CILVEGÖZÜ, TURKEY, DEC 13 (AFP/APP/DNA):Eight-year-old Rayan Assani knows next to nothing about Syria, but in a few minutes, the little girl with long black hair and a Barbie backpack will cross the border and head for her family’s native Aleppo.

“It’s going to be pretty,” she said, speaking Arabic in a barely audible voice, clutching her pink earmuffs in her hand amid the bustle at the Turkish-Syrian border.

There, dozens of children like her were preparing to cross with their parents following the ouster of longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad.

“Our dad told us the war was over and we were going back to Aleppo. That’s all,” said her older sister, Merve, 17.

She admitted she had “cried a lot” on Wednesday as her family took a bus out of Istanbul, where they had fled in 2012, a year into Syria’s brutal 13-year conflict.

It was a grey, cloudy day at the Cilvegozu border crossing, and from where the Assani sisters were standing, nothing of what awaited them in Syria was visible on the horizon.

A little boy in his father’s arms had chocolate smeared around his mouth and a Turkish flag knotted around his neck like a cape.

“That’s to thank Turkey for welcoming us,” said the father as he hurried back to Damascus, the capital and hometown to many of the three million Syrian refugees in Turkey.