Peter Beaumont
The Guardian / December 10, 2024
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rebels free prisoners of the former president, Bashar al-Assad, who has fled to Russia
Bombing raids have hit sites across Syria as regional actors in the Middle East scrambled to defend their interests in the country after the sudden fall of its president, Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Moscow.
As rebels led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) freed regime prisoners, including from the notorious Sednaya jail – often referred to as the “human slaughterhouse” – Israel, Turkey and the US carried out military action and Assad’s former backers in Russia and Iran also engaged in efforts to shape a future Syria.
With events moving at an often dizzying pace, the rebels who toppled Assad announced on Telegram that they were issuing a general amnesty for regime military conscripts, as former Syrian prime minister Mohammed al-Jalali told Al-Arabiya television he had agreed to hand over power to the rebel “salvation government”.
The US has struck targets associated with Islamic State (IS) in central Syria, while Turkey has attacked US-backed Kurdish forces. A deal for the Kurdish forces to withdraw from the northern city of Manbij was reportedly struck on Monday after an advance by Turkish-backed Syrian National Army.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken warned on Monday that IS would try to use this period to re-establish capabilities in Syria. Blinken added that statements by rebel leaders about building inclusive governance were welcome but that the real measure would be in the action they take.
“History shows how quickly moments of promise can descend into conflict and violence. IS will try to use this period to re-establish its capabilities, to create safe havens. As our precision strikes over the weekend demonstrate, we are determined not to let that happen.”
Israel also confirmed that it had sent forces into the buffer zone beyond the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and into former Syrian military positions on Mount Hermon in what it described as a “temporary measure”.
It said it would continue with airstrikes on former regime sites associated with missiles and chemical weapons, and with airstrikes reported on Monday evening at an air defence installation near the port of Latakia.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said on Tuesday that Israel had “destroyed the most important military sites in Syria” with about 250 airstrikes since the fall of the Assad regime. The strikes had targeted airports and warehouses, aircraft squadrons, radars, military signal stations, and multiple weapons and ammunition depots over the past 48 hours, it said.
On the sidelines of a closed door UN security council meeting on Monday, Syria’s UN ambassador, Koussay Aldahhak, said: “We are with the Syrian people”, and that its embassies and missions had received instructions to continue in their role while they await a new government.
“Syria now is witnessing a new era of change, a new historical phase of its history and Syrians are looking forward for establishing a state of freedom, equality, rule of law, democracy,” the Syrian envoy said. “We will join efforts to rebuild our country, to rebuild what was destroyed, and to rebuild the future, a better future of Syria for all Syrians.”
The security council appeared united on the need to preserve Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and will work on a joint statement in the coming days, US and Russian diplomats said after the meeting.
“No one expected the Syrian forces to fall like a house of cards, and it took a lot of people by surprise,” US ambassador to the UN Robert Wood said. “It’s a very fluid situation, but just about everyone spoke about the need for Syria’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, independence to be respected, concern about the humanitarian situation.”
With sharply competing agendas, Turkey and Israel have already laid out what they say are their red lines regarding Syria, with Turkey saying it would not accept the Kurdish PKK or Islamic State benefiting from the new situation, even as it promised to help Syrian migrants in Turkey, which hosts 3 million refugees, to return.
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, however insisted that Turkey has no interest in expanding its reach into Syria, despite its backing of the Syrian rebels.
“Turkey has no eye on the territory of any other country,” said Erdoğan. “The only aim for our cross-border operations is to save our homeland from the terrorist attacks,” he added, referring to raids targeting the Kurdish-led YPG, based in northeastern Syria.
Turkey’s foreign minister and the UN secretary general, António Guterres, also discussed the transition and rebuilding in Syria on Monday, a Turkish foreign ministry source said, as hundreds of Syrian refugees had gathered at two border crossings in southern Turkey hoping to return home.
For its part, justifying Israel’s latest strikes on sites in Syria, Gideon Saar, the country’s foreign minister, said it struck suspected chemical weapons sites and long-range rockets in Syria in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of hostile actors.
Saar said on Monday that “the only interest we have is the security of Israel and its citizens”.
Iran, which backed Assad in the country’s brutal civil war in order to preserve its land corridor to Hezbollah in Lebanon, also indicated that it had quickly opened a direct line of communication with the rebels who ousted Assad, in an attempt to “prevent a hostile trajectory” between the countries.
Hours after Assad’s fall on Sunday morning, Iran said it expected relations with Damascus to continue based on the two countries’ “far-sighted and wise approach” and called for the establishment of an inclusive government representing all segments of Syrian society.
And in its own warning, the Russian news agency Interfax, citing a lawmaker, said Moscow would respond harshly to any attack on its military bases in Syria.
The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, confirmed on Monday that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, had personally granted asylum to Assad. He refused to comment on Assad’s specific whereabouts and said Putin was not planning to meet him.
With the lightning advance of a militia alliance led by HTS, a former Al-Qaida affiliate, marking a dramatic transformation in the dynamics of the Middle East, the fall of Assad has removed a bastion from which Iran and Russia had exercised influence across the Arab world.
Joe Biden, the US president, said Syria was in a period of risk and uncertainty, and it was the first time in years that neither Russia, Iran nor the Hezbollah militant organisation had held an influential role there.
The rebels face a monumental task of rebuilding and running a country after a war that left hundreds of thousands dead, cities pounded to dust and an economy hollowed out by global sanctions. Syria will need billions of dollars in aid.
“A new history, my brothers, is being written in the entire region after this great victory,” said Ahmed al-Sharaa, better known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the head of HTS.
Jolani, speaking to a huge crowd on Sunday at Damascus’s Umayyad Mosque, a place of enormous religious significance, said with hard work Syria would be “a beacon for the Islamic nation”.
While Jolani has become the face of the rebellion, experts warn that in any meaningfully stable transition he will need to find ways to accommodate rival anti-Assad forces as well as former supporters of the Assad, viewed as a considerable task.
On Tuesday, he said that the incoming authorities would announce a list of former senior officials “involved in torturing the Syrian people”.
“We will offer rewards to anyone who provides information about senior army and security officers involved in war crimes,” he said in a statement on Telegram.
The Assad regime, which had lasted since 1971, was known as one of the harshest in the Middle East, with hundreds of thousands of political prisoners held in horrifying conditions and huge numbers murdered in mass executions during the civil war.
There has also been mounting concern beyond Israel about safeguarding the former regime’s chemical weapons. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a UN watchdog, told the Syrian authorities on Monday to make sure suspected stockpiles were safe.
Syria agreed to join the OPCW in 2013, shortly after an alleged chemical gas attack killed more than 1,400 people near Damascus, the watchdog said: “To date … the Syrian declaration of its chemical weapons programme still cannot be considered as accurate and complete.”
Peter Beaumont is a senior international reporter
