DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Iran, which had strongly backed President Bashar Assad’s deposed government, says Syrians should decide their country’s future without “without destructive, coercive, foreign intervention.
DAMASCUS, Syria — Iran, which had strongly backed President Bashar Assad’s deposed government, says Syrians should decide their country’s future without “without destructive, coercive, foreign intervention.”
Others gleefully ransacked the presidential palace and the Assad family residence after President Bashar Assad and other top officials vanished, their whereabouts unknown. Russia, a close ally, said Assad left the country after negotiations with rebel groups and had given instructions to transfer power peacefully.
Syrian state television aired a video statement early Sunday by a group of rebels saying that Assad had been overthrown and all prisoners had been set free. They called on people to preserve the institutions of “the free Syrian state.” The rebels later announced a curfew in Damascus from 4 p.m. to 5 a.m.
Revelers filled Umayyad Square in the city center, where the Defense Ministry is located. Men fired celebratory gunshots into the air and some waved the three-starred Syrian flag that predates the Assad government and was adopted by the revolutionaries. The newspaper added that media workers should not be blamed for publishing government statements in the past, saying: “We only carried out the instructions and published the news they sent us.”
A senior diplomat from the United Arab Emirates, which had sought to rehabilitate Assad's image and has welcomed high-profile exiles in recent years, declined to comment on his whereabouts when asked by reporters at a conference in Bahrain. The rebels are led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, or HTS, which has its origins in al-Qaida and is considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the United Nations.
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