Sondus Alkadri recalled the death of her fiancé in the hands of soldiers of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s former president who fled the country following a dramatic collapse of his regime earlier this month.

Today, Alkadri is a dentist in Aurora, where she lives with her husband, Hamid Imam, and two children.

On Friday, she celebrated the fall of the Assad regime with her family and Aurora’s Syrian community following at the Colorado Muslims Community Center. 

During a sermon, the center’s founder, Imam Karim Abu Zaid, focused on the significance of justice, the dangers of tyranny and the opportunity for a bright future in Syria, which has been embroiled in a civil since 2011 that displaced half of the country’s 23 million people.

One of the most pressing questions facing Syrians is who would lead the country’s new government, and their celebration of Assad’s ouster has been tempered with uncertainty over the future.  

Zaid, who is from Egypt but now calls Aurora home, said Syrians need to come together and avoid those perilous disagreements in order to carve a successful path forward. 

“They are really rejoicing because I think they are seeing now a bright future,” he said. “I think unity is the key to building their country.”

At the celebration, Alkadri’s family and dozens of other Syrians danced, sang and waved Syrian flags at the community center, buzzing with a shared excitement for Syria’s potential.  

They said the joy comes after years of fear, heartbreak and trauma for Syrians like Alkadri, who fled to Saudi Arabia in 2013 as the war raged. 

Alkadri has lived in many places as she studied to become a dentist, going from Saudi Arabia to Turkey to Portugal and the United States — but Syria is home, she said. 

Leaving Syria brought feelings of guilt, she said, but the alternative was imprisonment and possibly death.

“As a dentist, I felt it’s my duty to not leave my country during pain,” she said. “I wanted to help injured people. But even if you hand someone bread, you are doing a crime in Assad’s eyes.”

She went back to Syria briefly after leaving, using a fake name to avoid capture, but the threat of being taken and imprisoned was all too real, she said. Her family told her she needed to leave and join them in Saudi Arabia. 

Alkadri and Imam were flying back from visiting family in Saudi Arabia when the news came of Syria’s liberation. As they landed in Denver, they were shocked at how quickly it all happened.

They aren’t shocked, however, that it did happen.

“I’m not surprised, you know. We have so much faith and belief in that cause,” Imam said. “It was a call for freedom. A call to end oppression and bring democracy to the country. Right is right and dictators never last.”

Imam and Alkadri have watched now as people are going home, cleaning the streets and celebrating. To many Syrians, they said, Syria finally feels like home again.

“Everyone is out on the streets cleaning, they feel like it’s their home now,” she said. “It gives me goosebumps to see how happy people are, to see all the people on the streets and no fear.”

It’s still hard to believe, she said, and will stay that way until she sees the country with her own eyes. But she believes in its future. 

“Syria, I drink its water, I breathe its air … I feel like I have a purpose to go back to my country and rebuild it,” she said. “I need to give back to Syria, because it’s our mother.”

Himah Abou Habra and her 18-year-old daughter, Ghazal Obaid, left Syria in 2012. On Friday, they shared hopes to return for a visit. 

Habra, like so many at Friday’s celebration, lost family members to Assad’s regime. She said she remembers the day her father’s body was found after his capture, tortured to the point of being almost unrecognizable.  

Obaid, who left with her mother at age 5, beamed talking about the possibility of going back home and seeing her family. As the oldest, she hasn’t met her cousins, and the rest of her family hasn’t seen her since she left.

“I left when I was 5, but I can remember the littlest things,” she said. “Now that it’s free, I can’t wait to go back and see everything, but it’s not going to be the same. Everything is broken.

“I just can’t believe that I have a family I can see,” Obaid said. 

While the Syrian community has suffered a lot, they are taking this time to celebrate, Habra said.

“There is no word in the whole world, not in any language, to describe what we feel right now,” Habra said. “We still have something sad inside, but what happened, right now it’s a dream.”

Habra said she, too, feels called to go home and do something to help her country get back on its feet. Also like Alkadri, Habra thinks her family will wait to go back until things settle down.

“I want to hug everyone in Syria, I want to kiss the floor,” she said.