Following the fall of dictators Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the Arab Spring blossomed in Syria in March 2011 with anonymous graffiti in the southern city of Deraa: “Your turn, doctor,” on allusion to the president, Bashar al-Assad, a graduate in Medicine. Thirteen years of bloody civil war later and in just 11 days of lightning offensive, the rebel troops took Damascus, the country’s capital and center of power, this Sunday, without encountering resistance. Assad has escaped by plane to an unknown destination, according to two military sources cited by the Reuters agency. The Syrian regime has collapsed like a fragile house of cards and thousands of people gather on foot and by car in the city’s main square to celebrate, singing chants governed by the word “Freedom.”
The regime’s General Staff has notified officers of the end of the regime and has asked the remaining soldiers to surrender. Prime Minister Ghazi al Jalali has expressed his willingness to cooperate with the new leadership that Syrians now elect. The country is “free of Assad,” the rebels have announced.
Around the time they took the capital, a plane left Damascus airport, although in the afternoon the cancellation of all commercial flights had been announced. The aircraft was heading towards the coastal area, the Alawite fiefdom from which the El Asad family comes, but it made a sharp turn, lost altitude and disappeared from the radar in an area near Homs, taken this Saturday by the rebels, according to the websites. air traffic monitoring such as Flightradar24. It is unknown who was inside the plane.
Photo: Mahmoud Hasano (Reuters)
The videos recorded by mobile phones in the capital and spread on social networks show different emotions, such as joy at the release of the prisoners from the infamous Sednaya prison, famous for its torture and murder of political dissidents. “We celebrate with the Syrian people the news of the release of our prisoners, the end of the era of injustice in Sednaya prison,” the rebels added in their statement broadcast on television. In other videos, soldiers are seen silently taking off their uniforms, before the arrival of the rebels in Damascus, to remain in civilian clothes. At the capital’s airport, scenes of chaos have been recorded, with people running, bright screens marking the cancellation of flights and empty seats usually occupied by security personnel.
It is the culmination of the unstoppable advance at cruising speed launched since the 27th by the rebel forces, led by the fundamentalist Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), with roots in Al Qaeda but today detached from the terrorist group. 11 days ago, HTS launched its surprise offensive from the northwest province of Idlib, for years the last stronghold of these militias. He did so in coordination with the Syrian National Army (SNA), linked to Türkiye, from northwest of Aleppo.
The Minister of the Interior, Mohammed al Rahmun, assured this Saturday that a “very solid security and military cordon” protected the capital. The only thing the rebels have found when entering Damascus are empty streets. Some gunshots have been heard, but it is not clear if they came from clashes.
The rebels had been taking important cities (Aleppo, Hama…) in recent days with virtually no effort, and the revolt was taking hold in parallel in other areas of the country, with burnings and demolitions of busts and figures of El Assad, the father (Hafez) and son (Bachar) who ruled Syria for half a century with an iron fist. The regime’s soldiers fled, surrendered or retreated without hardly putting up a fight. Thousands of them have crossed into Iraq, some after walking up to 30 kilometers, and have surrendered their weapons there.
Late on Saturday, the rebels delivered another key blow, taking the country’s third city, the strategic Homs, cutting off communication between Damascus and the coastal provinces of Tartus and Latakia, the fiefdom of the Alawite minority – a branch of the Shia Islam—from which the El Asad family comes. Shortly before, both the countries that had come to their aid, such as Iran and Russia – which has a naval base in Tartus and an air base in Latakia – and those that had supported the rebels, such as Qatar and Turkey, joined together unusual to demand in a joint statement that he reach a political agreement to end the war.
That agreement would now involve seating the different political actors at the dialogue table. At the head of the main opposition forces is the so-called Syrian Interim Government, which includes the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces which, since the beginning of the revolts, in March 2011, has tried from Turkey to embody an alternative to Assad. However, despite the explicit support of the West during the first years of the conflict, especially the United States, France and the United Kingdom, this coalition, which has the ENS as a military ally, has significantly lost specific weight. The fall of the Assad regime does not also mean control by the rebel forces of the entire territory. The ENS has reported in recent hours that it has begun an offensive towards Manbij and the area controlled by the Kurdish militias in the northeast of the country.
