Syrian President Assad’s Government Said To Fall To Rebels
Trump took to social media to say that the US should “have nothing to do with” the developments in Syria. “This is not our fight,” he said. “Let it play out. Do not get involved
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has fled Damascus, according to multiple reports, after rebel forces entered the capital following a stunning territorial advance over a few days.
The toppling of the longtime ruler is sending shockwaves through the Middle East and will be a major blow to Russia and Iran, his main foreign backers.
Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, which has led the push to oust Assad and his government, said it entered Damascus on Saturday evening and captured the key city of Homs — about 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of the capital — around the same time. Other areas of the country, including in the north near the Turkish border and in the south, have been captured by different groups.
There were reports of Syrians in Damascus celebrating the downfall of the widely despised regime.
HTS’s leader, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, called on all of the Syrian government’s forces in the capital to stand down. Al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani, said Prime Minister Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali will remain in his role until there’s an official handover.
Assad’s whereabouts are still unknown. He left the country for an undisclosed location, the Associated Press reported, citing Rami Abdurrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Agence France-Presse reported rebels as saying Assad had “fled,” while Reuters cited two army officers as saying the leader had flown out of Damascus.
The 59-year-old, who took over from his father Hafez in 2000, made a last-ditch attempt to remain in power, including indirect diplomatic overtures to the US and President-elect Donald Trump, Bloomberg reported on Saturday. In a sign of how weak his military position was, he ordered his army to fall back on Damascus, essentially ceding much of the country, including Homs, to the insurgents.
Trump took to social media to say that the US should “have nothing to do with” the developments in Syria. “This is not our fight,” he said. “Let it play out. Do not get involved!”
Assad lost large swaths of the northwest of the country in late November as opposition fighters made a sudden advance out of Idlib province. They first captured Aleppo, one of the biggest cities in Syria, and then advanced on Hama.
The rapid collapse of Syria’s government has taken Russia, Iran, the US and Israel, which borders Syria, by surprise. In 2015, Russia and Iran came to Assad’s aid and helped turn the tide in Syria’s war — which began four years earlier — in his favor.
This time both Tehran and Moscow, which has a naval base at the Syrian port of Tartus, have been stretched by conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. While Iran said it would send troops to Syria if Assad requested it and tried to drum up support for him among Arab states, it was ultimately unwilling or unable to do that.
Moreover, Tehran’s most powerful proxy militia group, Lebanon-based Hezbollah, has been hugely degraded since September by war with Israel. Its fighters were crucial to helping Assad stay in power from early in the civil war.
The Syrian conflict has left between 300,000 to 500,000 people dead and displaced more than 10 million, with many of them fleeing abroad, according to United Nations agencies and Syrian organizations.
