Bombing raids have hit sites across Syria as regional actors in the Middle East scrambled to defend their interests in Syria after the sudden fall of the country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Moscow on Sunday.
As rebels led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) freed regime prisoners, including from the notorious Sednaya jail – often referred to as the “human slaughterhouse”, Israel, Turkey and the US carried out military action as Assad’s former backers in Russia and Iran also engaged in efforts to shape a future Syria.
The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, confirmed on Monday that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, had personally granted asylum to Assad. He refused to comment on Assad’s specific whereabouts and said Putin was not planning to meet him.
The US has struck targets associated with Islamic State in central Syria, while Turkey has attacked US-backed Kurdish forces.
Israel also confirmed that it had sent forces into the buffer zone beyond the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and into former Syrian military positions on Mount Hermon in what it described as a “temporary measure”. It said it would continue with airstrikes on former regime sites associated with missiles and chemical weapons.
The UN security council is due to meet later on Monday to discuss the Syrian crisis in a closed session and at Russia’s request. The strikes reflect the perilous path forward for Syria as it transitions from five decades of brutal rule by the Assad family.
With sharply competing agendas, Turkey and Israel have already laid out what they say are their redlines regarding Syria, with Turkey on Monday saying it would not accept the Kurdish PKK or Islamic State benefiting from the new situation, even as it promised to help Syrian migrants in Turkey return.
Justifying Israel’s latest strikes on sites in Syria, Gideon Saar, the country’s foreign minister said it struck suspected chemical weapons sites and long-range rockets in Syria in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of hostile actors.
Saar said Monday that “the only interest we have is the security of Israel and its citizens”.
Iran, which backed Assad in the country’s brutal civil war in order to preserve its land corridor to Hezbollah in Lebanon, also indicated that it had quickly opened a direct line of communication with the rebels who ousted Assad, in an attempt to “prevent a hostile trajectory” between the countries.
Hours after Assad’s fall, Iran said it expected relations with Damascus to continue based on the two countries’ “far-sighted and wise approach” and called for the establishment of an inclusive government representing all segments of Syrian society.
And in its own warning, the Russian news agency Interfax, citing a lawmaker, said Moscow would respond harshly to any attack on its military bases in Syria.
With the lightning advance of a militia alliance led by HTS, a former al-Qaida affiliate, marking a dramatic transformation in the dynamics of the Middle East, the fall of Assad has removed a bastion from which Iran and Russia had exercised influence across the Arab world.
Joe Biden, the US president, said Syria was in a period of risk and uncertainty, and it was the first time in years that neither Russia, Iran nor the Hezbollah militant organisation had held an influential role there.
The rebels face a monumental task of rebuilding and running a country after a war that left hundreds of thousands dead, cities pounded to dust and an economy hollowed by global sanctions. Syria will need billions of dollars in aid.
“A new history, my brothers, is being written in the entire region after this great victory,” said Ahmed al-Sharaa, better known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the head of HTS.
Jolani, speaking to a huge crowd on Sunday at Damascus’s Umayyad Mosque, a place of enormous religious significance, said with hard work Syria would be “a beacon for the Islamic nation”.
While Jolani has become the face of the rebellion, experts warn that in any meaningfully stable transition he will need to find ways to accommodate rival anti-Assad forces as well as former supporters of the Assad, viewed as a considerable task.
The Assad regime, which lasted more than five decades, was known as one of the harshest in the Middle East with hundreds of thousands of political prisoners held in horrifying conditions and huge numbers murdered during the civil war in mass executions.
On Sunday, elated but often confused inmates poured out of jails. Reunited families wept in joy. Newly freed prisoners were filmed running through the Damascus streets holding up their hands to show how many years they had been in prison.
The White Helmets rescue organisation said it had dispatched emergency teams to search for hidden underground cells still believed to hold prisoners.
With a curfew declared by the rebels, Damascus was calm after dawn on Monday, with shops closed and streets in the city largely empty.
The majority of people seen were rebels, dressed in fatigues and carrying weapons, while many cars had license plates from the north-western province of Idlib, where the rebel offensive was launched 12 days ago.
Firdous Omar, from Jisr al-Shughur in Idlib, was among a group of fighters standing atop a tank in the central Umayyad Square who said he had been fighting the Assad regime since 2011.
He was now looking forward to laying down his weapon and returning to his job as a farmer. “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.”