DAMASCUS: Syria’s Islamist rebel leader on Monday began discussions on transferring power, a day after his opposition alliance dramatically unseated president Bashar Assad following decades of brutal rule.
Assad fled Syria as the Islamist-led rebels swept into the capital, bringing a spectacular end on Sunday to five decades of brutal rule by his clan.
He oversaw a crackdown on a democracy movement that erupted in 2011, sparking a war that killed 500,000 people and forced half the country to flee their homes, millions of them finding refuge abroad.
Rebel leader Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani, now using his real name Ahmed Al-Sharaa, met with Prime Minister Mohammed Al-Jalali “to coordinate a transfer of power that guarantees the provision of services” to Syria’s people, said a statement posted on the rebels’ Telegram channels.
At the core of the system of rule that Assad inherited from his father Hafez was a brutal complex of prisons and detention centers used to eliminate dissent by those suspected of stepping out of the ruling Baath party’s line.
Thousands of Syrians gathered on Monday outside a jail synonymous with the worst atrocities of Assad’s rule to search for relatives, many of whom have spent years in the Saydnaya facility outside Damascus, AFP correspondents said.
Rescuers from the Syrian White Helmets group had earlier said they were looking for potential secret doors or basements in Saydnaya.
“I ran like crazy” to get to the prison, said Aida Taha, 65, searching for her brother who was arrested in 2012.
“But I found out that some of the prisoners were still in the basements. There are three or four floors underground.”
Crowds of freed prisoners wandered the streets of Damascus distinguishable by the marks of their ordeal: maimed by torture, weakened by illness and emaciated by hunger.
While Syria had been at war for over 13 years, the government’s collapse came in a matter of days in a lightning offensive led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS).
In central Damascus on Monday, despite all the uncertainty over the future, the joy was palpable.
“It’s indescribable. We never thought this nightmare would end. We are reborn,” Rim Ramadan, 49, a civil servant at the finance ministry, told AFP.
“We were afraid for 55 years of speaking, even at home. We used to say the walls had ears,” Ramadan said, as people honked car horns and rebels fired their guns into the air.
Syria’s parliament, formerly pro-Assad like the prime minister, said it supports “the will of the people to build a new Syria toward a better future governed by law and justice.”
The Baath party said it will support “a transitional phase in Syria aimed at defending the unity of the country.”
Syrian state television’s logo on the Telegram messaging app now displays the rebel flag.
During the offensive launched on November 27, rebels met little resistance as they wrested city after city from Assad’s control, opening the gates of prisons along the way and freeing thousands, many of them held on political charges.
Some, like Fadwa Mahmoud, whose husband and son are missing, posted calls for help on social media.
“Where are you, Maher and Abdel Aziz? it’s time for me to hear your news. Oh God, please come back,” wrote Mahmoud, herself a former detainee.
Rooted in Syria’s branch of Al-Qaeda, HTS is proscribed by Western governments as a terrorist group but has sought to soften its image in recent years.
Germany and France said in a statement they were ready to cooperate with Syria’s new leadership “on the basis of fundamental human rights and the protection of ethnic and religious minorities.”
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, in Saudi Arabia on Monday, said HTS must reject “terrorism and violence” before Britain can engage with the group designated “terrorist” by Britain.
Washington’s top diplomat, Antony Blinken, said the United States — with hundreds of troops in Syria as part of a coalition against Daesh group terrorists — is determined to prevent Daesh re-establishing safe havens there.
“We have a clear interest in doing what we can to avoid the fragmentation of Syria, mass migrations from Syria and, of course, the export of terrorism and extremism,” Blinken said.
The United Nations said that whoever ends up in power in Syria must hold the Assad regime to account. But how Assad might face justice remains unclear, especially after the Kremlin refused on Monday to confirm reports by Russian news agencies that he had fled to Moscow.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, however, said that if Russia granted asylum to Assad and his family, this would be a decision taken by President Vladimir Putin.
The Syrian embassy in Moscow raised the opposition’s flag, and the Kremlin said it would discuss the status of its bases in Syria with the new authorities.
Russia played an instrumental role in keeping Assad in power, directly intervening in the war starting in 2015 and providing air cover to the army during the rebellion.
Israel, which borders Syria, sent troops into a buffer zone on the east of the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights after Assad’s fall, in what Foreign Minister Gideon Saar described as a “limited and temporary step” for “security reasons.”
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor reported more than 100 Israeli air strikes to “destroy the former regime’s military capabilities.” These were against weapons depots, boats from the Assad government’s navy, and a research center that Western countries suspected of having links to chemical weapons production, the Observatory said.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah condemned the strikes late Monday, despite having been allied to Assad, and lambasted Israel for “occupying more land in the Golan Heights.”
In northern Syria, a Turkish drone strike on a Kurdish-held area killed 11 civilians, six of them children, according to the Britain-based Observatory.
