DAMASCUS: Ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s prime minister said he had agreed on Monday to hand power to the rebel-led Salvation Government, a day after the rebels seized the capital Damascus and Assad fled to Russia.
The imminent transfer of power follows 13 years of civil war and the end to more than 50 years of brutal rule by the Assad family, leaving Syrians at home and millions of refugees abroad hopeful yet deeply uncertain about their country’s future.
Damascus stirred to life on Monday, with traffic returning to streets and people venturing out after a nighttime curfew, but most shops remained shut.
Fighters from the remote countryside milled about in the capital, clustering in the central Umayyad Square.
“We had a purpose and a goal and now we are done with it. We want the state and security forces to be in charge,” said Firdous Omar, who said he had been battling the Assad government since 2011 and was now looking forward to laying down his weapon and returning to work as a farmer in provincial Idlib.
Assad’s Prime Minister, Mohammed Jalali, told Al Arabiya TV he had agreed to hand power to the Salvation Government, an administration based in a small pocket of rebel-held territory in northwest Syria.
He said the handover could take days to carry out.
The main rebel commander Ahmed al-Sharaa, better known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani, had met overnight with Jalali and Vice President Faisal Mekdad to discuss a transitional government, a source familiar with the discussions told Reuters.
Al Jazeera television reported the transitional authority would be headed by Mohamed al-Bashir, who ran the Salvation Government before the 12-day lightning offensive that swept into Damascus.
A source close to the rebels in Idlib confirmed Bashir had been nominated, though there had been no official announcement.
Syria’s banks will reopen on Tuesday and staff had been asked to return to offices, according to a Syrian central bank source and two commercial bankers.
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.
The advance of a militia alliance spearheaded by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al Qaeda affiliate, was a generational turning point for the Middle East.
It ends a war that killed hundreds of thousands, caused one of the biggest refugee crises of modern times and left cities bombed to rubble, countryside depopulated and the economy hollowed out by global sanctions. Refugees could finally go home from camps across Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.
‘A NEW HISTORY’
Assad’s fall wipes out one of the main bastions from which Iran and Russia wielded regional power. Turkey, long aligned with Assad’s foes, emerges strengthened.
The Arab world faces the task of reintegrating one of the Middle East’s pivotal states, while containing the militant Sunni Islam that has in the past metastasized into the sectarian violence of Islamic State.
HTS is still designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations, but has spent years trying to soften its image to reassure foreign states and minority groups within Syria.
The group’s leader Golani, who spent years in US custody as an insurgent in Iraq but later broke with al Qaeda and Islamic State, has vowed to rebuild Syria.
“A new history, my brothers, is being written in the entire region after this great victory,” he told a huge crowd at the 1,300-year-old Umayyad Mosque in Damascus on Sunday. The rebels announced on their Telegram channel that they were granting amnesty to all conscript soldiers drafted under Assad. Assad’s police state was known for generations as one of the harshest in the Middle East, holding hundreds of thousands of political prisoners. On Sunday, elated inmates poured out of jails.
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