After the fall of dictators Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the Arab Spring flourished in Syria in March 2011 with anonymous graffiti in the city of Deraa: “Your turn has come, doctor,” in allusion to the president, Bachar El Asad, a graduate in Medicine. Thirteen years of bloody civil war later and in just 11 days of lightning offensive that have turned it around, the rebel troops have taken Damascus this Sunday without encountering resistance and “the doctor” has escaped by plane to an unknown destination, according to two sources military 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 main square to celebrate, with chants like “Freedom.” The General Staff has notified officers of the end of the regime and asked remaining soldiers to surrender, and Prime Minister Ghazi al Jalali has shown 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. It 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 map near Homs, taken this Saturday by the rebels, according to traffic monitoring pages. air. It is unknown who was inside.
Photo: Mahmoud Hasano (Reuters)
Videos recorded by mobile phones in Damascus show different emotions, such as joy at the release of prisoners from the infamous Sedauya prison, famous for its torture and murder of political dissidents. In others, soldiers are seen silently taking off their uniforms, before the arrival of the rebels, to remain in civilian clothes. At the Damascus airport, the scenes are one of chaos, with people running, lights marking the cancellation of flights and empty seats usually occupied by security personnel.
It is the culmination of the unstoppable advance at cruising speed of the rebel forces, led by the fundamentalist Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), since the 27th, when they launched their surprise offensive from Idlib, in the northwest and last rebel stronghold. 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 upon entering 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 the El Asads, 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 surrendered their weapons.
Late on Saturday, the rebels delivered another key blow, taking the country’s third city, the strategic Homs, cutting off communication between Damascus and the Alawite coastal area, where the Assads come from and Moscow has a maritime base and another air. Shortly before, both the countries that had come to his aid, such as Iran and Russia, and those that had supported the rebels, such as Qatar and Turkey, came together in an unusual way to demand that he reach a political agreement in a joint statement to put end to the war.
