The people of Syria have celebrated the fall of Bashar al-Assad and dared to dream of a better future after five decades of dynastic rule came to a sudden and unexpected end with the dictator fleeing to Moscow.
Crowds of people waved the Syrian revolutionary flag and pulled down statues and portraits of the president and his father, Hafez, while celebratory gunfire and car horns echoed around Damascus on Sunday as an astonishing rebel advance reached the capital.
In photos and videos of families reunited with loved ones long lost to the dark of the regime’s notorious prison system, people cried and clung to one another in disbelief at their newfound freedom. Others gleefully ransacked the presidential palace, marvelling at the abundance of luxury goods and designer cars in a country where 90% of the population lives below the poverty line.
People inside the presidential palace after Syrian rebels took over Damascus on Sunday. Photograph: Mohammed Al Rifai/EPA
Just hours before, it was announced that Assad had fled the capital in a private plane and that his regime had fallen. On Sunday evening, Russian state news agencies reported that the president and his family were in Moscow and had been given asylum on “humanitarian grounds”.
The major road linking the Lebanese city of Beirut to Damascus was lined with discarded army uniforms on Sunday after Syrian army soldiers discarded them upon realising their leader had abandoned them after 54 years of his family’s rule over Syria.
Syria erupted into the deadliest war of the 21st century, complicated by the interests of foreign powers, when the Assad regime began a brutal crackdown on peaceful pro-democracy Arab spring protests in 2011. Assad was saved by his Iranian and Russian allies from the advance of rebel forces backed by Qatar and Turkey in 2015, as well as the Lebanese group Hezbollah, forcing the opposition to withdraw to the north-west of the country.
The Assad axis and the Kurdish-led, US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, based in the north-east, fought to defeat Islamic State’s (IS) self-declared caliphate between 2014 and 2019, yet another theatre in the war that dragged in neighbouring Iraq.
At least 300,000 people have been killed and 100,000 disappeared since 2011. Half the country – about 12 million people – have been displaced from their homes, with about 5.4 million seeking shelter abroad.
The frontlines had for the most part stayed quiet since a ceasefire between the regime and opposition brokered in early 2020, but roared back to life less than two weeks ago in a push by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) on Aleppo, supposedly to stave off an expected regime offensive.
HTS, along with an umbrella of Turkish-backed militias known as the Syrian National Army (SNA), correctly assessed that Iran, Hezbollah and Russia were distracted by the wars with Israel and Ukraine: this time, no one came to save Assad, and loyalist Syrian forces fled or collapsed as the rebels moved south, taking city after city.
In a broadcast on state television from the capital on Sunday afternoon, a rebel spokesperson said: “To those that bet on us and to those who didn’t, to those one day who thought we were broken, we announce to you the victory of the great Syrian revolution after 13 years of patience and sacrifice.”
Damascus was still in a state of disbelief: smoke from battles the night before hung over the city like a fog. Windows shook from the occasional explosion, the target and the warring party unknown.
“I feel as if I am in a dream, I haven’t slept and I can’t absorb what’s happened,” Fatimeh, originally from north-west Idlib, long an opposition bastion, said as she approached Damascus after leaving Lebanon. “I am from Idlib,” she said once more, adding that for years she wouldn’t dare say where she was from when she was in Damascus, for fear that any affiliation with the area in part held by Islamist rebels would provoke retaliation.
It was still unclear by Sunday evening whether Latakia and Tartus, Assad’s coastal strongholds, had fallen to the rebels, and fighting was reported between Turkish-backed Arab rebels and Syrian Kurdish groups in Manbij, on the Turkish border.
Separately, US forces said they had conducted dozens of airstrikes on IS forces in central Syria, adding that they would not allow the jihadist group “to take advantage of the current situation to reconstitute”. US Central Command said it had struck more than 75 targets, without specifying where.
Reports also emerged that Israel had launched airstrikes on regime and Hezbollah weapons depots in Damascus and Syria’s southern countryside, apparently afraid that they would fall into the wrong hands. Israel also sent ground forces into areas of the Syria-controlled Golan Heights after the Syrian army’s withdrawal in order to deter rebel forces.
There are still many questions and challenges ahead for Syria’s future, as well as that of the wider region. The head of HTS, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who spearheaded the rebel offensive, announced that Syria’s prime minister, Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali, would stay on in Damascus to lead a transitional government in the coming months.
The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, hailed the end of Syria’s “dictatorial regime” and urged the country to rebuild.
“After 14 years of brutal war and the fall of the dictatorial regime, today the people of Syria can seize a historic opportunity to build a stable and peaceful future,” he said in a statement. “I reiterate my call for calm and avoiding violence at this sensitive time, while protecting the rights of all Syrians, without distinction.”
The UN Security Council will convene Monday afternoon for an emergency closed door meeting regarding Syria, at the request of Russia.
The US president, Joe Biden, called the Assad government’s fall a “fundamental act of justice” but also a “moment of risk and uncertainty”. The US would engage with Syrian stakeholders to establish a peaceful transition of power, he added.
Jolani was a late arrival to the capital: fighters from the southern province of Deraa, rather than HTS, were first to reach the gates of Damascus. HTS forces were preoccupied with securing Homs to the north, cutting off Assad’s last lifeline to Tartus and Latakia.
The leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, addresses the crowd at the capital’s Umayyad mosque on Sunday. Photograph: Abdulaziz Ketaz/AFP/Getty Images
The rebel leader was filmed at the historic Umayyad mosque in the old city of Damascus on Sunday afternoon in his first public appearance after the fall of the Assad government, a sight that was unthinkable just a few days before. To Syrians, the message was clear: Assad was gone, and rebels were in control.
Some residents expressed reservations about the Islamist group, wary of revolutionary factions claiming to represent the Syrian people – particularly Islamist ones – after years of bitter civil war. HTS and the SNA both have records of human rights abuses and authoritarian rule in areas under their control. But for most, caution was delayed for another day – today was for celebration.
“The feelings, they’re indescribable,” said Mohammed Ahmad, a resident of Kafr Halab, in northern Syria. “I am angry, I am happy and I am sad. But now that the regime has fallen, I can rest.”
∎