New Delhi:
Deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his family have landed in Moscow and been granted asylum, Russian state media reported today, hours after Islamist-led rebels took control of his country.
“Assad and members of his family have arrived in Moscow,” a Kremlin source told TASS and Ria Novosti news agencies. “Russia has granted them asylum on humanitarian grounds,” he added.
For much of Sunday, social media was buzzing with flight trackers speculating about Assad’s mysterious whereabouts.
According to data from the website Flightradar, a Syrian Air plane took off from Damascus airport around the time the capital was captured by rebels.
The plane initially flew towards the coastal region of Syria, a stronghold of Assad’s Alawite sect, but then made an abrupt U-turn and flew in the opposite direction for a few minutes before disappearing from the map.
The sudden change in course and the plane’s disappearance from tracking could indicate that it had been shot down, or that it had disabled its transponder.
Now that Assad and his family are in Russia, it is clear that the plane had disabled its transponder.
Assad’s departure comes less than two weeks after the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) challenged more than five decades of Assad family rule in a lightning offensive.
“After 50 years of oppression under Baathist rule, and 13 years of crimes, tyranny and displacement… today we announce the end of this dark period and the beginning of a new era for Syria,” the rebel groups said in Telegram.
HTS Islamist leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani visited the Umayyad Mosque in the capital Damascus as crowds greeted him with smiles and hugs. HTS is rooted in the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda.
HTS, banned as a terrorist organization by Western governments, has tried to soften its image in recent years.
Across Syria, people have toppled statues of Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar al-Assad and the founder of the system of government he inherited. In Syria for the past fifty years, even the slightest suspicion of dissent could land someone in prison or kill them.
As rebels entered the capital, HTS said its fighters broke into a prison on the outskirts of Damascus, heralding an “end of the era of tyranny in Sednaya prison,” which has become a byword for Assad’s darkest abuses era. .
UN war crimes investigators on Sunday described Assad’s fall as a “historic new beginning” for Syrians, urging those in charge to ensure the “atrocities” committed under his rule are not repeated .
The rapid developments came just hours after HTS said it had captured the strategic city of Homs, where prisoners were also released. Homs was the third major city taken by the rebels, who began their advance on November 27.
US President Joe Biden was closely monitoring the “extraordinary events” unfolding in Syria, the White House said. Newly elected US President Donald Trump said Assad had “fled his country” after losing Russia’s support.
With input from AFP