DAMASCUS – The first flight since the ouster of Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad took off on Wednesday from Damascus airport to Aleppo in the country’s north, AFP journalists saw.
Forty-three people including journalists were on board the plane. Assad fled Syria as a lightning rebel offensive wrested from his control city after city. His army and security forces abandoned Damascus airport on December 8.
His overthrow brought to a stunning end five decades of rule by the Assad clan that was marked by fear and horrific abuses, but it also plunged Syria into the unknown.
Here are some of the latest key developments:
The military chief of HTS said the Islamist group would be “the first” to dissolve its armed wing and integrate into the armed forces.
“All military units must be integrated into this institution,” Murhaf Abu Qasra, known by his nom de guerre Abu Hassan al-Hamawi, said in an interview with AFP.
He added that Kurdish-held areas of Syria would be integrated under the country’s new leadership, adding that the group rejects federalism and that “Syria will not be divided”.
Abu Qasra also called on the international community to “find a solution” to repeated Israeli strikes and an “incursion” into Syrian territory.
“We view the Israeli strikes on military sites and the incursion into southern Syria as injust… we call on the international community to find a solution to this matter,” he said.
The first flight since Assad’s ouster took off on Wednesday from Damascus airport to Aleppo in the country’s north, AFP journalists saw.
Forty-three people including journalists were on board the Syrian Air plane. Assad’s army and security forces had abandoned Damascus airport on Dec. 8.
United Nations special envoy Geir Pedersen warned that Syria’s protracted conflict “has not ended yet” despite Assad’s overthrow, highlighting clashes between Turkish-backed and Kurdish groups in the north.
“There have been significant hostilities in the last two weeks, before a ceasefire was brokered… A five-day ceasefire has now expired and I am seriously concerned about reports of military escalation,” he said.
Shortly after Pedersen spoke, the United States announced it had brokered an extension of the ceasefire, to the end of the week.
The UN Security Council called for an “inclusive and Syrian-led” political process, in a press statement on Tuesday.
It said such process “should meet the legitimate aspirations of all Syrians, protect all of them and enable them to peacefully, independently and democratically determine their own futures.”
Turkish rescue workers have ended their search for survivors in Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison, after finding no detainees languishing in any hidden cells.
Located just north of Damascus, the prison became a symbol of rights abuses under president Assad.
Thousands of people released from prisons have been reunited with their families, but tens of thousands of others remain unaccounted for, leaving families desperate for closure.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, more than 100,000 people died in custody from 2011 in Assad’s web of jails and detention centers.
EU chief Ursula Von der Leyen said the bloc would intensify its “direct engagement” with Syria’s new rulers.
France, Britain and Germany have sent delegations to Damascus, while Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said Rome was “ready to engage with the new Syrian leadership”, but urged “maximum caution”.
“Words must be followed by actions and we will judge the new Syrian authorities on their actions,” she said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a security briefing atop a strategic Syrian mountain inside a UN-patrolled buffer zone that Israel seized this month, the defence minister said.
Netanyahu, Defence Minister Israel Katz and top security officials visited “outposts at the summit of Mount Hermon for the first time since they were seized by the military,” Katz’s office said.
