For Dima Kedraki, a Syrian American living in Orange, she is happy but anxious about the fall of the Assad regime. She was born two years after Bashar Al-Assad’s father, Hafez Al-Assad, assumed power in 1971 and lived in Syria until 1998.

It took barely 10 days for Syria’s insurgents to march from their stronghold in the northwest into Damascus and bring an end to the Assad family rule that had gripped the country for half a century. Every step of the way brought moments that would have been unbelievable only days earlier.