DAMASCUS: Damascus stirred back to life on Monday at the start of a hopeful but uncertain era after rebels seized the capital and President Bashar Al-Assad fled, following 13 years of civil war and more than 50 years of his family’s brutal rule. Busy traffic returned to the streets and people ventured out after a nighttime curfew, but most shops remained shut. Rebels milled about in the center.

The main rebel commander Ahmed Al-Sharaa, better known as Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani, met overnight with Assad’s Prime Minister Mohammed Jalali and Vice President Faisal Mekdad to discuss arrangements for a transitional government, a source familiar with the discussions told Reuters. Al Jazeera television reported that the transitional authority would be headed by Mohamed Al-Bashir, who ran the administration in a small pocket of rebel-held territory before the 12-day lightning offensive that swept into Damascus.

Syria’s banks would reopen on Tuesday and staff had been asked to return to offices, according to a Syrian central bank source and two commercial bankers. Syria’s currency would continue to be used, they said. At the interior ministry that ran Assad’s police force, furniture had been looted and staff stayed away. Armed rebels were there to maintain order. The oil ministry called on all employees in the sector to head to their workplaces starting on Tuesday, adding that protection would be provided to ensure their safety.

Syrian rescuers searched a jail synonymous with the worst atrocities of ousted Assad’s rule, as people in the capital flocked to a central square Monday to celebrate their country’s freedom. Assad oversaw a crackdown on a democracy movement that erupted in 2011, sparking a war that killed 500,000 people and forced half the country to flee their homes. At the core of the system of rule that Assad inherited from his father Hafez was a brutal complex of prisons and detention centers used to eliminate dissent by jailing those suspected of stepping out of the ruling Baath party’s line.

On Monday, rescuers from the Syrian White Helmets group said they were searching for potential secret doors or basements in Saydnaya prison, though they said there was no immediate sign that anyone was trapped. “We are working with all our energy to reach a new hope, and we must be prepared for the worst,” the organization said in a statement, urging families of the missing to have “patience”.

Aida Taha, aged 65, said she had been “roaming the streets like a madwoman” in search of her brother, who was arrested in 2012. “We’ve been oppressed long enough, we want our children back,” she said. While Syria has been at war for over 13 years, the government’s collapse ended up coming in a matter of days, with a lightning offensive launched by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

In central Damascus on Monday, despite all the uncertainty over the future, the joy was palpable. “It’s indescribable, we never thought this nightmare would end, we are reborn,” 49-year-old Rim Ramadan, a civil servant at the finance ministry, told AFP. “We were afraid for 55 years of speaking, even at home, we used to say the walls had ears,” Ramadan said, as people honked their car horns and rebels fired their guns into the air. “We feel like we’re living a dream,” she added.

Public institutions as well as schools were closed, and an AFP correspondent saw fighters deployed near the central bank, which said depositors’ funds in the country’s lenders were “safe”. During the offensive launched on Nov 27, rebels wrested city after city from Assad’s control, opening the gates of prisons along the way and freeing thousands of people, many of them held on political charges.

Social media groups were alight with Syrians sharing images of detainees reportedly brought out from the dungeons, in a collective effort to reunite families with their newly released loved ones, some of whom had been missing for years. Others, like Fadwa Mahmoud, whose husband and son are missing, posted calls for help finding their missing relatives. “Where are you, Maher and Abdel Aziz, it’s time for me to hear your news, oh God, please come back, let my joy become complete,” wrote Mahmoud, herself a former detainee.

Assad’s Prime Minister Jalali told Sky New Arabia he was ready to provide documents and help for the transfer of power. The fate of Syria’s army would be “left to the brothers who will take over the management of the country’s affairs”, Jalali said. “What concerns us today is the continuation of services for Syrians.”

One of the final areas to fall was the Mediterranean coast, heartland of Assad’s Alawite sect and site of Russia’s naval base. Two Alawite residents said so far the situation had been better than expected, seemingly without retribution against Alawites. One said a friend was visited at home by rebels who told him to hand over any weapons he had, which he did.

Near Latakia, rebels had yet to enter the Assad family’s ancestral village of Qardaha, site of a mausoleum for Assad’s father who seized power in a coup in 1970 and ruled until his death in 2000. A resident said all senior figures tied to Assad had left. The Kremlin said it was too early to know the future of Russia’s military bases in Syria, but it would discuss the issue with the new authorities.

US President Joe Biden said Assad should be “held accountable” as he called his downfall “a historic opportunity” for the people of Syria. “The fall of the regime is a fundamental act of justice,” he said. But he also cautioned that hardline Islamist groups within the victorious rebel alliance would face scrutiny. “Some of the rebel groups that took down Assad have their own grim record of terrorism and human right abuses,” Biden said. The United States has taken note of recent statements by the rebels suggesting they were adopting a more moderate posture, but Biden said: “We will assess not just their words, but their actions.”

Amnesty International also called for perpetrators of rights violations to face justice, with its chief Agnes Callamard urging the forces that ousted Assad to “break free from the violence of the past”. “Any political transition must ensure accountability for perpetrators of serious violations and guarantee that those responsible are held to account,” UN rights chief Volker Turk said on Monday.

How Assad might face justice remains unclear, especially after the Kremlin refused on Monday to confirm reports by Russian news agencies that he had fled to Moscow. The Syrian embassy in Moscow raised the flag of the opposition, and the Kremlin said it would discuss the status of its bases in Syria with the new authorities.

Iran, another key ally of Assad, said it expected its “friendly” ties with Syria to continue, with its foreign minister saying the ousted president “never asked” for Tehran’s help against the rebel offensive. Turkey, historically a backer of the opposition, called for an “inclusive” new government in Syria, as the sheer unpredictability of the situation began to settle in.

The Zionist entity, which borders Syria, sent troops into a Syrian-held area of the buffer zone in the Golan Heights after Assad’s fall, in what Foreign Minister Gideon Saar described as a “limited and temporary step”. Saar also said his country had struck “chemical weapons” in Syria, “in order that they will not fall in the hands of extremists”. In northern Syria, a Turkish drone strike on a Kurdish-held area killed 11 civilians, six of them children, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor. – Agencies