A flood of conflicting emotion washed over Mahmoud Murad as he witnessed the rapid crumbling of Bashar al-Assad's brutal regime.
The 34-year-old community development worker is a survivor.
Missiles launched by Assad struck his former home while he also endured being shot at by snipers and kidnapped, handcuffed, blindfolded and beaten by militias.
A decade ago, Mr Murad sought asylum in Australia and is now settled in Sydney.
"I felt happy in the beginning, after that we feel happy and worried, and day by day we feel like it's very complicated," he tells AAP in the aftermath of Syria falling to rebel forces on December 8.
"We were under bombardment and we didn't have time to grieve the deaths of our loves ones ... and then it hits you years later."
The disabled refugees advocate was born with muscular atrophy and nerve damage in his leg which affects how he walks.
Amid a civil war which began in 2011, he recalls begging a regime fighter wielding a machine gun to let him cross a main road to seek safety with his hands in the air because he couldn't run.
"You're taking split second decisions all the time ... we cheated death several times," he says.
An estimated 500,000 people were killed and over 10 million were displaced in the conflict.
While attempting to flee into Lebanon from his hometown of Homs, which was destroyed in a 2013 offensive, regime-affiliated Hezbollah militants kidnapped Mr Murad and a dozen others.
They were tortured for several days.
"We were handcuffed and blindfolded ... we were hit with metal rods and the butts of guns," he says.
"I lost consciousness."
For Khaled El Megharbel, also from Homs, the pain of Assad's henchmen interrogating and beating him in an underground jail isn't easily forgotten.
"When you go into jail you are stripped naked and made to squat on the ground in front of 15 men and you are hit in a gruesome display with sticks, knives and bike chains in what is known as a welcome party," the 53-year-old says.
He was arrested in March 2011, the same month the revolution erupted. He spent a month in prison for being a bystander at a protest.
The Sydney fencing business owner, who arrived in Australia in December 2014, remembers the putrid smells of latrines in cramped cells and hearing the wails of the abused. He says two people died the month he was imprisoned.
"I cry a hundred times over watching videos of prisoners being freed because I know their pain," Mr El Megharbel says.
"I feel sad for them, what they've been through and happy at the same time that they're out now - a whole bunch of mixed emotions."
Western Sydney University academic Rifaie Tammas, who has written about foreign intervention in Syria over the past decade, also carries horror-filled memories.
His father and brother were killed by Assad's forces and bombings.
He explains how the regime used incarceration to maintain a police state.
"Prison cells and forced disappearances maximised the level of violence and torture away from the public ... and as a scare tactic. It is a core tenet of that strategy," Dr Tammas says.
"We knew this but seeing it to its full extent now, we're going to have decades of uncovering atrocities committed in these dungeons."
He is optimistic a new page is being turned.
Adelaide law student Ahmed Omar, 23, was only young when his school teacher mother was arrested and hauled off to Saydnaya military prison on the outskirts of Damascus.
She was held for three months on what her son says were trumped up charges and endured frequent beatings.
Saydnaya, Syria's most notorious jail, has been called a human slaughterhouse where thousands have died in underground cells.
"I actually have to stop her from watching Instagram videos because when she saw those images of the jail opened she sobbed," he says.
Mr Omar, who survived being shot in the head by a sniper aged 13, as well as barrel bombings in the city of Douma, says generations will be scarred trying to move past the bloodiest chapter in Syria's history.
"We were happy to see the Assad regime that has been tormenting us for years falling," he says.
"Then seeing all the videos of Saydnaya, it's pretty extreme, it's unbelievable really."
