ECONOMYNEXT – Syria’s Al-Assad family rule that started in 1971 with a military coup by the last President, Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez had ended with rebel groups entering the capital Damascus, media reports said.
Qatar-based Al Jazeera network reported celebratory gunfire in Damascus, statues brought to the ground, flags being torn down and burned and an empty presidential palace.
The sudden collapse of he Assad regime came after an offensive launched on November 27, by a coalition of rebel forces, which first captured a Aleppo, a key city and rapidly overran the rest of the country as the government resistence collapsed.
Israeli action in Lebanon which weakened Iran-backed Hizbollah, who had earlier supported the government as well as Russia’s pre-occupation in Ukraine has been pointed to by Middle East analysts reasons for the fall of the Assad family regime.
Iran itself was supporting the Assad regime. Crowds stormed the Iranian embassy as the capital fell, Al Jazeera reported.
The Assads belonged to a Levantine Arab minority ethnoreligious community called the Alawites, a splinter group of Shia Muslims with a distinct identity.
Unrest flared in Syria from the late 1960s amid generally high inflation and the coup came in the same year as the collapse of the Bretton Woods pushing up oil prices.
After the coup, General Hafez Al-Assad made the country into a secular state in a 1973 constitution, and also removed a requirement for a Sunni Muslim to be president, and drew support from the Soviet Union for his Baath Party.
A branch of the original Pan-Arab Baath socialist movement also ruled Iraq under Saddam Hussein.
Syria had been embroiled in a civil war from around 2011, with countries including Turkey and the US getting involved with continued Russian backing the regime and heavy fighting in cities such as Aleppo hitting headlines.
Russian General, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Dvornikov who led the invasion of Ukraine was dubbed the ‘butcher of Aleppo’ during the conflict.
The US and Nato forces were also involved in a bombing campaign to useat the ISIS, one of the militant groups that captured large tracts of land in Syria.
Kurdish groups also captured territory, which is opposed by Turkiye. Kurdish forces are backed by the US which uses Syrian oil revenues to pay them to police the area.
At the forefront of the latest offensive was a group called Tahrir al-Sham which controlled an area and had its own revenues.
In 2023, the official rate of the Syrian pound collapsed from around 2,500 to 13,000 to the US dollar.
The Syrian pound was quoted at 22,000/27,000 by the S-PToday.com webiste on December 07, but reports said trading in the currency had stopped as rebels marched closer to Damascus.
“The Syrian Army just melted,” Joshua Landes, Director of Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma told Al Jazeera.
“There was no money in Damascus to pay troops. Then of course Israel’s extraodinary attack which pummelled Hizbollah, pinned back Iran and really degraded the Syrian Army over the last year, with about three strikes every week taking out military factories and Iranian militias and Iranian officers.”
“So this was a very weakened regime with no allies. So the army melted away.
President Assad who was believed to have fled in an aircraft which went off radar of tracking website after take-off over the city of Homs. The Russian-made Ilyushin 76 cargo aircraft was flying towards the Mediterranean where there were Russian bases, the report said.
“As a result of negotiations between B. Assad and a number of participants in the armed conflict on the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic, he decided to resign from the presidency and left the country, giving instructions for a peaceful transfer of power,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. (Colombo/Dec08/2024)
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