DAMASCUS, Syria – They streamed in by the thousands, flooding Damascus's Umayyad Square with a sea of cars and people in an impromptu parade to celebrate the secret escape of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad the morning before.
“Lift your head up. “You are a free Syrian,” a voice rang out from a bank of speakers on a pickup truck parked nearby. Nearby, a group of young men and children swarmed over an abandoned Syrian army tank, chanting “May Allah curse your soul, Hafez” – a reference to Assad's father Hafez, who ruled Syria for three decades before he died.
Meanwhile, dozens of militants maintained a near-constant staccato of celebratory machine gun fire, leaving a carpet of spent cartridges on the asphalt.
Off to the side, a young man stamped on the singed copies of a tome titled “The Speech on Principles and the National Decision of President Bashar Al-Assad,” which included a portrait of the former president.
“That scumbag, we finally got rid of him,” he said, punctuating his words by stepping on Assad’s picture before rushing toward the crowd in the center of the square.
Over the centuries, Damascus has been many things: a metropolis that served as the center of an Islamic caliphate; a hotbed for Arab anti-colonialist movements; and the seat of a political dynasty that was one of the defining forces of the contemporary political landscape of the Arab world. Now it is searching for a new identity as its residents wake up to the post-Assad reality and the thousands of unkempt, bearded militants who have appeared – seemingly overnight – at every major intersection and state institution.
For many Damascenes, the prevailing emotions are a mixture of joy and fear.
“We are happy, of course, but we are afraid of what is coming,” said Muna Maidani, a 28-year-old who was walking with her two children near Umayyad Square – one of the Syrian capital's most famous landmarks.
A man holds the Syrian opposition flag as he walks past a poster of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the capital Damascus on December 9, 2024.
(Omar Sanadiki/Associated Press)
Was the rebels' entry into the capital a surprise for Maidani?
“Absolutely,” she said.
“But a good one,” interrupted her sister, 22-year-old Shaymaa. The two of them jumped as a gunman raised his rifle in the air with one hand and fired a volley.
“But hopefully we’ll be done shooting soon,” Shaymaa added as she quickly moved away from the field of fire.
For many of the militants, many of whom come from rural areas of Syria, it was the first time they had set foot in the capital.
People celebrate in Umayyad Square in Syria on December 9, 2024.
(Omar Sanadiki/Associated Press)
“It’s the capital of Syria, so of course it’s beautiful. It was ruled by a tyrant, but now we will build a new Syria,” said Abdul-Ilah Hmoud, a 24-year-old from the northwestern province of Idlib, which is ruled by Hayat Tahrir al Sham, the Islamist faction. and former al-Qaeda affiliate – leader of the rebel coalition.
“We will make it like a European country where everyone has rights.”
Elsewhere there was less jubilation and more confusion over the speed of Assad's downfall. The road from the Lebanese border to Damascus is lined with army bases and checkpoints, and a drive on Monday morning suggested what appeared to be a complete collapse of the army as opposition fighters from the rebel coalition attacked the capital.
Mohsen Haykal, a 32-year-old bearded militant with a beard of burnt copper, proudly pointed to a broken tank standing to the side with three children strolling along its turret and spoke disparagingly of his now-defeated opponents.
“They didn’t resist at all,” Haykal said as he manned a highway checkpoint nearly 15 miles west of the capital’s entrance. “We confiscated it. His crew simply ran away.”
On a nearby hill overlooking the highway was the base of the chemical weapons battalion of the 4th Armored Division, an elite unit led by Assad's younger brother Maher that had acted as a kind of Praetorian Guard for his government. But it too seemed to have melted away, and there was no sign of current activity on the base, aside from a discarded uniform and a peeled clementine on a desk in the command office.
So far, the militants appear to have largely succeeded in maintaining order in the capital, with little of the initial looting seen on Sunday – at the presidential palace, the central bank, not to mention ATMs and SIM card dispensing machines across the city .
In a statement on Monday, Hayat Tahrir al Sham announced “a general amnesty for all military personnel conscripted for compulsory service,” adding that “their lives are safe” and banning any acts of revenge.
Assad's overthrow ends more than six decades of rule by the Baath Party, which sought to establish Syria as a leading power in the Arab world but left the country mired in corruption and impoverished.
But for Syria's minority communities, the alternative now on offer, namely a government dominated by the ideology of militant Islamists, leaves little room for optimism.
“In my opinion, we have two options: the Egyptian model or the Iraqi model,” said Jamil Yashou, the 38-year-old priest at St. Teresa's Chaldean Catholic Church in the capital's Christian quarter. In its depiction, the Egyptian model referred to the Muslim Brotherhood, which came to power in Egypt after the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions, but whose government was soon deposed in an army-backed coup and replaced by an autocrat. The latter refers to the sectarian bloodshed that followed the ouster of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
Yashou was no fan of Assad: He had been picked up by one of the country's notoriously tough secret services for making an inappropriate comment about the president in a phone call with a friend. But he fears that what follows – the chaos in Iraq after Saddam or the failed Islamist rule in Egypt after Mubarak – could prove to be the most important legacy of the Syrian conflict.
“I was happy when I saw Assad go,” he said. “But I fear a constitution that makes me a second-class citizen.”