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SYRIAN REBEL fighters raced into Damascus unopposed on Sunday, overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad and ending more than five decades of his family’s iron-fisted rule after a lightning advance that reversed the course of a 13-year civil war.
Late on Sunday, Russian news agencies, citing a Kremlin source, reported that Assad and his family had arrived in Russia and been granted asylum there. The Interfax news agency quoted the unnamed source as saying: “President Assad of Syria has arrived in Moscow. Russia has granted them (him and his family) asylum on humanitarian grounds.”
Earlier in the day, Russia said Assad had left Syria but did not say where he had gone, or whether Moscow itself had offered him shelter. Two senior Syrian Army officers said he had flown out of Damascus for an unknown destination.
In one of the most consequential turning points in the Middle East for generations, the fall of Assad’s government wiped out a bastion from which Iran and Russia exercised influence across the Arab world.
His sudden overthrow at the hands of a Turkish-backed revolt with roots in jihadist Sunni Islam limits Iran’s ability to spread weapons to its allies and could cost Russia its Mediterranean naval base. It also paves the way for millions of refugees scattered for more than a decade in camps across Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan to finally return home.
For Syrians, it brought a sudden unexpected end to a war that had been in deep freeze for years, with hundreds of thousands already dead, cities pounded to dust, an economy hollowed out by global sanctions and no resolution in site.
“How many people were displaced across the world? How many people lived in tents? How many drowned in the seas?” the top rebel commander Abu Mohammed al-Golani told a huge crowd at the medieval Ummayad Mosque in central Damascus.
“A new history, my brothers, is being written in the entire region after this great victory,” he said. It would take hard work to build a new Syria which he said would be “a beacon for the Islamic nation”.
Assad’s government — known for generations as heading one of the harshest police states in the entire Middle East with hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in its gulag — melted away overnight.
Bewildered and elated inmates poured out of jails after rebels blasted away the locks on their cells. Reunited families wept and wailed in joy. Newly freed prisoners were filmed at dawn running through the Damascus streets holding up the fingers of both hands to show how many years they had been in prison.
“We toppled the regime!” a voice shouted and a prisoner yelled and skipped with delight.
The rebels said they had entered the capital with no sign of army deployments. Thousands of people in cars and on foot congregated at a main square in Damascus waving and chanting “Freedom”.
People were seen walking inside the Al-Rawda Presidential Palace, with some leaving carrying furniture from inside. A motorcycle was parked on the intricately-laid parquet floor of a gilded hall.
‘The future is ours’
Golani whose group was once Syria’s branch of al Qaeda but has since softened its image to reassure members of minority sects and foreign countries, said there was no room for turning back. “The future is ours,” he said in a statement read on state TV.
The Syrian rebel coalition said it was working to complete the transfer of power to a transitional governing body with executive powers. “The great Syrian revolution has moved from the stage of struggle to overthrow the Assad regime to the struggle to build a Syria together that befits the sacrifices of its people,” it added in a statement.
Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali, Prime Minister under Assad, called for free elections and said he had been in contact with Golani to discuss the transitional period.
The pace of events stunned Arab capitals and raised concerns about a new wave of instability in a region already in turmoil following the spread of conflict after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing Gaza war.
Jubilant supporters of the revolt stormed Syrian embassies in a number of cities around the world, lowering red, white and black Assad-era flags and replacing them with the green, white and black flag flown throughout the war by his opponents.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Assad’s fall was a direct result of blows Israel had dealt to Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, once the lynchpin of Assad’s security forces but pounded by Israel over the last two months.
French President Emmanuel Macron said “the barbaric state has fallen” and paid tribute to the Syrian people.
Daunting task ahead
When the celebrations fade, Syria’s new leaders will face the daunting task of trying to deliver stability to a diverse country with competing factions that will need billions of dollars in aid and investments to rebuild.
During Syria’s long civil war, which erupted in 2011 as an uprising against Assad’s rule, his forces and their Russian allies bombed cities to rubble. Hundreds of thousands of people died. The refugee crises across the Middle East was one of the biggest of modern times and caused a political reckoning in Europe when a million people arrived in 2015.
In recent years, Turkey had backed the rebels in a small redoubt in the north and along its border. The US, which still has 900 soldiers on the ground, backed a Kurdish-led alliance that fought Islamic State jihadists from 2014-2017.
President Joe Biden’s administration was monitoring developments but has not adjusted the positioning of the US troops, officials told Reuters.
The biggest strategic losers were Russia and Iran, which had intervened in the war’s early years to rescue Assad when his regime appeared in danger, helping him recapture most territory and all major cities. The frontlines were frozen four years ago under a deal Russia and Iran reached with Turkey.
But Moscow’s distraction by war in Ukraine and the blows to Iran’s allies following the war in Gaza — particularly the decimation of Hezbollah by Israel over the past two months — left Assad with scant support at the end.
Even after Assad had fled, Israel continued to strike targets associated with his government and its Iranian-backed allies, including one in Damascus where Israel had previously accused Iran of developing missiles. Netanyahu said the toppling of Assad could make it easier for Israel to reach a ceasefire deal to free hostages in Gaza.
On Sunday, rebels stormed Iran’s embassy, Iran’s English-language Press TV reported. Iran’s foreign ministry said Syria’s fate was the sole responsibility of the Syrian people and should be pursued without foreign imposition or destructive intervention.
Hezbollah withdrew all its remaining forces from Syria on Saturday, two Lebanese security sources said.
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