Life after Assad: Syria rises from ashes as world nervously watches. DISPATCH. Damascus is quiet and hopeful, spared heavy fighting in the rapid conquest. What emerges from the calm will reshape the entire Middle East. Soldiers of the conquering army have taken over government buildings throughout the capitalHASAN BELAL/EPA. Tuesday December 10 2024, 5.00pm, The Times. It is hard to bring down an empire. It is even harder to build a new one. But the young, bearded men of Idlib were doing their best to show they knew how to run the world’s most ancient capital.. They stood guard at Damascus’s ministries, prisons and courts, stone-fronted edifices whose names these men from Syria’s provincial and lower classes once whispered in fear.. • In pictures: Syrians celebrate end of the Assad regime. Their boss, meanwhile, was talking to the man who until the weekend was the prime minister of the Assads’ Syria, Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali. It was hard to tell who was the more nervous.. “We will not hesitate to hold accountable the criminals, murderers, security and army officers involved in torturing the Syrian people,” the jihadist formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani stated on Telegram.. Advertisement. Now that the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) finds himself the undisputed ruler of Syria, he has started using his real name, Ahmed al-Sharaa.. “We will offer rewards to anyone who provides information about senior army and security officers involved in war crimes,” Sharaa added, to an almost audible gulp from across Mezzeh, the suburb of southwest Damascus housing its ministries and the upmarket villas where regime bosses lived.. Abu Mohammed al-Jolani is now in de-facto command of Syria, but allies remain wary of his Islamist roots. OMAR HAJ KADOUR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES. Conscripts who fought in the Syrian army have been formally granted amnesties. But in the hunt for their leaders, the rebels who seized the capital have started knocking on doors, according to residents.. “I can’t find my brother,” one man said after walking up to two young bearded guards on the gate of the state television building. “He has been kidnapped. He was a customs worker, a civilian.”. One of the rebels replied, “I’m sure he will be released after a few questions”. The implication was immediately obvious. “Wait! Who took him?” the man asked.. Advertisement. • Inside Sednaya prison, Assad’s ‘human slaughterhouse’. For the most part, though, the new custodians of the 4,000-year-old city were on their best behaviour, like teenagers on a school trip.. What was unmistakable was that they were outsiders. Not just in their attire — their makeshift uniforms, their Islamist beards; their weather-beaten faces were several shades darker than those of the smartly dressed, pale-skinned Damascenes, used to offices and boutiques rather than the battlefields and refugee camps of provincial Syria.. In turn, the residents, or at least the happy and optimistic ones who took to the streets, looked at the newcomers with fascination. Smartly dressed young women, their hair free or wrapped in the neat white hijabs popular in urban Syria, often in sunglasses and make-up, posed for selfies alongside the Kalashnikovs.. Toddlers were hauled up on the rebels’ rusty armoured personnel carriers that were no doubt captured from the regime in a long-ago battle and left in a car park somewhere until the rapid advance of last week.. Advertisement. “It’s the first time I have felt like this is my country,” said a young woman called Maya, clutching a Prada-branded handbag, as her father climbed on board too.. Jubilant Damascenes have welcomed the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham forces. HUSSEIN MALLA/AP. Along the principal thoroughfares, shops were starting to reopen and the green uniforms of the battlefield were being withdrawn. The fighters were instead posted on the roads to the borders, unguarded for days.. They were being replaced by the black-clad police force of the Syrian Salvation Government, the body that was the civilian administration of Idlib province until it was suddenly handed the whole country at the weekend. Its boss, Mohammed al-Bashir, was appointed interim prime minister until March 1 at the handover ceremony with Sharaa and Jalali.. A cabinet has been appointed, though the ministers as far as could be told were not yet occupying their ministries.. That is partly because the rebels first had to work out how to get into them. Three curious figures were standing outside the Ministry of Information, a drab building in Mezzeh where the few foreign journalists granted visas to report on the country would once be berated by screaming officials for perceived offences, such as unflattering portraits of one or another Assad.. Advertisement. • After Assad’s downfall, who will emerge as winners and losers?. One of the figures wore a police uniform with a black balaclava. He said he had been trying to stop looting — “I have caught 20 thieves already,” he said, in a rather jovial tone.. The old man next to him had a pickaxe, though he looked too frail to wield it. The third man was smartly dressed in jeans, polo shirt and jacket, and explained he was called Safwan al-Madi, and was a journalist for the official newspaper of the Ba’ath Party — the organisation that counted both Assads among its members.. He had come to show the rebels around the building, he said. But first they had to break the locks — hence the pickaxe.. He seemed unfazed by the presence of an ideological foe with a gun. “I have to say, they all seem very polite,” he said of the rebels. What had he expected them to be, he was asked.. Advertisement. “Expected?” he replied. “I didn’t expect anything. I went to bed on Saturday evening, like a normal evening. I woke up the next morning and everything had changed.”. The new regime’s fighters cut a more approachable figure than the secret police-like forces of Assad, dining at restaurants alongside citizens. HUSSEIN MALLA/AP. Along the road sits an altogether more sinister location, the headquarters of the military prosecution service. One of the greatest traps the regime set for its people, including the millions who fled the country, was to imply that some sin had been forgiven — participation in a protest, dodging military service.. Your record is clean, they would be told, by a source in state security, or general intelligence, or the ministry of defence, and they could return. Only at immigration would they learn that their name was still on the blacklist of, say, the air force intelligence branch, and that would be the end of their freedom.. If they were lucky, they might live long enough for their names to appear on some register of inmates in a building like the military prosecution branch. Many were not so lucky.. The city having fallen without a fight, Damascus bears few scars of battle and it was hard to see just how a rule that seemed so impregnable had come to an end. For hints, you had to look more closely.. At the Iranian embassy, a young man was idly trying to break into an official car, whose windscreen, like the glass of the sentry box, was pierced with bullet holes.. The embassy was empty and locked, and its glorious front wall, tiled in turquoise and gold like an Isfahan mosque, was unharmed.. But the large photograph that had adorned it of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah killed by Israel in September, and Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general hit by an American drone strike in January 2020, had been ripped through.. Next to the embassy was what appeared to be a building site. The hole in the ground marked, however, the spot where an Israeli strike in April destroyed an embassy annexe containing Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the link man between the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Syrian regime.. That strike set off the tit-for-tat exchanges between Israel, Iran and its proxies that have, since Nasrallah’s death, changed the face of the Middle East.. For the empire that has been lost was not, in truth, Bashar al-Assad’s, but that of the “Resistance”, the Iran-led united front against Israel and the West of which the Assads were a notional part, but by far the weakest.. There was not an Iranian to be found in Damascus yesterday, or a Hezbollah flag or even any public demonstrations of hostility to Israel. Though one woman did say, of the bombing which continued in the distance as the “Zionist jets” did their worst against regime weapons stores: “Everything would be great, if only those bastards would leave us alone.”. Fighters outside the headquarters of the Ba’ath party, the Assad regime’s power base. LOUAI BESHARA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES. From abroad, western leaders too made nervous noises. “The United States will recognise and fully support a future Syrian government that results from this process,” Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state. said. The process was the “inclusive and transparent” transformation of the country that HTS is promising.. As a proscribed terrorist organisation whose supporters include a large proportion of America’s most wanted, that transformation will have to start with itself.. No one in the United States wants to be sending troops to Syria, if it all goes wrong, in yet another futile attempt to shape the region to its priorities. But then other presidents have promised to keep out of Middle East wars too.. Donald Trump was one of them in 2016, and he has repeated that pledge many times over. Syria was a mess, he said on Sunday, but America should have nothing to do with it.. • How will Donald Trump deal with Syria?. Yet it was he who ordered the strike against Soleimani, the man who had built Iran’s empire, co-ordinated its militias and ensured that self-inflicted disasters like the destruction of Gaza and Hamas did not happen. Soleimani also masterminded the Assad regime’s survival tactics in 2015. There are many reasons for the fall of the Assads, but his death is one of them.. “DO NOT GET INVOLVED,” Trump’s message continued, in capital letters. Not get involved? He started it. This is his empire now.. The British jihadists who could be freed from Syrian camps. December 10 2024, 7.50pm. Shayma Bakht. , News Reporter |. Larisa Brown. , Defence Editor |. Tom Witherow. , General News Reporter. INTERVIEW. ‘I saw my Sednaya prison cell on TV — no one should ever experience that’. December 10 2024, 2.45pm. Emma Yeomans. PROMOTED CONTENT. Previous article. Rayner to allow building on area of green belt bigger than Surrey. Previous article. Next article. Can you crack GCHQ’s Christmas puzzle?. Next article
