Following the fall of dictators Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the Arab Spring blossomed in Syria in March 2011 with anonymous graffiti in the southern city of Deraa: “Your turn, doctor,” on allusion to the president, Bachar el Assad, a graduate in Medicine. Thirteen years of bloody civil war later and in just 11 days of lightning offensive, the rebel troops, the country’s capital and center of power, without encountering resistance. Assad has escaped by plane to an unknown destination, according to two military sources cited by the Reuters agency. The Syrian regime has collapsed like a fragile house of cards and thousands of people gather on foot and by car in the city’s main square to celebrate, singing chants governed by the word “Freedom.”
The regime’s General Staff has notified officers of the end of the regime and has asked the remaining soldiers to surrender. Prime Minister Ghazi al Jalali has expressed his willingness to cooperate with the new leadership that Syrians now elect. The country is “free of Assad,” the rebels have announced.
Around the time they took the capital, a plane left Damascus airport, although in the afternoon the cancellation of all commercial flights had been announced. The aircraft was heading towards the coastal area, the Alawite fiefdom from which the El Asad family comes, but it made a sharp turn, lost altitude and disappeared from the radar in an area near Homs, according to air traffic monitoring websites such as Flightradar24. It is unknown who was inside the plane.
Photo: Mahmoud Hasano (Reuters)
The videos recorded by mobile phones in the capital and spread on social networks show different emotions, such as joy at the release of the prisoners from the infamous Sednaya prison, famous for its torture and murder of political dissidents. “We celebrate with the Syrian people the news of the release of our prisoners, the end of the era of injustice in Sednaya prison,” the rebels added in their statement broadcast on television. In other videos, soldiers are seen silently taking off their uniforms, before the arrival of the rebels in Damascus, to remain in civilian clothes. At the capital’s airport, scenes of chaos have been recorded, with people running, bright screens marking the cancellation of flights and empty seats usually occupied by security personnel.
It is the culmination of the unstoppable advance at cruising speed launched since the 27th by the rebel forces, with roots in Al Qaeda but today detached from the terrorist group. 11 days ago they launched their surprise offensive from the province of Idlib, in the northwest, for years the last stronghold of these militias. The Minister of the Interior, Mohammed al Rahmun, assured this Saturday that a “very solid security and military cordon” protected the capital. The only thing the rebels have found when entering Damascus are empty streets. Some gunshots have been heard, but it is not clear if they came from clashes.
The rebels had been effortlessly taking important cities (Aleppo, Hama…) and the revolt was taking place in parallel in other areas of the country, with burnings and demolitions of busts and figures of El Asad, the father (Hafez) and son ( Bashar) who ruled Syria for half a century with an iron fist. The regime’s soldiers fled, surrendered or retreated without hardly putting up a fight. Thousands of them have crossed into Iraq, some after walking up to 30 kilometers, and have surrendered their weapons there.
Late on Saturday, the rebels delivered another key blow, taking the country’s third city, cutting off communication between Damascus and the coastal provinces of Tartous and Latakia, the fiefdom of the Alawite minority – a branch of Shiite Islam – of the which the El Asad family comes from. Shortly before, both the countries that had come to their aid, such as Iran and Russia – which has a naval base in Tartus and an air base in Latakia – and those that had supported the rebels, such as Qatar and Turkey, joined together unusual to demand in a joint statement that he reach a political agreement to end the war.
