With Assad ousted, new era starts in Syria as world watches

DAMASCUS – Damascus stirred back to life on Dec 9 at the start of a hopeful but uncertain era after rebels seized the capital Damascus and President Bashar al-Assad

fled to Russia,

ending a 13-year civil war and more than 50 years of his family’s brutal rule.

Heavy traffic returned to the streets and people ventured out after the suspension of a night-time curfew, but most shops remained shut. Rebels milled about in the city centre.

Main rebel commander Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, met Mr Assad’s Prime Minister Mohammed Jalali and Vice-President Faisal Mekdad overnight to discuss arrangements for a transitional government, a source familiar with the discussions told Reuters.

Al Jazeera television reported that the transitional authority would be headed by Mr Mohamed Al-Bashir, who ran the administration in a small pocket of rebel-held territory before the 12-day

lightning offensive that swept into Damascus.

Syria’s banks were scheduled to reopen on Dec 10 and staff had been asked to return to offices, according to a Syrian central bank source and two commercial bankers. Syria’s currency would continue to be used, they said.

Fighters from the remote countryside milled about in the capital, clustering in the central Umayyad Square before Damascus’s great 8th-century mosque.

“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,” said Mr Firdous Omar, who said he had been battling the Assad government since 2011 and was now looking forward to laying down his weapon and returning to his job as a farmer in provincial Idlib.

The advance of a militia alliance spearheaded by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former Al-Qaeda affiliate, was a generational turning point for the Middle East.

It ends a war that killed hundreds of 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 Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.

Mr Assad’s fall wipes out one of the main bastions from which Iran and Russia wielded power across the region. Turkey, long aligned with Mr Assad’s foes, emerges strengthened, while Israel hailed the blow it dealt to the ousted leader’s Iran-backed allies.

The Arab world faces the challenge of reintegrating one of the Middle East’s central states, while containing the militant Sunni Islam sect that underpinned the anti-Assad revolt but has also metastasised into the horrific sectarian violence of the ISIS terror group.

HTS is still designated a terrorist group by the US, Turkey and the United Nations, although it has spent years trying to soften its image to reassure international governments and minority groups within Syria.

Now to rebuild

The group’s leader Jolani, who spent years in US custody as an insurgent in Iraq but broke with Al-Qaeda and ISIS to align his movement with more mainstream anti-Assad groups, has 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 on Dec 8 at Damascus’ Umayyad Mosque. With hard work, Syria would be “a beacon for the Islamic nation”.

Prime Minister Jalali told Sky New Arabia he 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.”

The Assad police state was known as one of the harshest in the Middle East, with hundreds of thousands of political prisoners held in horrible conditions.

On Dec 8, 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 jail.

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, heartland of Mr Assad’s Alawite sect and site of Russia’s naval base.

Looting took place in the coastal city of Latakia on Dec 8 but subsided the next day, residents said, with few people in the streets and shortages of fuel and bread.

Two Alawite residents said that so far, the situation had panned out better than they had expected, seemingly without sectarian retribution against the group. 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 Mr Assad’s father, who took power in the 1960s. A resident said all senior figures tied to Mr Assad and his rule had left. “Only the poor are left here. The rich guys and thieves are gone.”

The Kremlin said it was too early to know the future of Russia’s military bases in Syria, but it would discuss the issue with the new authorities.

Israel, US launch strikes

Israel said Mr Assad’s fall was a direct consequence of its punishing assault on Iran’s Lebanese ally Hezbollah, which had propped up Mr Assad for years but had been decimated since September by an Israeli air and ground campaign.

Since the rebels entered Damascus, Israel has struck sites in Syria. Israeli officials said those air strikes would carry on for days, to keep Mr Assad’s former arsenal out of hostile hands.

The Israeli military would “destroy heavy strategic weapons throughout Syria, including surface-to-air missiles, air defence systems, surface-to-surface missiles, cruise missiles, long-range rockets and coastal missiles”, Defence Minister Israel Katz said.

Israel has also pushed tanks over the border into a demilitarised buffer zone. On Dec 9, the Israeli military published photos of its forces in the Mount Hermon border area.

The US, which has 900 soldiers on the ground in Syria operating alongside Kurdish-led forces in the east, said its forces hit around 75 targets in air strikes against ISIS camps and operatives on Dec 8.

“There’s a potential that elements in the area, such as ISIS, could try to take advantage of this opportunity and regain capability... Those strikes were focused on those cells,” US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin said during a visit to Japan.

The US-backed Kurdish forces have clashed with Turkey-backed rebels in the north. A video, verified by Reuters, showed rebels entering the town of Manbij, captured from the Kurdish forces on Dec 9. REUTERS