“This is the day we’ve been dreaming of,” said Ammr Nakour, a Sydney cafe owner who escaped the besieged Syrian city of Homs as an eight-year-old boy. “It has come at last. We had faith, we believed in it, now it is here.”

Nakour and his cousin, Bilal Al Kesm, danced in the streets of Chullora on Sunday with other members of Sydney’s Syrian community after news broke that rebel forces had taken Damascus and dictator Bashar al-Assad had fled to Moscow.

“Honestly, it just makes you feel free, to know that the regime is over,” Al Kesm said. “We were watching it day by day – every day they were taking new cities, in just a few days it happened so fast – phenomenal.”

The pair, both 22, escaped to the Lebanese port of Tripoli with their families during a brief ceasefire in Homs and made it to Australia in 2015. The cousins jointly operate a cafe in Greenacre and hope to visit Syria again one day to help rebuild.

“I see videos of what they’ve done to Homs – all these beautiful, sacred places completely destroyed,” Nakour said. “In my memory, it’s all happy things – family, seeing friends, playing soccer on the streets. My dad was a school principal. Now all that history has been wiped out – it only exists in our minds and our hearts.”

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Australia’s Syrian community was cautiously optimistic about the nation’s future but expected a period of uncertainty as Syrian opposition forces jostled to fill the power vacuum left by the dissolution of the Assad regime, said George Alrahil, a businessman and community leader who moved to Sydney in 1998.

“Everyone is happy,” he said. “From talking to people in the community here, the main idea is that economically it will be better. Wages are so low you can barely buy a dozen eggs.

“A house in Damascus was $300,000 to $400,000 – now it’s $50,000. The Iranians were buying them up cheap. The people just want the basic things a human needs – water, food, electricity.”