DAMASCUS: Damascus stirred back to life on Monday at the start of a hopeful era after rebels seized the capital and President Bashar al Assad fled the country, following 13 years of civil war and more than 50 years of his family's brutal rule. Heavy traffic returned to the streets and people ventured out after a nighttime curfew, but most shops remained shut. Rebels milled about in the centre.
Firdous Omar, from Idlib in the nortwest, among fighters in central Umayyad Square, said he had been battling the government since 2011 and was now looking forward to laying down his weapon and returning to his job as a farmer. "We had a purpose and a goal and now we are done with it. We want the state and security forces to be in charge."
The lightning advance of a group alliance was a generational turning point for the Middle East. It ends a war that killed thousands of people, caused one of the biggest refugee crises of modern times and left cities bombed to rubble, swathes of countryside depopulated and the economy hollowed out by global sanctions. Millions of refugees could finally go home from camps across Türkiye, Lebanon and Jordan.
The group's leader, Ahmed al Sharaa, better known as Abu Mohammed al Golani, vowed to rebuild Syria. "A new history, my brothers, is being written in the entire region after this great victory," he told a huge crowd at ancient Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. With hard work Syria would be "a beacon for the Islamic nation". Assad's prime minister, Mohammed Jalali, said he would be willing to meet with Golani and was ready to provide documents and assistance for the transfer of power. The fate of Syria's army would be "left to the brothers who will take over the management of the country's affairs", he said. "What concerns us today is the continuation of services for Syrians."
On Sunday, elated inmates poured out of jails. Reunited families wept in joy. Newly freed prisoners were filmed running through the Damascus streets holding up their hands to show how many years they had been in prison. The White Helmets rescue organisation said it had dispatched emergency teams to search for hidden underground cells still believed to hold detainees. One of the final areas to fall to the rebels was the Mediterranean coast.
Looting took place in the coastal city of Latakia on Sunday but had subsided on Monday, residents said, with few people in the streets and shortages of fuel and bread. Two residents said that so far the situation had panned out better than they had expected. One said a friend had been visited at home by rebel fighters who told him to hand over any weapons he had, which he did. Near Latakia, rebels had yet to enter the Assad family’s ancestral village of Qardaha, site of a huge mausoleum for Assad's father who took power in the 1960s. — Reuters
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