Syrians awakened on Monday to a hopeful if dangerous future, after rebels seized the capital Damascus and President Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, ending a 13-year civil war and extra than 50 years of his family’s brutal rule.
The lightning attain of a militia alliance spearheaded by Hayat al-Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a outdated al-Qaeda affiliate, marked one in every of the greatest turning strategies for the Heart East in generations. Assad’s topple worn out a bastion from which Iran and Russia exercised affect at some stage in the Arab world.
Moscow gave asylum to Assad and his family, Russian media reported and Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s ambassador to world organizations in Vienna, said on his Telegram channel on Sunday.
Worldwide governments welcomed the tip of the Assads’ autocratic government, as they sought to rob inventory of a contemporary-look Heart East.
US President Joe Biden said Syria is in a period of threat and uncertainty, and it is some distance the first time in years that neither Russia, Iran nor the Hezbollah militant group held an influential feature there.
HTS is restful designated as a terrorist neighborhood by the US, Turkey and the United Nations, despite the truth that it has spent years attempting to soften its image to reassure world governments and minority groups within Syria.
Japan’s chief cupboard secretary, Yoshimasa Hayashi, said on Monday Tokyo used to be paying shut consideration to trends in Syria.
Assad’s overthrow limits Iran’s means to unfold weapons to its allies and should always restful value Russia its Mediterranean naval indecent. It’ll additionally enable hundreds and hundreds of refugees scattered for extra than a decade in camps at some stage in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan to at final return house.
NOW TO REBUILD
The rebels face a large project of rebuilding and working a rustic after a war that left an entire bunch of hundreds pointless, cities pounded to dirt and an economy hollowed by world sanctions. Syria will need billions of bucks in serve.
“A brand contemporary ancient past, my brothers, is being written in the entire self-discipline after this noteworthy victory,” said Ahmed al-Sharaa, higher identified as Abu Mohammed al-Golani, the top of HTS.
Talking to a giant crowd on Sunday at Damascus’ Umayyad Mosque, a location of mammoth non secular significance, Golani said with laborious work Syria would be “a beacon for the Islamic nation.”
The Assad police explain used to be identified as one in every of the cruelest in the Heart East with an entire bunch of hundreds of political prisoners held in horrifying prerequisites.
On Sunday, contented nonetheless most continuously pressured inmates poured out of jails. Reunited households wept in joy. Newly freed prisoners were filmed working by the Damascus streets protecting up their fingers to demonstrate how decades they’d been in jail.
The White Helmets rescue group said it had dispatched emergency teams to stare hidden underground cells restful believed to withhold detainees.
With a curfew declared by the rebels, Damascus used to be calm in a single day, with roads leading into the metropolis mostly empty. One shopping centre had been looted on Sunday, and a few folk rampaged interior Assad’s presidential location, leaving carrying furniture.
The riot coalition said it used to be working to halt the switch of vitality to a transitional governing physique with government powers, relating to building “a Syria together.”
Golani is a Sunni Muslim, which is the bulk in Syria, nonetheless the country is house to a mammoth different of non secular sects, including Christians and Assad’s fellow Alawites, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.
WORLD STUNNED
The tempo of events petrified world capitals and raised concerns about extra regional instability on prime of the Gaza war, Israel’s assaults on Lebanon and tensions between Israel and Iran.
The US Central Expose said its forces carried out dozens of airstrikes focusing on identified Islamic Remark camps and operatives in central Syria on Sunday.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said on Sunday he spoke with Turkish Minister of Nationwide Defense Yasar Guler, emphasizing the importance of shielding civilians and that the United States is looking at closely.
All the method by Syria’s civil war, which erupted in 2011 as an uprising against Assad, his forces and their Russian allies bombed cities to rubble. The refugee crisis at some stage in the Heart East used to be one in every of the greatest of in style cases and precipitated a political reckoning in Europe when one million folk arrived in 2015.
In contemporary years, Turkey had backed some rebels in a diminutive redoubt in the northwest and alongside its border. The USA, which has about 900 troops in Syria, backed a Kurdish-led alliance that fought Islamic Remark jihadists from 2014-2017.
