Daily Times

Syria’s rebel leader on Tuesday vowed to pursue former senior government officials responsible for torture and war crimes, a day after he began talks on the transfer of power following president Bashar al-Assad’s ouster.

Assad fled Syria as the Islamist-led opposition alliance swept into the capital Damascus, bringing a spectacular end on Sunday to five decades of brutal rule by his clan. He oversaw a crackdown on a democracy movement that erupted in 2011, sparking a civil war that killed 500,000 people and forced half the country to flee their homes, millions of them finding refuge abroad.

“We will not hesitate to hold accountable the criminals, murderers, security and army officers involved in torturing the Syrian people,” rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, now using his real name Ahmed al-Sharaa, said on Tuesday in a statement on Telegram.

“We will offer rewards to anyone who provides information about senior army and security officers involved in war crimes,” he said, adding the incoming authorities would seek the return of officials who have fled abroad. Sharaa held talks on Monday with outgoing prime minister Mohammed al-Jalali “to coordinate a transfer of power that guarantees the provision of services” to Syria’s people, according to an earlier statement on Telegram.

While Syria had been at war for over 13 years, the government’s collapse came in a matter of days in a lightning offensive led by Sharaa’s Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Even as some Syrians rejoiced and others rushed to search for loved ones in Assad’s notorious jails, Israel continued to carry out air strikes aimed at destroying the former government’s military capabilities, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Early Tuesday, AFP journalists heard more loud explosions in Damascus. The Syrian Observatory said on Tuesday that Israel had “destroyed the most important military sites in Syria” with a flurry of air strikes since the fall of Assad. It said Israel has carried out “about 250 air strikes on Syrian territory” over the last 48 hours.

They targeted weapons depots, boats from the Assad government’s navy, and a research centre that Western countries suspected of having links to chemical weapons production, it said. Near the port city of Latakia, Israel targeted an air defence facility and damaged Syrian naval ships as well as military warehouses.

In and around the capital Damascus, strikes targeted military installations, research centres, and the electronic warfare administration. Israel, which borders Syria, also sent troops into a buffer zone east of the Israel-annexed Golan Heights after Assad’s fall, in what Foreign Minister Gideon Saar described as a “limited and temporary step” for “security reasons”.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which had been allied to Assad, condemned the strikes on late Monday and lambasted Israel for “occupying more land in the Golan Heights”. At the core of the system of rule that Assad inherited from his father Hafez was a brutal complex of prisons and detention centres used to eliminate dissent by those suspected of stepping out of the ruling Baath party’s line. Thousands of Syrians gathered Monday outside a jail synonymous with the worst atrocities of Assad’s rule to search for relatives, many of whom had spent years in the Saydnaya facility outside Damascus, AFP correspondents said.

Rescuers from the Syrian White Helmets group had earlier said they were looking for potential secret doors or basements in Saydnaya. “I ran like crazy” to get to the prison, said Aida Taha, 65, searching for her brother who was arrested in 2012.

“But I found out that some of the prisoners were still in the basements. There are three or four floors underground.”

Crowds of freed prisoners wandered the streets of Damascus distinguishable by the marks of their ordeal: maimed by torture, weakened by illness and emaciated by hunger. In central Damascus on Monday, despite all the uncertainty over the future, the joy was palpable.

“It’s indescribable. We never thought this nightmare would end. We are reborn,” Rim Ramadan, 49, a civil servant at the finance ministry, told AFP. “We were afraid for 55 years of speaking, even at home. We used to say the walls had ears,” Ramadan said, as people honked car horns and rebels fired their guns into the air.

Syria’s parliament, formerly pro-Assad like the prime minister, said it supports “the will of the people to build a new Syria towards a better future governed by law and justice”. The Baath party said it will support “a transitional phase in Syria aimed at defending the unity of the country.” Syrian state television’s logo on the Telegram messaging app now displays the rebel flag.

During the offensive launched on November 27, rebels met little resistance as they wrested city after city from Assad’s control, opening the gates of prisons along the way and freeing thousands, many of them held on political charges.

Some, like Fadwa Mahmoud, whose husband and son are missing, posted calls for help on social media. “Where are you, Maher and Abdel Aziz? It’s time for me to hear your news. Oh God, please come back,” wrote Mahmoud, herself a former detainee.