was to come. Early predictions looked to the examples of Iraq after the US invasion or Libya after the fall of the Gaddafi regime. Few expected that the severe US sanctions on Syria would be removed, especially with Ahmed al-Sharaa, a man once with a US ransom on his head, leading the new government. Tragedy did, however, follow when widespread sectarian violence took place along the Syrian coast in March and again in Suwayda in July. (Al Jazeera/AFP)