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Growing up in Syria, Rawan Bairouti would be warned the walls have ears and that if she stepped out of line, she would have to go to her aunt's house. Of course, these were references to not criticising the government, particularly the Syrian president.

Watching from the other side of the world as Syrians across the country tear down statues of the swiftly exiled now-former president Bashar al-Assad is a bittersweet time for those who love their home country, but left it all behind for freedom and the opportunity of a better life.

"I definitely wish I could be celebrating with my people. It was amazing seeing all the celebrations happening all over the country," Bairouti, a software engineer who relocated with her immediate family to southern California in 2013, told °®Âþµº.

"People are finally free for the first time, and it's beautiful to see the youth taking ownership of the country, seeing that it's truly theirs and making it better, and I wish I were there to be part of it. I never thought I would say this because I never thought I'd live to see Assad fall," she said.

Assad, along with his entire government apparatus, fell from power on 8 December following a swift military campaign by HTS, Hayat Tahrir Sham, a rebel group led Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa (or his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani), once viewed as an extremist, and now the country's de facto leader.

He has, however, indicated in recent years that he has reformed, including not wanting to wage war on other countries and showing an apparent openness to the rights of minorities and other matters. Many Syrians in the diaspora are watching from afar with cautious optimism.

Syria has one of the worst human rights records in the world. Under more than six decades of Baath Party rule, freedom of speech and expression were suppressed, and political dissent was cracked down on. Since the 2011 Arab uprising, there were an estimated at least 100,000 who disappeared and around that same number believed to have died in prison.

It is with this long and recent history of this overt and coerced repression that many Syrians are watching their country in disbelief and hope. For most Syrians, both at home and in the diaspora, this was the only system they knew.

Hussam Ayloush, a Syrian who grew up in Lebanon and now lives in southern California, where he works as a Muslim civil rights advocate, his memories of the fear go back to his childhood of crossing from Beirut to Damascus.

"On the way to Syria, my parents would say 'don't make a joke about the president' and 'don't talk about the lack of services' or that could get someone in trouble," he told TNA.

"As you grow up, you hear stories of people being detained for benign things," he recalls.

"I remember when I took my kids in early 2000 to visit Syria, my son was six years old, and he asked why that person's face was everywhere. We weren't used to that cult," he said.

Hassan Twiet, who grew up in Hama and now works as a computer science teacher in California, says he stopped taking his children to Syria when he realised they were too outspoken to travel to a dictatorship.

"I said, you know, this will be a problem. Living under that pressure is like living a fake life. You have to say yes to something you don't believe," he told TNA.

Being from Hama, where a government crackdown on political dissent killed 40,000 civilians, put residents like Twiet under tight scrutiny.

"If you're from Hama, it's automatically assumed that you're against the government," he said.

Right now, he's already making plans to return to Syria and rebuild an old family home.

Like many other Syrians, Bairouti is trying to be optimistic, though not without concern for the future.

"Obviously, everyone is choosing to be as optimistic as possible. But I can't help but feel nervous about external forces," she said. "I feel like that's going to be the biggest challenge. I'm not a political analyst. I'm just Syrian. But I know certain powers don't want Syria to be well. If it's left alone, it can thrive, but I fear it won't be."

Ayloush sees the next step for Syrians as defending this hard-won freedom.

"In their mind, they've paid the ultimate price to gain their freedom, and they're willing to pay much more to protect that hard-earned freedom, and they won't let anyone take that away," he said.

Even with the new freedom after the fall of Assad, Bairouti says she feels happy while still feeling the heavy weight of the past, something she is adamant shouldn't be forgotten.

"It's very bittersweet," she said. " I'm happy that it's liberated, but it's traumatic. Everything is resurfacing with the images we're seeing. You can't celebrate without acknowledging all of the ugliness of it."