With music thumping on his car speakers, Damascus resident Abdallah drove up the palm-lined road to Bashar al-Assad’s palace in the Syrian capital on Sunday morning. He reached the entrance, turned off the music, and sauntered into the heart of power of a dynasty that had ruled his country with an iron fist for more than 50 years.
Inside the marble halls Syrians roamed in jeans and hoodies, taking in the surreal scenes of ornate furniture broken and piled in corners. “I still can’t believe it,” said Abdallah, who spent the night in terror amid heavy bombing until rebels announced just before dawn they had full control of the capital, ushering in the demise of the Assad regime.
“No one has suffered as much as the Syrian people,” he told the Financial Times in a phone call and shared videos of his journey. “The entire city has risen up in joy — everyone is in the streets, shouting, shooting.”
Through 13 years of civil war Damascus was an Assad stronghold, from where the military and intelligence kept a brutal grip on the country’s citizens. But in the early hours of Sunday, euphoria flooded the capital as residents awoke to the sudden fall of a dictator who survived more than a decade of war but was ousted in a stunning two-week rebel offensive.
Public squares were filled on Sunday morning with celebration, while many like Abdallah rushed into buildings that were once symbols of Assad’s rule, tearing down portraits and stealing everything from luxury perfume to board games.
Along with the unbridled joy, however, was chaos. Rebels and everyday Syrians over-ran symbols of the Assad regime. And the takeover by rebel factions, led by the powerful grouping Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, plunges the country into a new era of uncertainty amid unresolved questions about who will rule, and how.
Many of those associated with the Assad’s regime were nowhere to be seen on Sunday. The prime minister was filmed being escorted out of his office down red velvet steps by rebels. He was apparently to be taken to the Four Seasons Hotel, which was owned by a regime loyalist but was now purportedly being used by rebels in a symbol of the stunning reversal of power.
“The military gave up, the television gave up, the palace, the security branch, the state buildings,” said one Damascus resident. “Soldiers are giving up their weapons. The situation is very tense, they’ve opened all the prisons.”
Abdallah tried to enter the Assad family’s swanky residence but was turned away by rebel guards who were seeking to control the looting. Videos shared by Damascenes with the FT and on social media showed regular people roaming the luxurious apartment, incredulous at the opulence their leaders had lived in, giggling as they methodically packed up everything from designer handbags to ceramic plates from inside the house. “Wow! An elevator inside the apartment!” one girl exclaimed.
Abu Sakhr al-Karak, a gift shop owner from the southern province of Deraa where the Syrian revolution started in 2011, had not slept all night. When news of the regime’s collapse broke before the sun rose, he did his dawn prayers and set off for Damascus along with his brothers and friends.
The former activist, who had given up protesting when the revolution turned violent, used to come to the capital every week but had not visited for 14 years. So much time had passed he could not remember the names of major streets.
“The first moments were just pure happiness. All of Syria is celebrating,” he said, speaking from one of Damascus’s most famous squares as celebratory gunshots rang out around him. “The only thing is it’s been slightly tempered by the state of chaos. We just hope no one gets hurt.”
Locals told the FT that, while armed rebel forces were guarding public institutions and banks and trying to control looting, chaos was still prevailing. In a statement on Sunday morning, the rebels urged residents not to shoot into the air or steal.
Al-Karak said widespread looting was the sole reason for hesitation, and saw HTS’s head Abu Mohammad al-Jolani as a good leader. HTS was once affiliated with al-Qaeda and is deemed a terrorist organisation by the US and others, though Jolani has sought to present the Islamist group as a more moderate force in recent years.
The regime’s fall means that thousands of Syrians in exile — both within the country and abroad — can return after more than a decade. “It’s as though my soul has come back to me — we’ve been waiting 50 years for this moment,” said Youssef Shoghr, who crossed into Damascus from Lebanon in a convoy complete with fireworks and rebel flags.
Shafiq Abu Talal, who is originally from Damascus but had been living for years in the HTS stronghold of Idlib, planned to return to his city immediately.
“My city was the last city to be free. The feelings are indescribable,” he said. He said his parents lived near a detention centre in the capital that was opened in the early hours of Sunday, a scene repeated across the country as political prisoners were released.
“Events sped up dramatically,” Abu Talal said. “The revolution lasted for 13 years and the regime ended in less than 13 days.”
After the palace, Abdallah went to the embassy of Iran, an Assad ally who together with Russia helped prop up the regime against the popular uprising.
After hours of roaming his city, Abdallah’s phone died. He stopped to charge it inside the ransacked military security building, a place he said he had never even been allowed to pass in front of.
He explained that he’d chosen the location because, unlike for the rest of the population, regime military buildings enjoyed uninterrupted electricity supply. “For them it never cuts, for us it never comes,” he said.
But Abdallah was still in disbelief: “I’m still afraid that this is a dream — that I’ll wake up. Or that it turns out they are just pretending and they’ll come back and kill us all.”
Additional reporting by Raya Jalabi in Beirut and Chloe Cornish in Dubai
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