Syrians return to Damascus in a truck laden with their belongings on Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024. Uncertainty persists about the country’s direction after rebels ousted President Bashar Assad. NICOLE TUNG NYT
DAMASCUS, Syria -- The rebel alliance that overthrew the Assad government in Syria vowed Tuesday to hunt down and punish senior officials of the previous regime who are implicated in torture and other abuses, but said rank-and-file conscripted soldiers would receive amnesty.
The leader of the rebel force that stormed into the Syrian capital, Damascus, over the weekend issued statements suggesting he was seeking to strike a balance between retribution and filling the power vacuum left after President Bashar Assad fled to Russia and the Syrian government disintegrated.
“We will not relent in holding accountable the criminals, murderers and security and military officers involved in torturing the Syrian people,” the rebel leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. He heads Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the most powerful of the armed factions that toppled Assad.
Al-Sharaa said the rebel group would soon announce “List No. 1,” which will contain senior figures “implicated in the torture of the Syrian people.” The group will also issue rewards to those who provide information about officials who took part in war crimes, he said.
The announcement comes at a time of jubilation and great uncertainty in Syria, with foreign powers jockeying for advantage in the country as the rebel leadership seeks to assert itself. Israel said Tuesday that it had destroyed Syria’s navy and other military assets in overnight airstrikes, arguing that it needed to keep them out of the hands of militants.
Turkey -- which backed militias fighting the Assad regime -- and another Syrian rebel ally group have seized on the power vacuum, mounting an offensive against the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria.
At the presidential palace in Damascus on Tuesday, a contingent of rebels stood watch at the gate, keeping out would-be looters and curious civilians. They sleep on couches in a cavernous reception hall.
Mohammed al-Bashir, a rebel leader affiliated with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, announced Tuesday in a brief address on Syrian television that he was assuming the role of caretaker prime minister until March. 1. A little-known figure in most of the country, al-Bashir previously served as the head of the administration in rebel-held territory in the northwest.
Even as the former rebels sought to consolidate power, Syria’s neighbors set out to shore up their own interests. Great powers have fought for centuries for influence in the strategic territory now known as Syria, and the fall of the Assad regime seemed to intensify the interest in the lands stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Euphrates River and beyond.
Israeli leaders fear that the Syrian revolution could replace one implacable enemy, the secular Assad regime, with another, one with a specifically religious bent. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, originally an offshoot of al-Qaida, is labeled a terrorist group by the United States and others. It contends it has moderated and will work with other religious groups, but it has offered few hints about its intentions toward Israel. There are also concerns that the fall of Assad could empower a resurgent Islamic State group.
Israel said Tuesday that it had carried out 350 airstrikes against Syrian military targets overnight. “We would like to form relations with the new regime in Syria,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
Over the weekend, the Israeli military also seized control of a buffer zone in Syria bordering the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
The United Nations special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, said that the rebels “have been sending good messages to the Syrian people,” signaling that they wanted a government of “unity and inclusiveness,” not a theocracy. Israel’s military operations in Syria are “very troubling,” Pedersen told reporters in Geneva. “This needs to stop.”
As Syria’s rebels seek to carry out an orderly transition to a new government, he said, it is “extremely important that we don’t see any action from any international actor that destroys the possibility for this transformation in Syria to take place.”
Armed groups with competing interests are still battling in Syria for territory and power, trying to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the Assad regime.
In northern Syria, fierce fighting was underway Tuesday near the town of Kobani between Turkey-backed rebels, aided by Turkish airstrikes, and the Kurdish-led forces supported by the United States. For years the Kurds have held most of northeastern Syria, while Turkey and its rebel allies have controlled a neighboring piece of Syria along the Turkish border.
In recent days, the U.S.-backed rebels, who call themselves the Syrian Democratic Forces, have been moving into areas vacated by government forces.
The clashes Tuesday signaled an intensification of a long-running conflict between Turkey and its proxies, and Kurdish forces. The fighting had centered on the Kurdish-controlled city of Manbij, not far from the Turkish border. Turkish-backed forces captured the city on Monday, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and pushed north toward Kobani, less than 40 miles away.
Turkey aims to weaken Kurdish forces, which it calls terrorists, putting it at odds with the United States, even though both countries are NATO allies.
U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for the Middle East, said Tuesday that Gen. Michael Kurilla, who leads the command, had visited U.S. and allied forces at several bases in Syria. The United States, the statement said, remains committed “to the enduring defeat” of the Islamic State group.
In the Homs region in central Syria on Tuesday, Islamic State forces killed 54 people who had been part of the government’s military and were fleeing, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war.
The U.S., which has refused to have direct relations with either Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or the Assad government, stated its hopes Tuesday for the transition in Syria.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken laid out a list of expectations for the new government in Damascus, including inclusive and “nonsectarian governance,” respect for the rights of minorities and facilitating the flow of humanitarian aid. Blinken also said the new government must “prevent Syria from being used as a base for terrorism.”
“The United States will recognize and fully support a future Syria government that results from this process,” Blinken said. “We stand prepared to lend all appropriate support to all of Syria’s diverse communities and constituencies.”
The British government said Tuesday that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham would not be removed from its list of banned terror organizations for now, but that the group’s proscribed status would not prevent Britain from communicating with it.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham broke ties with al-Qaida in 2016 and fought against the Islamic State, trying to gain international legitimacy by casting aside global jihad ambitions and focusing on organized governance in Syria. But it has also come under criticism for its authoritarian governance of northwestern Syria, where it cracked down on dissent.
Human rights groups say that more than 500,000 people, including around 200,000 civilians, died in Syria’s civil war, which began in 2011, but attention has focused on the atrocities committed by Assad’s government.
The whereabouts of about 136,000 people arrested arbitrarily by the regime is unknown. In many cases, the government did not acknowledge that people had been detained, leaving relatives in the dark, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. At least 15,000 people were tortured to death by the government, the network said.
Human rights experts say it will take time to set up Syrian police and court systems capable of rendering justice for such crimes, and that can be done only once security in the country has been established.
Since the sudden fall of the Assad regime, residents of Damascus have stormed prisons and government buildings. They rushed into one of the most notorious symbols of Assad’s rule, Saydnaya prison, just north of Damascus, where untold numbers of people were tortured and thousands were executed in mass hangings after sham trials.
Some 2,000 prisoners emerged from Saydnaya on Sunday, according to Fadel Abdul Ghany, director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, which has monitored Assad’s labyrinth of prisons. But the rest of the approximately 11,000 detainees who he said were being held there when the government was overthrown were nowhere to be found.
On Tuesday, hundreds of families descended into the morgue at Al-Moujtahed Hospital in Damascus, where rebels had brought 38 bodies discovered at Saydnaya.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Copyright 2024
This story was originally published December 10, 2024, 6:28 PM.