MONITORING (SW) – Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is believed to have fled the country his family has ruled over for 50 years as rebels said they had captured the capital after a lightning advance completed in just under two weeks.
Two senior Syrian officers told Reuters that Assad had fled Damascus, his destination unknown. The report could not be independently verified.
The Syrian leader had been publicly absent as Islamist militant insurgents spearheaded a sweeping offensive that began in a small enclave in northwestern Syria, and within eleven days appeared to have toppled Assad’s rule. ‘He has come out an old man’: joy and grief as loved ones released from Assad prisons, reported Guardian.
In their first announcement on state television following the offensive that took the world by surprise, rebels said they had ended Assad’s 24-year authoritarian rule. A group of people were shown at the state television news studio, with one reading a statement from the “Damascus Conquest operations room” announcing “the liberation of the city of Damascus and the fall of the tyrant Bashar al-Assad and the release of all the unjustly detained from the regime prisons”, calling on fighters and citizens to safeguard the “property of the free Syrian state”.
Syria’s army command notified officers on Sunday that Assad’s regime had ended, a Syrian officer who was informed of the move told Reuters. But the Syrian army later said it was continuing operations against “terrorist groups” in the towns of Hama and Homs and Deraa countryside.
Rebels said they had freed prisoners from Damascus’ notorious Sednaya prison, regarded as a symbol of the Assad regime’s brutality, while video from Damascus showed a man climbing on top of a hospital sign to tear down a poster of Assad’s face. In the capital’s central square, people climbed on top of tank and cheered as they trampled on a toppled statue of President Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez, AFPTV images showed.
In Syria’s second city of Aleppo, claimed by insurgent forces just one a week prior, celebratory singing broadcast from the speakers of mosques was interspersed with the sound of ululating and cheering ringing out across the rooftops.
The Assad family have ruled Syria since 1971 when Hafez al-Assad seized power in a military coup, before his son Bashar inherited the presidency in 2000. Their control of the country was enforced through a vast security state, crushing dissent through a broad network of detention centres and government surveillance.
Bashar al-Assad suppressed a popular uprising against him in 2011, when Syrians first took to the streets of major cities to demand his overthrow. What began as peaceful demonstrations later spilled over into a civil war that is estimated to have killed more than 300,000 people in ten years of fighting.
Assad willingly turned the full might of the state on his own people in order to maintain control, including pummelling the civilian population with airstrikes and the use of chemical weapons including the deadly nerve agent sarin.
Intervention from Russia and Iran had allowed Assad to survive almost fourteen years of unrest and civil strife, leaving him in charge of a fractured state. His rule over Syria had appeared inevitable, until an insurgent advance led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham began to seize control of major towns along a highway leading to Damascus.
As the insurgency drew closer along the highway that leads to the capital, rebel groups across southern Syria took control of a swath of towns south of Damascus. Armed opposition groups closed in on the capital from three directions as Syrian army officers retreated, or fled. Video from Damascus showed soldiers rapidly changing into civilian clothes on the streets of the capital before dispersing.
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