In the final, chaotic hours before rebel forces stormed Damascus and ended Bashar al-Assad‘s iron-fisted rule, the Syrian president had already fled the country. His departure, shrouded in secrecy, marked the abrupt collapse of his 24-year regime and his family’s 50-year hold over Syria. As the clock ticked towards Sunday morning, Assad had already abandoned…
US secretary of state Antony Blinken confirmed on Saturday that American officials have been in direct communication with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Syrian rebel group designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the US since 2018.“We’ve been in contact with HTS and with other parties,” Blinken told reporters. HTS recently led a coalition of…
Opposition fighters gesture as they check a Syrian army jet after they took over a military airbase near the central city of Hama. Syrian civil war LIVE updates: The Syrian opposition forces now have control of the capital city of Damascus, with President Bashar al-Assad ‘fleeing’ the country to an undisclosed location, media reports said….
Government forces on Sunday lost control of Aleppo, the country’s second-largest city, for the first time since the conflict began in 2011, according to a war monitor. The Islamist-dominated rebel alliance, led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), launched a lightning assault that dealt a severe blow to President Bashar al-Assad‘s Russian- and Iranian-backed regime.The…
