Syrians across the nation on Sunday toppled and trampled on statues of President Bashar al-Assad’s late father Hafez, who based the brutal system of presidency that his son inherited.
Within the capital Damascus, individuals cheered as they stood on a toppled statue of former president Hafez al-Assad, in a extremely symbolic second for a rustic dominated with an iron fist for 5 a long time by his clan.
The scenes got here as Islamist-led rebels declared Bashar al-Assad had fled the nation following a lightning offensive that wrested metropolis after metropolis from his management, culminating with their arrival in Damascus.
Assad dominated Syria since 2000, when he inherited energy from his father.
Since 2011, he oversaw the crackdown on the democracy motion that started with peaceable protests.
The Assad authorities’s repression of the protests morphed into one of many bloodiest wars of the century, killing tons of of hundreds of individuals and displacing hundreds of thousands.
Hafez al-Assad took energy in a 1970 coup, and arrange a paranoid and brutal regime beneath which anybody suspected of dissent may very well be jailed or killed.
Lengthy after his loss of life, his statues and picture remained a strong image of the Assad clan’s grip over Syria.
His {photograph} was pasted on partitions, establishments, places of work and faculties across the nation, typically facet by facet together with his son’s.
After 5 a long time in energy, most Syrians are too younger to recollect a time when the nation was not dominated by the Assads.
Even previous to the rebels’ declaration of the autumn of Damascus, statues of Hafez al-Assad had been toppled in different cities across the nation.
The pictures recalled footage from Iraq in 2003, when a US armoured car toppled a statue of former dictator Saddam Hussein with the assistance of a crowd of jubilant Iraqis on the day Baghdad fell to a US-led army coalition.
In Jaramana, within the suburbs of Damascus, protesters introduced down a statue of the late Syrian chief, cheering, applauding and chanting because it got here down, in accordance with photos posted on social media and verified by AFP.
In Aleppo in northern Syria, photos confirmed individuals toppling a statue of Bashar al-Assad’s brother Bassel in addition to one in all their father.
In Daraa in southern Syria, the cradle of the 2011 rebellion, on-line photos verified by AFP confirmed a insurgent fighter driving a bike down a highway and dragging a toppled statue of Hafez al-Assad behind him.
The massive steel statue seemed to be gentle sufficient to tug as a result of it was hole.
Within the metropolis of Hama, the positioning of a 1982 bloodbath by the military, rebels cheered earlier this week as they introduced down a statue of Assad as they seized the town.
Younger males celebrated the rebels’ takeover of Hama, yelling “freedom for eternity”.
Fighters there additionally paraded down one of many metropolis’s huge streets in autos that seemed to be stained utterly brown from desert mud, previous a constructing bearing a mural of Bashar al-Assad.
