'I'm just happy': Syrian diaspora across Europe reacts to Bashar al-Assad's downfall

euronews (in English)

Syria has been devastated by a bloody civil war since 2011 which has its roots in a failed uprising against Bashar al-Assad as part of the Arab Spring anti-government protest movement that swept across much of the Arab world in the early 2010s.

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00:00Syria has been devastated by a bloody civil war since 2011, which has its roots in a failed

00:08uprising against Bashar al-Assad during the Arab Spring. While many of the region's rulers

00:13either stepped down or were forcibly removed, Assad hung on. He directed the military to

00:19launch a brutal crackdown on the unrest with an estimated 3,500 protesters killed. After

00:25months of violence, armed rebel groups began forming across the country, and what started

00:30as an insurgency had, by 2012, escalated into full-blown civil war. The UN Refugee Agency

00:37says that more than 14 million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes. More than

00:43seven million of those remain internally displaced. The rest have fled abroad. While many settled

00:49in the countries closest to Syria, others sought asylum in Europe, and the news of Assad's

00:54downfall has been met with a mixture of disbelief and joy.

01:24It's a revelation. It's not a civil war in Syria. Please. The media in Austria says

01:45that it's a civil war in Syria. It's not a civil war. It's a revelation, and now it's

01:54a civil war.

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