I hope Assad pays the price, says mother whose son's death inflamed 2011 Syrian revolution
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If the push to oust Bashar al-Assad was born anywhere, it was born in Deraa, a small city in Syria near the Jordanian border.
Here, on 21 May 2011, the tortured and mutilated body of 13-year-old Hamza al-Khatib was delivered to his family weeks after his arrest at an anti-government rally.
His death, and the torture of other local teenagers for writing anti-Assad graffiti, sparked widespread protests and a harsh crackdown by government forces.
If anyone in Deraa should be celebrating the fall of Assad's regime, it's the Khatib family.
But when we visited today, no one in that house was celebrating.
They had just been sent screenshots of documents found in the notorious Saydnaya prison confirming that Hamza's older brother Omar - also arrested by the police in 2019 - had died in custody.
The boys' mother, Samira, shaking with grief, told me she had been waiting for Omar to emerge from prison.
"I was thinking maybe he'll come today or tomorrow," she said. "Today, I got the news."
Dressed all in black, and already mourning her husband, who died less than three months ago, she asked for former President Bashar al-Assad himself to experience what she had lived through.
"I hope he will pay the price," she said. "And that God will take revenge on him, and on his children."
Her nephew, Hossam al-Khatib, said the documents had been published on social media, by people scouring Saydnaya for information on their relatives. They found Omar's file and shared it online, knowing that he was Hamza's brother.
The fall of Assad has lifted the lid on decades of repression in Syria, and much of Deraa was out on the streets on Sunday, giddy with freedom, as rebel fighters took the capital Damascus and Assad fled.
Mobile phone footage shows crowds of men running around Deraa's central square in a chaotic outpouring of joy - shouting and firing weapons into the air.
This area was a key opposition heartland during the Assad regime - heavy battles are etched onto schools and homes here, village after village corroded by tank rounds and machine gun fire.
The opposition in this southern part of Syria is different to the alliance led by Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which swept down from the north and took the capital last week. But they both converged on the capital on Sunday.
The Free Syria Army (FSA) began fighting here in 2011, when the harsh government crackdowns following Hamza's death convinced some serving officers in Assad's army to defect and form a rebel force.