DAMASCUS: Syrians rejoiced into the night as fireworks exploded on the first Friday — the Muslim day of rest and prayer — since the ouster of president Bashar Al-Assad. More than half a century of brutal rule by the Assad clan came to a sudden end on Sunday, after a lightning rebel offensive swept across the country and took the capital.
Assad fled Syria, closing an era in which suspected dissidents were jailed or killed, and capping nearly 14 years of war that killed more than 500,000 people and displaced millions. Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani, head of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) which spearheaded the offensive, had called on Syrians "to go to the streets to express their joy”. Jolani now uses his given name Ahmed Al-Sharaa.
They continued all afternoon and into the night, AFPTV live images showed from Umayyad Square in Damascus which was jammed with vehicles, people, and waving flags as fireworks shot into the air. In the early days of Syria’s uprising in 2011, pro-democracy protesters gave their Friday gatherings a different name every week. On the first such day after Assad’s fall they called it: "Friday of Victory”.
Thousands flocked to the capital’s landmark Umayyad Mosque, some raising the three-star Syrian independence flag which none dared wave in the capital during Assad’s repressive rule. Exhilarated crowds chanted, "The Syrian people is one!” Families with children mixed with armed and uniformed Islamist fighters to celebrate the first Friday prayers since Assad’s overthrow, later streaming into the Old City’s streets and squares.
Former rebel fighters allowed women and children to pose with their assault rifles for celebratory photos, as relieved citizens milled around the square before the mosque, a place of worship since the Iron Age and the city’s greatest mosque since the eighth century. "We are gathering because we’re happy Syria has been freed, we’re happy to have been liberated from the prison in which we lived,” said Nour Thi Al-Ghina, 38. "This is the first time we have converged in such big numbers and the first time we are seeing such an event,” she said, beaming with joy. "We never expected this to happen.”
Rebel fighter Mohammed Shobek, 30, came to the city with the victorious HTS and posed for pictures with local children with a rose in the barrel of his Kalashnikov assault rifle. "We’ve finished the war in Syria and started praying for peace, we started carrying flowers, we started building this country and building it hand in hand,” he told AFP.
Exhilarated crowds chanted: "One, one, one, the Syrian people is one!” Many held the Syrian independence flag, used by the opposition since the uprising began. Dozens of street vendors around the mosque were selling the three-star flags — which none would dare to raise in government-held areas during Assad’s iron-fisted rule.
Pictures of people who were disappeared or detained in Assad’s prisons hung on the mosque’s outer walls, the phone numbers of relatives inscribed on the images. At the core of the system 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 away from the ruling Baath party line.
War monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in 2022 that more than 100,000 people had died in the prisons since 2011. HTS has now named one of its own, Mohammad Al-Bashir, as interim prime minister in a post-war transitional government until March 1. On Friday he addressed worshippers at the Umayyad Mosque.
‘Victory of the revolution’
Omar Al-Khaled, 23, said he had rushed from HTS’s northwestern stronghold of Idlib, cut off from government areas for years, to see the capital for the first time in his life. "It was my dream to come to Damascus,” the tailor said. "I can’t describe my feelings. Our morale is very high and we hope that Syria will head towards a better future,” he said, adding: "People were stifled... but now the doors have opened to us.”
On Thursday, the interim government vowed to institute the "rule of law” after years of abuses under Assad. Amani Zanhur, a 42-year-old professor of computer engineering, said many of her students had disappeared in Assad’s prisons and that she was overjoyed to be attending the prayers in the new Syria. "There can be nothing worse than what was. We cannot fear the situation,” she told AFP, expressing support for a state based on Islamic teachings.
Thousands flocked to the nearby Umayyad Square, raising a huge rebel flag on its landmark sword monument and chanting. "Let’s not discuss details that might separate us now and focus only on what brings us together: our hatred for Bashar Al-Assad,” said Amina Maarawi, 42, an Islamic preacher wearing a white hijab.
Crowds also gathered in the squares and streets of other Syrian cities, including Homs, Hama and Idlib. There was a festive and relaxed atmosphere as hundreds rallied in the main square of Syria’s second city Aleppo, a scene of fierce fighting during the country’s civil war, AFP correspondents said. A huge billboard depicting Assad and his father Hafez was set on fire. "The Assad father and son oppressed us, but we have liberated our country from injustice,” a white-bearded policeman at the scene said. Ahmad Abd Al-Majed, 39, an engineer who returned to Aleppo from Turkey, said many shed "tears of joy and happiness”. — AFP
"Syrians deserve to be happy,” he said. In the southern city of Sweida, the heartland of Syria’s Druze minority, Bayan Al-Hinnawi, 77, never believed he would live to see such a day. "It’s a wonderful sight. Nobody could have imagined that this could happen”, said Hinnawi, who spent 17 years in prison. — AFP