TThe road to Damascus was lined with discarded army uniforms. Panicked Syrian army soldiers stripped naked in the streets in the early hours of Sunday as they realized their leader Bashar al-Assad had abandoned them after his family’s 54-year rule over Syria.

Syrian army tanks, tasked with stopping the rebels’ lightning offensive that had begun just 11 days earlier, stood empty in front of checkpoints bearing posters of the late leader Hafez al-Assad, his face half-torn. Out of habit, a driver stopped and rolled down the window, but there was no one at the checkpoint.

“No more checkpoints, no more bribes,” Mohammed remarked with a smile as he sped toward the Syrian capital.

Damascus was still in a state of disbelief, the smoke of the previous night’s battles hanging over the city like a fog. Windows shook from the occasional explosions, the target and warring party unknown. Just hours earlier, it was announced that Assad had fled the capital and his regime had fallen.

The head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Mohammed al-Jolani – the most prominent rebel leader in Syria – announced that former Syrian Prime Minister Mohammed Gaza al-Jalali would lead an interim government in the coming months.

The residents of Syria were stunned by the day’s events. “I feel like I’m in a dream, I haven’t slept and I can’t understand what happened,” said Fatimeh, a Syrian originally from Idlib, as she approached Damascus. “I’m from Idlib,” she said again. For years she dared not say where she came from when she was in Damascus, fearing that any affiliation with the province controlled by Islamist rebels would provoke retaliation.

Al-Jolani, who this week gave up his pseudonym in favor of his birth name, Ahmed al-Shaara, was also on the hunt for rebel forces. It was fighters from the southern province of Deraa, not HTS, who reached the gates of Damascus. HTS fighters were busy securing Homs, Assad’s last lifeline to his coastal strongholds of Tartus and Latakia.

The rebel leader arrived at the landmark Umayyad Mosque in the Old City of Damascus on Sunday in his first public appearance since the fall of the Assad government. Just a few days ago it would have been unthinkable to see the rebel leader in the mosque in the former government center. For Syrians, the message was clear: Assad was gone and the rebels were in control.

With the fall of the president, the empire of silence suddenly came to life. Hundreds of people gathered in Umayyad Square, where the ground was littered with bullet casings – not from fighting but from celebratory gunfire. Fighters passed families of AK-47s, gleefully firing them into the air as the red glow of tracer bullets faded into the distance.

Jolani had banned firing weapons into the air for fear that a stray bullet could injure someone – but his order was quickly forgotten amid the cheers. “The tears flowed by themselves, my father, my brothers, so many people were killed,” said a woman in the square, refusing to give her name. Her daughter chimed in, “Now we know our father didn’t die in vain.”

During the celebration, a woman rolled down her window and asked a passerby: “Was anyone here from Sednaya?” The prison, about 20 km from the capital, was perhaps the most notorious of all the Syrian government’s internment camps. The rebels opened their doors on Sunday morning and thousands of prisoners left the place at once, each in a different direction.

As Mohammad Abu al-Zeid, a commander with the rebel group Operations Room to Liberate Damascus, drove through Damascus with two other fighters from southern Syria, he drew attention to the embassies lining the chic Mezzah district in Damascus, from which the Most of them are now empty but are undamaged.

“We are not attacking any of the public institutions – these are intended for the new state,” Abu al-Zeid said.

Abu al-Zeid had started his day by storming the headquarters of Syrian state television. He led a squadron of fighters who took over the broadcast and read from a sheet of paper as he announced the end of the Assad regime.

“My children saw me on TV and started crying: ‘What is Baba doing?'” the rebel commander said with a laugh.

Now he was busy exploring the city he had just helped conquer. He kept getting lost, making U-turns and squinting at Google Maps. It was the first time he had been in the capital in years.

Not even the rebels seemed to have expected that they had taken Damascus so quickly – they walked around the capital in a seemingly daze. Their weapons, which they had fired just hours before, now lay untouched in the trunk of the car.

“We didn’t want to have to fight for 13 years, we didn’t have to. We wanted change, not the overthrow of a regime,” said Wassim al-Khatib, one of the fighters under Zeid’s command, as he looked over the rows of broken military equipment littering the streets of Damascus.