Exclusive:'It feels like a dream coming true': The Syrian refugee who fled to Scotland on Assad's fall

Tasnim Helmi has two homes now. It has been eight long years since she and her family arrived in Scotland, flying into a wintry Glasgow Airport with little more than the clothes on their back.

She was in her early 20s then, forced to abandon her studies as a medical laboratory technician. But the only home she knew, and the plans she had mapped out, were stolen from her. In that time, she has feared for those that were left behind, while forging a new future for her young family in Scotland.

Throughout it all, she never lost hope the suffering in Syria would end, and never quite knew what she would feel if, or when, it did. The answer to that question is still something she is trying to process in the wake of the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime.

“We have been glued to the TV and our phones have been in our hands for the past three days following the news,” she explains, pausing for a moment. “It feels like a dream that is coming true.”

After a devastating civil war that has killed more than half a million people and displaced half of Syria’s pre-war population of 23 million, the dawning of a new reality has stirred a range of feelings in Tasnim, who like many other Syrian refugees, has spent the past few weeks watching the once thinkable come to pass.

A decade ago, it seemed like this moment would arrive, only for her homeland to descend to new depths of suffering. “It felt then the end was very, very close, but because of the help Assad got from other countries, we lost hope, we were seeing more killing, and more airstrikes,” she recalls. “The end felt very far away, very far in the future.”

This time, with the end only too real after a shock rebel offensive that seized military bases, freed prisoners and captured major cities, there is happiness, of course. But more than that. “It’s all mixed emotions,” Tasnim says. “You don’t quite know what to do or what to feel because everything is happening so suddenly, and we’re trying to understand the situation. But we see now that the only weapon Assad had was fear. Once you don’t have that power, you’re done.”

Tasmin Helmi (centre) said the fall of the Assad regine is 'like a dream come true'. | National World

In the eight years since she fled Syria, Tasnim has been on her own journey of change. Along with her father, Bashar, and her husband, Mohamed, a baker who ran his own pâtisserie in Syria before the war, Tasmin launched the family’s inaugural business in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute in the summer of 2018. With customers including Sir Billy Connolly, the wee eatery with its distinctive pastel pink exterior has proved a huge success. And under Tasnim - the firm’s managing director - it has since expanded to several locations across Glasgow and the neighbouring town of Bearsden in East Dunbartonshire.

“Scotland has been our country since 2016, and it’s been such a welcoming and very warm place, although not with the weather,” she laughs. “It’s been great to have the support of the local communities in Rothesay, and now in Bearsden, where we stay. I look at it like we have two homes now, it feels really nice.”

Over the past 48 hours, Tasnim has been in near constant contact with aunts, uncles and other loved ones in and around the Damascus suburb of Darayya, where her father Bashar’s once thriving clothes factory was destroyed amidst the carnage visited on the Syrian capital. The emotions being felt there, she said, are different to those being experienced nearly 2,500 miles away.

“Because of all the long years of the dictatorship, they’re still afraid today,” she says. “They’d like to be happy and celebrate, but they’re hesitating to say the words they’ve been afraid of saying. I think that slowly, they’re understanding that they’re free. But it’s hard for someone who’s been under oppression to be suddenly free. It’s something they’ve never experienced before.”

Tasnim said it is vital that Bashar al-Assad answers for his crimes. Picture: Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty | AFP via Getty Images

Tasnim, 31, says she is now “full of hope” for a new Syria, a nation where there are “young men and women full of potential” and optimism. “There’s nothing worse than what we’ve been through under Assad,” she reflects. “Not knowing the future can be scary, but I think this is a good side of being scared.”

Her priority, like so many other Syrians, is ensuring those who were persecuted by Assad’s forces are found safe and well. Overnight, she has been following the harrowing news of the search for survivors in labyrinthine underground prison complexes in Damascus.

“It’s hard to feel joy knowing those people are there without food or oxygen or water or power, they’re slowly dying under the ground,” she says. “The hope is becoming more little with time, but we’re waiting for the news that they’re able to save them.

“It’s clear Assad has planned for this, he’s left the prisoners behind to die. It’s a regime that’s brutal to a point you can’t imagine.”

To that end, there is another reckoning that Tasmin believes is crucial if Syria is to move forward. “The only hope we have is to get justice,” she adds. “We don’t know exactly where Assad is now, but we need him to be punished for all the crimes he has committed, and the people he has killed, tortured or displaced. There are children who have never seen their homes. So the only hope is justice - we need answers and justice.“