DAMASCUS, (Reuters) – Syria rebel fighters raced into Damascus unopposed today, overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad and ending nearly six decades of his family’s iron-fisted rule after a lightning advance that reversed the course of a 13-year civil war.
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. Moscow gave him and his family asylum.
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 may pave 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 dead, cities pounded to dust, an economy hollowed out by global sanctions and seemingly no resolution in sight.
“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 Umayyad Mosque in central Damascus, referring to refugees who drowned trying to reach Europe.
“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”.
The Assad police state – known since his father seized power in the 1960s as one of the harshest in the 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.
EYES RIPPED OUT
As the sun set in Damascus without Assad for the first time, the roads leading into the city were mostly empty, apart from motorcycles carrying armed men and rebel vehicles caked with brownish mud as camouflage.
Some men could be seen looting a shopping centre on the road between the capital and the Lebanese border, stuffing goods into plastic bags or into pick-up trucks. The myriad checkpoints lining the road to Damascus were empty. Posters of Assad had been torn at his eyes. A burning Syrian military truck was parked diagonally on the road out of the city.
A thick column of black smoke billowed out from the Mazzeh neighbourhood, where Israeli strikes earlier had targeted Syrian state security branches, according to two security sources.
Throughout the evening, intermittent gunfire rang out throughout the city in apparent celebration.
Shops and restaurants closed early in line with a curfew imposed by the rebels. Just before it came into effect, people could be seen briskly walking home with stacks of bread.
Earlier, 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 Oct. 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
When the celebrations fade, Syria’s new leaders will face the daunting task of trying to deliver stability to a diverse country that will need billions of dollars in aid to rebuild.
During the civil war, which erupted in 2011 as an uprising against Assad, his forces and their Russian allies bombed cities to rubble. The refugee crisis 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 northwest and along its border. The United States, 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 U.S. troops, officials told Reuters.
The biggest strategic losers were Russia and Iran, which had intervened in the war’s early years to rescue Assad, helping him recapture most territory and all major cities. The front lines were frozen four years ago under a deal Russia and Iran reached with Turkey.
But Moscow’s focus on its 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.
Hezbollah had pulled all its remaining forces from Syria on Saturday, two Lebanese security sources said.
