The road to Damascus was lined with discarded army uniforms. In a panic, Syrian army soldiers stripped down in the streets in the early hours of Sunday morning, realising their leader, Bashar al-Assad, had abandoned them after 54 years of his family’s rule over Syria.
Syrian army tanks, which were supposed to stop the lightning rebel offensive that started just 11 days earlier, stood empty in front of checkpoints with posters of the late leader Hafez al-Assad, his face half torn. Out of habit, a driver stopped and rolled down the window, but there was no one at the checkpoint.
“No more checkpoints, no more bribes,” Mohammed remarked, smiling as he sped towards the Syrian capital city.
Damascus was still in a state of disbelief, smoke from battles the night before hung over the city like a fog. Windows shook from the occasional explosion, the target and the warring party unknown. Just hours before, it was announced that Assad had fled the capital and that his regime had fallen.
The head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Mohammed al-Jolani – the most prominent of the rebel leaders in Syria – announced that the former Syrian prime minister Mohammed Gaza al-Jalali would lead a transitional government in the coming months.
Residents of Syria were dazed by the day’s events. “I feel as if I am in a dream, I haven’t slept and I can’t absorb what’s happened,” said Fatimeh, a Syrian originally from Idlib, as she approached Damascus. “I am from Idlib,” she said once more. For years she wouldn’t dare say where she was from when she was in Damascus, for fear that any affiliation with the province held by Islamist rebels would provoke retaliation.
Al-Jolani, who this week dropped his nom de guerre in favour of his birth name – Ahmed al-Shaara – was also chasing after rebel forces. It was fighters from the southern province of Deraa, not HTS, who reached the gates of Damascus. HTS fighters were preoccupied with securing Homs, Assad’s last lifeline to his coastal strongholds of Tartus and Latakia.
The rebel leader arrived at the landmark Umayyad mosque in the old city of Damascus in his first public appearance on Sunday after the fall of the Assad government. Seeing the rebel leader in the mosque, located in the former heartland of the government, would have been unthinkable just a few days earlier. To Syrians, the message was clear: Assad was gone, and rebels were in control.
With the president ousted, the kingdom of silence had suddenly come alive. Hundreds of people gathered in Umayyad Square, where the ground was littered with bullet casings – not from fighting, but from celebratory shooting. Fighters passed families AK-47s, which they fired into the air with glee, the tracer rounds’ red glow fading in the distance.
Jolani had forbidden the firing of guns into the air, for fear a stray bullet could hurt someone – but his instruction was quickly forgotten amid the jubilation. “The tears were falling by themselves, my father, my brothers, so many people were killed,” a woman said in the square, declining to give her name. Her daughter chimed in: “Now we know our father did not die for nothing.”
Amid the celebration, a woman rolled down her window to ask a passerby, was anyone from Sednaya here? The prison, about 20km from the capital city, was perhaps the most notorious of all of the Syrian government’s detention centres. Rebels had opened its doors on Sunday morning and thousands of prisoners left all at once, each heading in a different direction.
Driving through Damascus, Mohammad Abu al-Zeid, a commander from the rebel group Operations Room to Liberate Damascus, along with two other fighters from southern Syria, pointed out the embassies that lined the swanky Mezzah district in Damascus, most of them now empty but undamaged.
“We are not touching any of the public institutions – those are for the new state to come,” Abu al-Zeid said.
Abu al-Zeid had started his day by storming the headquarters of Syrian state television. He led a squadron of fighters who commandeered the broadcast – reading from a piece of paper as he declared the end of the Assad regime.
“My kids saw me on TV and started crying, ‘what is Baba doing there’,” the rebel commander said, laughing.
Now, he was occupied with navigating the city he had just helped capture. He kept getting lost, making U-turns and squinting at Google maps. It was the first time he had been in the capital city in years.
Not even the rebels seemed to anticipate having taken Damascus so quickly – they travelled around the capital city seemingly in a daze. Their guns, which they had been firing just hours before, now sat in the boot of the car untouched.
“We didn’t want to have to fight for 13 years, we shouldn’t have had to. We wanted change, not to have to bring down a regime,” said Wassim al-Khatib, one of the fighters under Zeid’s command, as he looked over the lines of broken military equipment which littered the streets of Damascus.