Photo credit: NPR
The Syrian government fell early Sunday in a stunning end to the 50-year rule of the Assad family after a sudden rebel offensive sprinted across government-held territory and entered the capital in 10 days.
AP reports that the man who read the statement said the Operations Room To Conquer Damascus, an opposition group, called on all opposition fighters and citizens to preserve state institutions of “the free Syrian state.”
The statement emerged hours after the Head of a Syrian opposition war monitor said Assad had left the country for an undisclosed location, fleeing ahead of insurgents who said they had entered Damascus following a remarkably swift advance across the country.
The Prime Minister Mohammed Ghazi Jalali said the government was ready to “extend its hand” to the opposition and turn its functions over to a transitional government.
He said, “I am in my house and \i have not left, and this is because of my belonging to this country.”
Rami Abdurrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told The Associated Press that Assad took a flight from Damascus on Sunday.
As daylight broke over Damascus, crowds gathered to pray in tje city’s mosques and to celebrate in the squares, canting”God is great.” People also chanted anti-Assad slogans and honked car horns. In some areas, celebratory gunshots rang out.
Soldiers and police left their posts while looters bt=roke into the headquarters of the military.
A lawyer Omar Daher said, “My feelings are indescribable. After the fear that he (Assad)and his father made us live in for many years, and the panic and state of terror that I was living in,I can’t believe it.”
Ghazal al-Sharif said, “Damn hos soul and the soul of the entire Assad family. It is the prayer of every oppressed person and God answered it today. We thought we would never see it, but thank God, we saw it.”
The [police headquarters was abandoned. An army checkpoint was also abandoned with uniforms discarded on the ground under a poster of Assad’s face. Footage broadcast on opposition-linked media showed a tank in one of the capital’s central squares.
The UN’s special envoy fir Syria, Geir Pedersen, called Saturday for urgen talks in Geneva to ensure an “orderly political transition.”
In Damascus, people rushed back to stock up on supplies. Thousands went to Syria’s border with Lebanon, trying to leave the country, Lebanese border officials closed the main Masnaa border crossing late Saturday, leaving many stuck waiting.
Many shops in the capital were shuttered and those still open ran out of staples such as sugar. Some were selling items at three times the normal price.
CNN quotes the Russian state media, TASS as stating “Assad and his family have arrived in Moscow. Russia, for humanitarian reasons, Has granted them asylum.”
