Newsman: Rebel forces in Syria overthrew President Bashar Al Assad and captured the capital of Damascus . The regime change of of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad led President Bashar flee to Moscow with his family. The collapse of Assad’s government ends a 24-year reign, the president having succeeded his father Hafez al-Assad in 2000. The Assad family had ruled Syria since 1971.
President Joe Biden was “closely monitoring the extraordinary events in Syria,” White House National Security Council spokesperson Sean Savett said in a statement.
Speaking at a defense conference earlier in the day, before rebels advanced into the capital, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the speed and scale of their rapid advance came, in part, because Assad’s chief backers — Iran, Russia and Hezbollah — had all been “weakened and distracted,” in recent months.
That has left Assad “basically naked,” Sullivan said at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California. “His forces are hollowed out.”
Early Sunday morning local time, the rebel military operations command for the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, or HTS, claimed the president was no longer in the capital, writing: “We declare the city of Damascus free of the tyrant Bashar al-Assad.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a Sunday morning statement that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “decided to leave the presidential post and left the country, giving instructions to transfer power peacefully.” Russia and Iran were the two most important foreign backers of Assad’s government. Assad’s whereabouts remain unknown.
Videos on social media showed Syrian forces abandoning their posts and melting away. There were also reports of Syrian military troops surrendering in other cities.
A few hours earlier, the rebel group first announced it had advanced directly into the capital city, reaching Sednaya prison, a government facility dubbed the “human slaughterhouse” by the human rights group Amnesty International.
“Our forces have begun entering the capital Damascus,” HTS said in one message. In a follow-up statement, the group said it was “the end of the era of injustice of Sednaya prison.”
Assad oversaw Syria’s slide into brutal civil war in 2011. His security forces sought to crush a mass protest movement demanding democratic reforms as the Arab Spring buffeted the region. The standoff devolved into a bloody civil war that split the nation on political, ethnic and religious lines. Assad retained nominal control of much of the country with Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah assistance. But last month’s surprise rebel offensive revealed the weakness of the regime as fighters surged out of rebel-held Idlib province in the northwest of the country and quickly seized multiple major cities on their way to Damascus.
The chaos allowed ISIS to rise in the Iraq-Syria border region and seize swaths of territory in the Levant region. The conflict also became a proxy battleground drawing in major world powers including the U.S., Russia, Iran, Israel and the Gulf states.
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The United Nations estimated some 307,000 civilian dead in Syria by the end of 2022, with 12 million people — more than half of the country’s 2011 population of around 22 million — forced from their homes, approximately 5.4 million of whom were still living as of late 2022.
The Syrian prime minister, Ghazi al-Jalali, released a video saying the government was ready to “extend a hand” to the opposition and hand over its functions. Rebel leaders have instructed their fighters not to approach Syrian government sites, an apparent attempt to quell any fears in the city and await a formal handover in the morning.
The insurgent group claimed credit for taking over four Syrian cities in 24 hours — Homs, Daraa, Queinetra and Sweida — in a series of rapid advances by opposition fighters met with little resistance from government forces.
Throughout the day Saturday, as the rebel forces were on the move, the Syrian army withdrew from much of southern Syria, leaving more areas of the country, including two provincial capitals, under the control of the rebels, according to the military and an opposition war monitor.
Earlier this week, government forces withdrew from Hama, Syria’s fourth largest city, which sits between the capital Damascus to the south and Aleppo — Syria’s second city — to the north.
Aleppo fell to the lightning rebel offensive on Nov. 29. Hama was one of the few major cities that did not fall to anti-government forces following the unsuccessful 2011 revolution against Assad’s rule.
