Bashir al-Assad gets asylum in Russia, rebels sweep through Syria
Syrians The Syria, Photo/omar Sanadiki) Fighters 2024 Celebrate Of Opposition Dec Arrival Damascus, Sunday 8, In (ap
Syria rebel fighters raced into Damascus unopposed on Sunday, 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.
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.