Syrians across the world have been celebrating the shock ousting of longtime president Bashar al-Assad after he reportedly fled to Moscow just hours after the fall of his regime in Damascus.
In a stunning 12-day advance, opposition forces achieved what 13 years of war failed to do: ending more than half a century of the Assad family’s brutal rule. As they took control of cities including Homs, Aleppo and the capital, Damascus, regime forces largely fled or laid down arms. Russian state media reported that Assad was in Moscow and would be granted asylum.
There were gatherings held across the world and huge numbers of Syrians took to social media to talk about their joy, hope and anxieties after the fall of a dictatorship that crushed freedom of speech while ruling through fear.
Irish-Syrian writer Suad Aldarra called Assad’s ousting a “new era”.
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“We’ve been glued to the TV for the past few days with our hearts in our throats,” she said. “What happened was too scary and too fast, yet too mesmerising to look away. Our giant shared wound is starting to heal and the only sad thing right now is that it took that long to finally happen … We don’t know what the future is holding for us but we are ready to leave decades of injustice behind and start over again.”
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Assad (59) inherited the presidency from his father, Hafez, in 2000. Both men were infamous for their cruelty: while Hafez crushed a rebellion by overseeing the killing of between 10,000 and 40,000 Syrians in the city of Hama in 1982, the younger Assad’s response to the 2011 revolution saw mass bombing campaigns and chemical weapons attacks launched against his own people.
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says more than 14 million Syrians fled their homes since the beginning of the war, with the majority internally displaced and more than five million in neighbouring countries. Others escaped to Europe, and, even last year, Syrians were still the largest group applying for international protection in the EU, with more than 180,000 first-round applications.
The conquering Syrian opposition forces were led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a globally designated terrorist group. HTS emerged out of Jabhat al-Nusra, which declared allegiance to al-Qaeda, before splitting from them in 2016.
Since the shock offensive started, HTS’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has pledged to protect minorities and to build institutions, though many remain sceptical. In an interview with CNN last week, he said HTS was only “one detail of this dialogue, and it may dissolve at any time”. Instead, “we’re talking about a larger project, we’re talking about building Syria”.
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As they advanced across Syria, the opposition forces freed prisoners – some of whom had been incarcerated for decades – including from Sednaya prison, which was nicknamed the “human slaughterhouse”. The Syrian Network for Human Rights says more than 130,000 people had been arbitrarily arrested and detained since 2011, with more than 15,000 dying from torture. Videos of the releases were anxiously scanned by families, some of whom have no idea if their loved ones are still alive.
The International Commission on Missing Persons encouraged those on the ground to protect evidence that could result in “long-term justice”, while Amnesty International “urge[d] the international community to centre Syrian voices in this transition”.
In recent years, though many Arab countries moved towards normalising relations with Assad, his main military backers – Russia and Iran – became distracted by other crises.
The fall of Assad was welcomed by many western governments. Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign affairs chief, called it “a positive and long-awaited development”, though warned “the process of rebuilding Syria will be long and complicated and all parties must be ready to engage constructively”.
Despite the uncertainties ahead, for Irish-Syrian journalist Razan Ibraheem, Sunday was “the blessed day Syrians rolled up their sleeves to start rebuilding their homeland on the foundations of freedom, equality, justice and democracy”.
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