In Damascus, life resumes without Assad

People walk past anti government forces securing the Syrian capital in Damascus, on December 9, 2024. (AFP)
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People walk past anti government forces securing the Syrian capital in Damascus, on December 9, 2024. (AFP)
In Damascus, life resumes without Assad
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People celebrate as anti-government fighters and their families, who lived in exile in the Idlib governorate, return to the Damascus suburb of Daraya on December 9, 2024. (AFP)
In Damascus, life resumes without Assad
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A woman offers a rose to a pedestrian in central Aleppo to celebrate its take over from government forces on December 6, 2024, one week after the northern Syrian city was overrun by Islamist-led rebel fighters in a surprise offensive. (AFP)
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Updated 1 min 22 sec ago
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In Damascus, life resumes without Assad

People walk past anti government forces securing the Syrian capital in Damascus, on December 9, 2024. (AFP)
  • The curfew imposed on the capital’s residents since Sunday has been relaxed, now starting at 9:00 p.m. (1800 GMT) instead of 5:00 p.m. and lasting until morning

DAMASCUS: In Damascus, life is cautiously returning to normal as residents step out of their homes into a Syria transformed by the ousting of long-time president Bashar Assad.
“We were a little worried, but since Sunday, we are no longer afraid,” said Lina Al-Ostaz, referring to when the Syrian capital fell to a coalition of Islamist-led rebels.
The 11-day lightning offensive by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) and allies ended over half a century of unchecked rule by the Assad dynasty.
Ostaz said she left her house for the first time since the offensive began to go shopping in central Damascus on Tuesday. She strolled through the market with her husband, smiling at patrons and passersby.




People eat outdoors in Damascus on December 9, 2024, a day after the ousting of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad by Islamist-led anti-government fighters, who took the capital, forcing him to flee, and ending five decades of Baath rule in Syria. (AFP)

“We Syrians, we love life, and life goes on,” said the 57-year-old, who hesitated before mentioning she was arrested by government forces in 2015.
“I hope that the future will be better for young people,” she said.
After more than half a century of repression, Syrians seem to be speaking more freely.

In Qassaa, a predominantly Christian neighborhood, cafes are bustling with patrons smoking shisha and playing cards.
“We were very afraid... but we encouraged each other to go out and resume our normal lives,” said Rania Diab, a 64-year-old doctor who left home for the first time to meet up with friends at a cafe.
“But we remain cautious, we go home early, the situation is not yet clear,” she added.
She said her only hope was “that we can live normally in our country, that our freedoms are preserved... and that we can live in security and with freedom of opinion.”
The curfew imposed on the capital’s residents since Sunday has been relaxed, now starting at 9:00 p.m. (1800 GMT) instead of 5:00 p.m. and lasting until morning.
In the streets, portraits of Bashar Assad have been torn down. The green, white, and black flag of the revolution now flies, replacing the red, white, and black of the Syrian flag adopted during Assad’s father Hafez’s reign.
Spent bullet casings litter the vast central Umayyad Square, where revellers play out revolutionary songs.
Armed men from various rebel groups, clad in fatigues and often wearing balaclavas, patrol the streets of the capital. Regime soldiers and police officers deserted their posts in large numbers on Sunday.

At the police headquarters in Damascus, there are officers from the self-proclaimed rebel government of Idlib, led by Mohammad Al-Bashir, who was appointed as the head of Syria’s transitional government on Tuesday.
A man who introduced himself as the new head of the police and declined to give his name told AFP that they would take up their duties in the coming days.
“We will ensure the security of all government buildings and maintain security in the capital,” he said.
In the upscale Malki neighborhood, people sat in outdoor cafes, while young people staged an impromptu demonstration, dancing to the familiar tunes of the 2011 uprising.
The peaceful demonstrations were brutally repressed by Assad’s forces, sparking a civil war that fragmented Syria and killed more than half a million people.
In the historic heart of the capital, the bars of the Christian neighborhood of Bab Touma, which serve alcohol, are still closed.
In the restaurants and cafes that are open, alcohol is not served, out of caution as residents await the new order under Damascus’s new rulers.
 

 


Red Cross urges Syrians not to exhume their own dead

Red Cross urges Syrians not to exhume their own dead
Updated 29 sec ago
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Red Cross urges Syrians not to exhume their own dead

Red Cross urges Syrians not to exhume their own dead
With families searching for their missing loved ones, alive or dead, Cardon appealed to them to “respect cemeteries and other places where people may be buried“
“Key forensic processes” must be followed so victims’ bodies can be identified, he added

GENEVA: Syrian families whose loved ones disappeared under ousted president Bashar Assad should not try to exhume their bodies themselves, which could prevent forensics experts from identifying them, the Red Cross said Tuesday.
After years of brutal conflict, families have an understandable urge to find and retrieve missing relatives’ bodies from formerly off-limits areas now that Assad has fled the country, but it is important to “follow all the steps correctly,” Christian Cardon, spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told AFP in an interview.
The issue of the missing is “central today, but also for the future,” with proper autopsies needed to “eventually pave the way for peace and reconciliation negotiations,” he said.
More than 100,000 people have disappeared during Syria’s civil war, according to rights groups. They say most of the disappearances came at the hands of Assad’s side, which was overpowered by an Islamist-led militant coalition, causing the long-time leader to flee the country Sunday.
As militants flooded into Damascus, images on social media showed dozens of emaciated men, some so weak they had to be carried, leaving the notorious Saydnaya prison, which Amnesty International has condemned as a “human slaughterhouse.”
With families searching for their missing loved ones, alive or dead, Cardon appealed to them to “respect cemeteries and other places where people may be buried.”
“Key forensic processes” must be followed so victims’ bodies can be identified, he added.
The Red Cross is also urging Syrians to “protect the registry documents in which thousands of prisoners’ names were recorded,” along with “thousands of people believed to be dead,” Cardon said.
“There’s a real urgency today to ensure that in administrative offices as well as prisons and detention centers across the country, people preserve and maintain that vital information.”
“Anyone in a position of authority in Syria today needs to make sure the different buildings are protected,” Cardon said.
The Red Cross is in touch with “influential actors” in the country, including Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), the group that spearheaded the anti-Assad offensive, he said.
An ICRC team visited Saydnaya prison on Tuesday and “observed that many documents related to detainees held at the prison have been damaged and scattered in different rooms,” the organization said on X.
With thousands of prisoners now freed, the ICRC, which has around 500 staff in Syria, says it hopes to reunite as many families as possible using information gathered by its offices around the world over the years.
The organization has set up two hotlines, for both ex-prisoners (+963 953 555 431) and families seeking their loved ones (+963 936 033 628).
Its employees are also doing outreach on the ground in Syria to help families reunite.
It is a “puzzle” that will take time to complete, given that those involved have been through “major traumatic events,” said Cardon.

Lebanese haunted by Assad say his fall is ‘divine justice’

Lebanese haunted by Assad say his fall is ‘divine justice’
Updated 15 min 53 sec ago
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Lebanese haunted by Assad say his fall is ‘divine justice’

Lebanese haunted by Assad say his fall is ‘divine justice’
  • Syrian forces only quit Lebanon in 2005 after enormous pressure following the assassination of former PM Rafic Hariri, a killing attributed to Damascus and its ally Hezbollah
  • Presumed victims of the Assad regime include President-elect Bashir Gemayel, killed in 1982, President Rene Mouawad, in 1989, and Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt, in 1977

BEIRUT, Lebanon: Many in Lebanon who suffered through decades of brutal rule in Syria that extended across the border say the fall of longtime leader Bashar Assad is “divine justice,” but want him held accountable.
For almost 30 years, the government of Hafez Assad and then his son Bashar — whom militants ousted on Sunday after 13 years of war — held Lebanon in a stranglehold.
The Syrian army entered the country in 1976 as part of an Arab force that was supposed to put an end to Lebanon’s civil war, which began a year earlier.
But instead it became the dominant military and political force, looming over all aspects of Lebanese life.
Syrian forces only quit Lebanon in 2005 after enormous pressure following the assassination of former prime minister Rafic Hariri, a killing attributed to Damascus and its ally Hezbollah.
A United Nations-backed court in 2022 sentenced two Hezbollah members in absentia to life imprisonment for the crime.
“Divine justice has been served, even if there has been no punishment” for Assad, said Rania Ghanem Gantous, who maintains her father Antoine Ghanem was killed by Syrian forces in a 2007 car bomb blast near his east Beirut home.
“We want to see those who committed these crimes punished here on earth,” said Gantous, whose father was a lawmaker with Lebanese Christian Kataeb (Phalange) party, which opposed the Syrian presence.
Gantous said the fall of Assad was a “glorious day,” but that she was torn between “joy and sadness.”
“My father’s death was a terrible loss and I miss him a lot,” she said, adding she was also “happy for the end of the tyranny” of the Assad family’s rule “after 50 years of oppression.”
Zaher Eido expressed similar sentiment, 17 years after his father Walid Eido was assassinated in a 2007 car bomb.
Another son of the former lawmaker from Hariri’s Future Movement was also killed in the blast.
“The fall of the regime in Damascus has lifted the spirits of my mother and those who have endured its repression,” Eido told AFP.
But with “a father who was a judge, and a brother who was a lawyer, I believe justice will not be served until Bashar Assad is tried and his punishment, whether death or life in prison or something else, is served,” he added.
The evening of Assad’s ouster, Lebanese television channel LBCI began its news broadcast announcing that “he who committed the worst butchery, murders, explosions and arrests, whether in Syria, Lebanon or against the Palestinians, has fallen.”
Fireworks lit up the sky over another local broadcaster MTV, whose journalists began the news program displaying photographs of presumed victims of Assad’s government.
The included president-elect Bashir Gemayel, who was killed in 1982 less than a month after his election, as well as president Rene Mouawad, assassinated in 1989, and Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt, who was killed in 1977.
“Assad’s Syria is dead, long live the new Syria. A free Syria is born,” the channel’s news broadcast said, inviting “Beirut to rejoice.”
Presenter Marcel Ghanem later opened a bottle of champagne on air to celebrate “the fall of the regime of repression.”
“I’ve always thought that justice was a question of time,” said Yasma Fleihan, the widow of former minister and lawmaker Bassel Fleihan, who died of wounds sustained in the 2005 blast that killed Hariri.
“Assad’s fall brings justice to all those who were killed, threatened or tortured,” she told AFP.
In Beirut’s Sassine Square, Nassib Ibrahim, 76, recalled the days in 1978 when Syrian forces were bombing the area, where his brother was also killed.
The fall of Assad was “the best day of my life,” he said.
“He tried to humiliate us but he fled and was humiliated himself.


Yemen’s Houthis say they targeted three supply ships and two American destroyers

Yemen’s Houthis say they targeted three supply ships and two American destroyers
Updated 10 December 2024
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Yemen’s Houthis say they targeted three supply ships and two American destroyers

Yemen’s Houthis say they targeted three supply ships and two American destroyers
  • Houthis targeted two American destroyers

CAIRO: Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis targeted three supply ships and two American destroyers accompanying them in the Gulf of Aden, a military spokesman for the Houthis said on Tuesday.


G7 to discuss Syria crisis in talks Friday: US

G7 to discuss Syria crisis in talks Friday: US
Updated 10 December 2024
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G7 to discuss Syria crisis in talks Friday: US

G7 to discuss Syria crisis in talks Friday: US
  • Kirby said he would have “more to say” about the agenda later in the week
  • US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had earlier on Tuesday urged all nations to support an “inclusive” political process in Syria

WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden and his G7 partners will discuss the turmoil in Syria when they hold a scheduled virtual meeting this Friday, the White House said.
The talks — which will also deal with Russia’s war in Ukraine — come days after Islamist-led militants in Syria ousted longtime ruler Bashar Assad.
“Syria and Ukraine will absolutely be on the agenda for the G7,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Tuesday.
Kirby said he would have “more to say” about the agenda later in the week “but you can bet that those two topics will be front and center.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had earlier on Tuesday urged all nations to support an “inclusive” political process in Syria.
Russia will be hovering in the background of both crises. Moscow has granted asylum to its fallen ally Assad, while it continues to push its invasion in Ukraine.
Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States make up the G7 allies, who coordinate broadly on diplomatic and economic policies.
The meeting was called days ago, before the fall of Assad, according to sources close to the prime minister’s office in Italy, which currently holds the group’s rotating presidency.
The meeting, which was scheduled as an official handover to Canada as it assumes the presidency in January, will also address “other international crises, from Ukraine to the Middle East,” the source said.


At least 176 killed in two days of Sudan battles

At least 176 killed in two days of Sudan battles
Updated 10 December 2024
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At least 176 killed in two days of Sudan battles

At least 176 killed in two days of Sudan battles
  • In Omdurman, part of the Sudanese capital, paramilitary shelling killed at least 65 people and wounded hundreds
  • A single shell on a passenger bus “killed everyone on board and turned 22 people into body parts,” said Khartoum governor Ahmed Othman Hamza

PORT SUDAN: At least 176 people were killed in two days of army and paramilitary strikes across Sudan, according to an AFP tally of tolls provided by officials, activists and lawyers on Tuesday.
In Omdurman, part of the Sudanese capital, paramilitary shelling killed at least 65 people and wounded hundreds on Tuesday, according to the state’s army-aligned governor.
A single shell on a passenger bus “killed everyone on board and turned 22 people into body parts,” said Khartoum governor Ahmed Othman Hamza.
He attributed the strike to “the terrorist militia,” in reference to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, at war with the army since April 2023.
The attack comes a day after an army air strike on a market in the North Darfur town of Kabkabiya killed over 100 people, the pro-democracy Emergency Lawyers reported Tuesday.
“The air strike took place on the town’s weekly market day, where residents from various nearby villages had gathered to shop, resulting in the death of more than 100 people and injury of hundreds, including women and children,” said the lawyers’ group, which has been documenting human rights abuses during the conflict.
The lawyers also reported six people were killed in North Kordofan state when a drone that had crashed on November 26 exploded.
In the famine-stricken Zamzam displacement camp in North Darfur, paramilitary shelling on Tuesday killed five people, according to civil society group the Darfur General Coordination of Camps for the Displaced and Refugees.
A UN-backed report in July declared famine had taken hold in the camp after a months-long RSF siege of state capital El-Fasher and the surrounding area.
The war between the RSF and the regular army has so far killed tens of thousands, uprooted 12 million and created what the United Nations has called the worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory.
It has also nearly destroyed Khartoum, control over which both sides have not managed to claim.
Most of Omdurman — the capital’s twin city across the Nile — is under army control, while the RSF holds Khartoum North (Bahri) to the east.
Residents have continuously reported shelling across the river, with bombs and shrapnel regularly striking homes on both banks.
On Tuesday, eyewitnesses said artillery was striking Omdurman from multiple fronts.
“We haven’t seen bombing this intense in six months,” one eyewitness to the passenger bus shelling told AFP, also requesting anonymity.
Another reported shelling from the Wadi Seidna army base, in northern Omdurman, toward RSF positions in western Omdurman and across the river in Bahri.
The army currently controls parts of the capital, as well as the country’s north and east.
The RSF has seized nearly the entire vast western region of Darfur, swathes of the southern Kordofan region and much of central Sudan.
Darfur, a region the size of France, is home to around a quarter of Sudan’s population but more than half its displaced people.
It has also been the site of some of the war’s most horrific violence.
In footage sent to AFP purporting to show the aftermath of Monday’s strike on the market, people were seen sifting through rubble as the charred remains of children lay on scorched ground.
The footage, which AFP was unable to independently verify, was supplied by the Darfur General Coordination of Camps for the Displaced and Refugees.
Though some drone attacks have been attributed to the RSF, the Sudanese military is the only party with fighter jets and maintains a functional monopoly on the skies.
In a statement Tuesday, the army accused RSF-affiliated political groups of “spreading lies” and said its forces “target rebel activity bases.”
The lawyers described the attack as a “horrendous massacre committed by army air strikes.”
They said recent strikes across the country were part of an “escalation campaign... deliberately concentrated on densely populated residential areas,” contradicting claims by warring parties that they only target military objectives.
Both the army and the RSF have been accused of indiscriminately targeting civilians and deliberately bombing residential areas.
On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch accused the RSF and allied Arab militias of carrying out numerous abuses against civilians in South Kordofan state from December 2023 to March 2024.
The rights organization accused the groups of “war crimes” including “killings, rapes, and abductions of ethnic Nuba residents, as well as the looting and destruction of homes.”
The group also urged the United Nations and the African Union to deploy a mission to protect civilians in Sudan.