Bashar al-Assad reportedly fled Syria as rebels said they had taken Damascus | Syria

Bashar al-Assad reportedly fled Syria as rebels said they had taken Damascus | Syria

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is believed to have fled the country his family has ruled for 50 years as rebels said they had captured the capital after a lightning advance in just under two weeks.

Two senior Syrian officers told Reuters that Assad had fled Damascus but his destination was unknown, while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said he had left the country and departed from Damascus airport before army security forces left. The reports could not be independently verified.

The Syrian leader was publicly absent as militant Islamist insurgents led a sweeping offensive that began in a small enclave in northwestern Syria and appeared to have toppled Assad’s rule within 11 days.

Rebels said they had freed prisoners from Damascus’ notorious Sednaya prison, seen as a symbol of the Assad regime’s brutality, while a video from Damascus showed a man climbing a hospital sign to tear off a poster with Assad’s face. People climbed onto tanks in the capital’s central square.

In Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city that had been captured by insurgents just a week earlier, celebratory chants from mosque loudspeakers mixed with cheers and cheers that echoed across rooftops.

A portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is pictured with a broken frame at a Syrian regime’s political security department facility on the outskirts of downtown Hama. Photo: Omar Haj Kadour/AFP/Getty Images

The Assad family has ruled Syria since 1971, when Hafez al-Assad seized power in a military coup before his son Bashar took over the presidency in 2000.

Bashar al-Assad crushed a popular uprising against him in 2011, when Syrians first took to the streets in major cities to demand his ouster. What began as peaceful demonstrations later turned into a civil war that is estimated to have cost more than 300,000 lives in the decade of fighting.

To maintain control, Assad willingly turned the full power of the state against his own people, targeting civilians with air strikes and the use of chemical weapons, including the deadly nerve agent sarin.

“Today marks the end of the Assad family’s 54-year rule in Syria. “This is the only regime I have known all my life,” said doctor Zaher Sahloul, a Syrian-American doctor who organized medical missions in Syria, including hospitals in Aleppo that came under attack from Syrian and Russian airstrikes.

“I haven’t cried often in my adult life, but today I did. It was fourteen long years of horror. “This is our Berlin Wall moment,” he said.

Thanks to the intervention of Russia and Iran, Assad was able to survive almost fourteen years of unrest and civil war and was now at the head of a fragmented state. His rule over Syria seemed inevitable until an insurgent push led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group began to take control of major cities along a highway to Damascus.

As the uprising grew closer along the highway leading to the capital, rebel groups across southern Syria seized control of a strip of towns south of Damascus. Armed opposition groups approached the capital from three directions, while Syrian army officers retreated or fled. Video from Damascus showed soldiers quickly changing into civilian clothes on the streets of the capital before dispersing.

Prime Minister Mohammed Ghazi Jalali said in a video statement that the government was ready to “extend its hand” to the opposition and offered to work with an interim government.

People greet each other on a street in Damascus after rebels entered the Syrian capital. Photo: Louai Beshara/AFP/Getty Images

“I am in my house and I have not left it, and that is because I belong to this country,” Jalili said, without elaborating on Assad’s whereabouts.

In their own statement, the rebels promised a “new Syria” and said: “We are turning the page on the dark past and opening a new horizon for the future.”

As armed rebels swept through cities across the country, they tore up detention facilities where human rights groups estimated at least 100,000 people were missing or forcibly disappeared by the state since 2011.

This included the Sednaya military prison, a facility known to be the site of particularly brutal and degrading torture methods. A video circulated online showing dozens of people pouring into the streets surrounding the facility and running into the night.

Exiled Syrian human rights defender Ranim Badenjki of the Syria Campaign said she was crying with joy at the news of Assad’s departure because “it’s all too good to be true.”

“We always thought that Assad was lucky, that he was supported by strong allies and that world leaders rushed to shake his hand. But I am happy to see that the Syrians themselves have made this dream come true,” she said.

“I think of everyone we have lost in recent years who have been killed because they protested or wrote a post on social media. I think of the people who were tortured to death because they provided medicine or help to people in need. I think of my grandfather, who was tortured by Hafez Al-Assad,” she said.

Badenjki said her joy was also mixed with sadness, fearing the fate of some people missing or possibly lost in Syria’s labyrinthine detention centers.

“I want to be happy – but I also want to see my friend’s father alive; he was forcibly disappeared by the regime 11 years ago. I want to know that he is still alive and that he can be released. I want to know the fate of my missing cousin.”

Moayad Hokan, an exiled Syrian analyst, said the events of the past day were “unbelievable.”

“Just a few months ago we all assumed this day would never come,” he said. “Every time I tell myself that the Assad regime has fallen, I still can’t really believe it.”

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