In post-Assad Damascus, a mix of joy and trepidation
DAMASCUS, Syria — They streamed in by the thousands, deluging Damascus’ Umayyad Square in a sea of cars and people for an impromptu parade to celebrate the stealthy flight of former Syrian President Bashar Assad the morning before.
“Raise your head high. You are a free Syrian,” blared a voice from a bank of loudspeakers atop a pickup truck parked nearby. To the side, a gaggle 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 his death.
Meanwhile, dozens of militants kept up 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 stomped at the singed copies of a tome entitled “The speech on tenets and the national decision by President Bashar Al-Assad,” which bore a portrait of the former president.
“That scumbag, we’re finally rid of him,” he said, emphasizing the words by stepping on Assad’s image before rushing to join 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 stirrings; and the seat of a political dynasty that was one of the defining forces of the Arab world’s contemporary political landscape. It now searches for a new identity, as its residents wake up to the post-Assad reality and the thousands of scruffy, bearded militants who have — seemingly overnight — sprouted at every major intersection and state institution.
For many Damascenes, the dominant feelings are a mix of joy and trepidation.
“We’re happy, of course, but we’re afraid of what’s coming,” said Muna Maidani, a 28-year-old who was walking near Umayyad Square — one of the Syrian capital’s most famous landmarks — with her two children.
Was the rebels’ entry into the capital a surprise for Maidani?
“For sure,” she said.
“But a good one,” interrupted her sister, 22-year-old Shaymaa. The two of them winced when a gunman raised his rifle with one hand into the air and let loose a salvo.
“But hopefully soon we’ll be done with the shooting,” Shaymaa added as she hurried away from the gunfire.
For a good number of the militants, many of whom hail from Syria’s rural regions, it was their first time entering the capital.
“It’s the capital of Syria, so of course it’s beautiful. It was ruled by a tyrant, but now we’ll 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 — leading the rebel coalition.
“We’ll make it like a European country, where everyone has rights.”
Elsewhere, it was less jubilation than confusion at the swiftness of Assad’s fall. The road to Damascus from the Lebanese border is lined with army bases and checkpoints, and a trip on Monday morning hinted at what appeared to be a total collapse in the army’s ranks as opposition fighters with the rebel coalition bore down on the capital.
Pointing with pride at a broken-down tank sitting off to the side with three children shimmying along its turret, Mohsen Haykal, a 32-year-old bearded militant with a burnt-copper beard, spoke dismissively of his now vanquished adversaries.
“They didn’t put up a fight at all,” said Haykal, as he manned a highway checkpoint nearly 15 miles west of the capital’s entrance. “We commandeered it. Its crew just ran away.”
On a nearby hill overlooking the highway was the chemical warfare battalion base for the 4th Armored Division, an elite unit led by Assad’s younger brother Maher and which had acted as a sort of praetorian guard for his government. Yet it too appeared to have melted away, with no sign of recent activity at the base save for a discarded uniform and a peeled clementine on a desk in the command office.
So far, the militants seem to have largely succeeded in keeping order in the capital, with little of the initial looting — at the presidential palace, the central bank, not to mention ATMs and SIM card-dispensing machines around town — that was seen Sunday.
In a statement Monday, Hayat Tahrir al Sham announced “a general amnesty for all military personnel conscripted under compulsory service,” adding that “their lives are safe” and proscribing any revenge assaults.
Assad’s fall ends more than six decades of Baath Party rule that sought to center Syria as a leader in the Arab world, but instead left it corruption-riddled and impoverished.
Yet for Syria’s minority communities, the alternative now on offer, namely a government dominated by the ideology of the Islamist militants, leaves little room for optimism.
“The way I see it, we have two options, the Egyptian or the Iraqi model,” said Jamil Yashou, the 38-year-old priest of the St. Teresa Chaldean Catholic Church in the capital’s Christian quarter. The Egyptian model, in his telling, referred to the Muslim Brotherhood, which came to power after the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions in Egypt but whose government was soon removed in an army-backed coup and replaced by an autocrat. The latter refers to the sectarian bloodletting that followed Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein’s removal.
Yashou was no fan of Assad: He had been picked up by one of the country’s notoriously strict intelligence services for an off-color remark about the president in a phone call with a friend. But he fears what follows — the chaos of a post-Saddam Iraq, or the aborted Islamist governance of post-Mubarak Egypt — may prove to be the most important legacy of Syria’s conflict.
“I was happy when I saw Assad go,” he said. “But I fear a constitution that will leave me a second-class citizen.”
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