Damascus began a slow return to normalcy Monday as anti-regime forces took control of the capital following Bashar Assad's flight to Russia, marking the end of his family's 50-year rule and 13 years of civil war.
Heavy traffic returned to the streets and people ventured out after a nighttime curfew but most shops remained shut. Members of the armed groups milled about in the center.
Firdous Omar, from Idlib in the northwest, among fighters in central Umayyad Square, said he had been battling the Assad government since 2011 and was now looking forward to laying down his weapon and returning to his job as a farmer.
"We had a purpose and a goal and now we are done with it. We want the state and security forces to be in charge."
The lightning advance of an anti-Assad alliance spearheaded by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) was a generational turning point for the Middle East.
It ended a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, caused one of the biggest refugee crises of modern times and left cities bombed to rubble, swathes of countryside depopulated and the economy hollowed out by global sanctions. Millions of refugees could finally go home from camps across Türkiye, Lebanon and Jordan.
Assad's fall wiped out one of the main bastions from which Iran and Russia wielded power across the region. Türkiye, long aligned with the Syrian opposition, emerges strengthened, while Israel hailed it as an outcome of its blows to Assad's Iran-backed allies.
The Arab world faces the challenge of reintegrating one of the Middle East's central states which also saw horrific sectarian violence carried out by the Daesh terrorist group.
The HTS leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, better known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani, vowed to rebuild Syria.
"A new history, my brothers, is being written in the entire region after this great victory," he told a huge crowd at the ancient Umayyad Mosque in Damascus on Sunday. With hard work, Syria would be "a beacon for the Islamic nation."
Assad's prime minister, Mohammed Jalali, told Sky News Arabia he would be willing to meet with Golani and was ready to provide documents and assistance for the transfer of power.
The fate of Syria's army would be "left to the brothers who will take over the management of the country's affairs," he said. "What concerns us today is the continuation of services for Syrians."
Assad's police state was known for generations as one of the harshest in the Middle East, holding hundreds of thousands of political prisoners.
On Sunday, elated inmates poured out of jails. Reunited families wept in joy. Newly freed prisoners were filmed running through the Damascus streets holding up their hands to show how many years they had been in prison.
The White Helmets rescue organization said it had dispatched emergency teams to search for hidden underground cells still believed to hold detainees.
One of the final areas to fall to the anti-regime forces was the Mediterranean coast, the heartland of Assad's Alawite sect and the site of Russia's naval base.
Looting took place in the coastal city of Latakia on Sunday but had subsided Monday, residents said, with few people in the streets and shortages of fuel and bread.
Two Alawite residents said that so far the situation had panned out better than they had expected, seemingly without sectarian retribution against Alawites.
One said a friend had been visited at home by rebel fighters who told him to hand over any weapons he had, which he did.
Near Latakia, anti-regime forces had yet to enter the Assad family's ancestral village of Qardaha, the site of a huge mausoleum for Assad's father who took power in the 1960s. A resident said all senior figures tied to Assad and his rule had left.
"Only the poor are left here. The rich guys and thieves are gone," he said.
The Kremlin said it was too early to know the future of Russia's military bases in Syria, but it would discuss the issue with the new authorities.
