Syrians celebrate Assad’s fall as his whereabouts remain unknown
Damascus: Crowds gathered in Syria’s Damascus on Sunday to celebrate the fall of Bashar Assad’s government with chants, prayers and the occasional gunfire
after opposition fighters entered the capital following a stunning advance.
Rami Abdurrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Syrian opposition war monitor, said Assad took a flight from Damascus and left early Sunday.
There was no immediate official statement from the Syrian government and Assad’s whereabouts remain unknown.
It was the first time opposition forces had reached Damascus since 2018 when Syrian troops recaptured areas on the outskirts of the capital following a yearslong siege.
The night before, opposition forces had taken the central city of Homs, Syria’s third largest, as government forces abandoned it.
The rapidly developing events have shaken the region. Lebanon said it was closing all its land border crossings with Syria except for one that links Beirut with Damascus. Jordan closed a border crossing with Syria, too.
American military presence will continue in eastern Syria
Daniel B Shapiro, a deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, said the US presence was “solely to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS and has nothing to do with other aspects of this conflict,” he said, using an acronym for the Islamic State group.
“We call on all parties in Syria to protect civilians, particularly those from Syria’s minority communities to respect international military norms and to work to achieve a resolution to include the political settlement,” Shapiro said.
“Multiple actors in this conflict have a terrible track record to include Assad’s horrific crimes, Russia’s indiscriminate aerial bomb bombardment, Iranian-back militia
involvement and the atrocities of ISIS.”
Shapiro, however, was careful not to directly say Assad had been deposed by the insurgents. “If confirmed no one should shed any tears over the Assad regime,” he added.
Yemeni government minister hails Assad’s fall as a blow to Iran
Moammar al-Eryani, Information Minister of Yemen’s internationally recognised government, said Iran’s “expansionist project, which used sectarianmilitias
as tools to complete the Persian Crescent, sow chaos, undermine the sovereignty of states ... is collapsing” as rebel groups took over the Syrian capital, Damascus.
He also expressed hope that Yemenis would drive out the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who seized the capital, Sanaa, and much of the country’s north in 2014.
“The Yemenis, with their wisdom and steadfastness, are able to thwart the plans of Iran and its
Houthi tool to violate their land and tamper with their destiny, just as those plans failed in Syria and Lebanon,” he wrote social media platform X.
Video shows Syrian Prime Minister escorted by armed men
A video shared on Syrian opposition media showed a group of armed men escorting Syrian Prime Minister Mohammed Ghazi Jalali out of his office and to the Four Seasons hotel on Sunday.
Meanwhile, Syrians have crowded the Lebanese side of the Masnaa border crossing Sunday waiting to cross back into Syria after the fall of Bashar Assad.
Lebanon’s General Security closed the crossing overnight but reopened it in the morning, allowing Syrians to freely cross out of Lebanon while restricting their entry from Syria into the country.
Lebanese officials have long complained about the country’s population of refugees — the largest per capita in the world. As of Sept 30, some 768,353 Syrian refugees were registered with the UN refugee agency in Lebanon, with hundreds of thousands more believed to be unregistered.
Many fled Lebanon after the escalation of the conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in late September, but others crossed back from Syria into Lebanon in recent days as insurgents marched toward Damascus.
