On Dec. 1, Iyad Alati, a Syrian-American on Vashon Island, got a call from his brother in Sweden. It was 4 a.m., but the news couldn’t wait: Bashar al-Assad’s army had collapsed in Aleppo, his brother told him, unraveling in the face of insurgents who were marching towards the Syrian capital of Damascus.

As Alati recounted the story in his modest home near the Tahlequah ferry dock, he stood up and started jumping and hollering, reliving his response to his brother’s news: “Syria is free! Syria is free! Wow! Wow! Wow! Syria is free!”

Safa Jneidi, his wife, said she began to cry. Their three children, curious about the commotion, got up and asked their mother what was happening.

“When we told them, they said, ‘Oh, that’s good.’ They didn’t live these moments. They didn’t suffer. We cannot explain to them what we’re feeling,” she said.

But to Alati and Jneidi, that phone call spelled pure elation. They knew the army’s collapse in Aleppo — the largest city in Syria — meant Assad’s brutal regime was likely over. Indeed, days later, Assad fled to Moscow, ending both a ruthless dictatorship and a 14-year civil war that had forced Alati, Jneidi and their one child at the time to flee Aleppo, the only home they had ever known.

“When we heard Assad was gone, we held a celebration,” Jneidi said.

Expert chefs, they made a huge spread of food — lamb and beef kabobs, sushi, dolma, baklava, and more — and invited their neighbors to celebrate with them. Photos from the day capture the joy: Alati is grinning broadly, surrounded by a community he’s come to love.

“We’re just so happy,” he said.

The brutality of Assad’s regime, and the civil war it spawned, created what human rights organizations have called one of the worst humanitarian crises in modern history.

Millions of Syrians lost their homes, becoming displaced people in their own country. Millions of others fled, becoming part of an international diaspora of Syrian refugees. Thousands more were killed or injured by Assad’s ruthless effort to hold on to power.

Human rights organizations over the years have reported widespread and arbitrary arrests, torture, use of chemical weapons, starvation as a weapon of war and both indiscriminate and deliberate attacks against civilians, their homes and communities. After Assad’s sudden departure, more horrors were revealed, including a network of prisons — “death camps,” according to several news reports — where people had been tortured, starved and executed.

Alati and Jneidi, who came to Vashon in 2017 with the help of the Vashon Resettlement Committee, are a world away from those war-torn days. They own a popular food cart — Iyad’s Syrian Grill — that operates five days a week in Vashon town. Their two oldest children — Huda, 13, and Gulnar, 12 — are doing well in school; their youngest, Humam, 4, is in preschool. Their home, on a quiet wooded lane on the southern tip of Vashon, is comfortable and nicely furnished.

But their memories of the brutal war in Syria are vivid. At times using an online translation app to help them convey their complex thoughts in English, Alati and Jneidi described in detail the start of the civil war in 2011 and their mounting realization that their country was no longer safe.

Stories of atrocities by Assad’s army — children being murdered, wholesale massacres in a nearby city — reached them. Their first-born child was 8 months old; Jneidi was pregnant with their second. Food was hard to find. One of Alati’s brothers was imprisoned. Another was delivering medicine to wounded insurgents, and they feared his imminent arrest, as well as their own.

After a bomb destroyed the apartment building next to theirs, Jneidi recalled, she tearfully told Alati she could no longer handle the terror of life in Aleppo, where Alati ran a textile shop that had been in his family’s ownership for centuries.

Late in 2011, after months of civil war, they decided to flee to Turkey, which borders Syria — a harrowing escape. Hours after they made it across the border, Assad’s army ambushed the border crossing, killing hundreds of people, the couple said.

They tried to make a new life for themselves in Turkey, where Alati began to work in restaurants, honing his skills as a chef. Still, it was hard. They didn’t speak Turkish; work was sporadic. After two years, they were invited to apply for refugee status in the United States, a process that took another two years of vetting.

“They wanted to make sure we were good people,” Jneidi said.

Finally, in 2017, they were flown to Tukwila, where they confronted a new set of challenges. Their apartment, in a gritty part of Tukwila, bordered a park where people drank and smoked late into the night. After Alati witnessed a robbery in a nearby market, Jneidi told him: “If this is the U.S., I want to go back to Turkey.”

But fate intervened again: The Vashon Resettlement Committee, a small group of islanders committed to helping Syrians find homes on Vashon, reached out to them and two other Syrian families. Four months after landing in Tukwila, they moved into a small rental home on Vashon and were touched by both the island’s peacefulness and a community that quickly embraced them, they said.

“It’s magic,” Alati said, recalling his first tour of the island. “It’s so beautiful. … When we moved here, wow. It’s like heaven.”

A lot has happened in the eight years since they settled on Vashon. Alati graduated from Seattle’s Project Feast, a nonprofit that helps refugees and immigrants enter the food industry, and soon after that launched his food service business. Jneidi enrolled in English classes, worked for a while for Vashon Youth & Family Services, then shifted to support her husband’s new venture. In 2023, she was named a Small Business Administration Seattle District Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

They continue to be struck by the support they receive on Vashon, they said. In December, right after Assad fled to Moscow, several people stopped by their food cart to give them hugs and high-fives. “It’s a small community, but very supportive,” Jneidi said.

In fact, Vashon reminds them of Aleppo, Alati said. “All the people helping each other, bringing us food, and celebrating. We share food with our neighbors. That’s our culture. We love that.”

But Syria still calls to them. They believe the new regime, currently headed by Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, will establish stability in Syria. They hope the United States and other nations will help the financially devastated country rebuild. And should both happen, they might decide to return — if not to live, at least to visit.

“In the future, if the situation is safe, we ​​will visit Syria so our children can see their history and the city their parents came from,” Jneidi said. “Perhaps we can help in rebuilding it again.”

Leslie Brown is a former editor of The Beachcomber.