Syria live: rebels say they have captured Damascus as Pentagon says US will keep presence in eastern Syria – latest updates

Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, has said that Syria’s government has collapsed confirming reporting.

The “Assad regime collapsed and control of the country is changing hands”, Fidan said a the Doha Forum in Qatar.

He said that “this didn’t happen overnight. For the last 13 years, the country has been in turmoil” since civil war began with Assad’s repression of democracy protests in 2011.

Ankara has for years supported Syrian opposition forces looking to oust the Iran and Russia-backed Assad. A main concern of Turkey is the presence in northern Syria of the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which it regards as a terrorist group, closely tied with militants in Turkey who have fought a 40-year insurgency against the Turkish state.

The Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, has written the following about Turkey’s involvement in Syria (you can read his full anlaysis here):

Earlier this year, Assad had refused to speak to Turkey so long as Turkish forces remained in Syria. This refusal led the President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to give the implicit green light to militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) last month to mount its stunningly successful attacks on Aleppo, and more recently into the city of Homs.

Ankara is convinced that the Syrian YPG, fighting under the flag of the Syrian Defence Forces and backed by the US, is the same as the Turkish Kurdish group, the PKK.

But there is no guarantee that Turkey can control the Islamist HTS, or simply order the group to end an offensive that has proved far more effective than even the HTS expected.

The Pentagon has said the US will keep a presence in eastern Syria and take the appropriate steps to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State.

Deputy assistant secretary of defence for the Middle East, Daniel Shapiro, also called for civilians, particularly minorities, to be protected and for international law to be adhered to by all parties, according to Sky News.

US ambassador Robert Wood said last week that American military positions and personnel in northeastern Syria remain essential to ensuring Islamic State can never resurge.

American troops are also stationed at Syria’s Tanf garrison near the intersection of the borders of Jordan and Iraq, where they support a Syrian rebel force to counter Islamic State in the area.

Assad’s government viewed US forces as occupiers. About 900 US troops are currently in the country, mostly in the northeast.

The rebels who have swept through Syria are led by Islamist alliance Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, along with an umbrella group of Turkish-backed Syrian militias called the Syrian National Army (SNA).

Here is an extract from our explainer on HTS, which is rooted in Syria’s branch of Al-Qaida, and the SNA:

Both have been entrenched in the north-west. They launched the shock offensive on 27 November with gunmen capturing Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, and the central city of Hama, the fourth largest.

The founder of HTS, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, was once a participant in the Iraqi insurgency against the US as a member of the group that eventually became Islamic State.

In its former incarnation as Jabhat al-Nusra or the Al-Nusra front, HTS later declared allegiance to al-Qaida. It eventually publicly broke those ties in 2016 and rebranded as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, or Organization for the Liberation of the Levant.

HTS is now the most powerful rebel faction in Syria.

It is designated as a terrorist group by the US and there are serious human rights concerns in the area it controls, including executions for those accused of affiliation with rival groups and over allegations of blasphemy and adultery.

The HTS and Syrian National Army have been allies at times and rivals at times, and their aims might diverge.

A portrait of President Assad on the side of a building in Damascus, the Syrian capital.

Celebrations in the Umayyad square, Damascus.

People have gathered in Aleppo, the country’s second-largest city, which was seized by rebels last week.

From Homs, Syria’s third largest city.

Rebel fighters parade detained members of Syrian government forces in Homs.

Many Syrian people – forced to live in exile – are rushing to the Lebanese and Jordanian borders, desperate to return home:

Eleni Courea is a political correspondent for the Guardian.

In the UK, Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, welcomed the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.

She told Sky News’ Trevor Phillips on Sunday: “The situation looks very serious. If Assad’s regime has fallen I welcome that news”. She added that Assad “wasn’t exactly good to the Syrian people”.

“What we need to see is a political resolution in line with the UN resolutions. We need to see civilians and infrastructure protected, far too many people have lost their lives, we need stability in that region,” the deputy prime minister said.

Asked about British citizens in Syria, Rayner said: “We’ve had a plan to ensure that people were evacuated ahead of what’s happened over the weekend and we continue to support our UK nationals.”

Iranian media is reporting that Iran’s embassy in Damascus has been attacked. Images circulating on social media show some of the building’s windows have been broken.

Videos also show a banner of former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah – who was assassinated by Israeli forces in September – and Iranian general Qassem Suleimani – who was killed in US airstrikes in 2020 – being torn by a crowd.

“Unknown individuals have attacked the Iranian embassy, as you can see in these images, shared by various networks,” an Iranian state TV broadcaster said, showing footage said to be from inside the diplomatic compound.

We mentioned in the opening summary that there are separate reports that the Iraqi embassy building in Damascus has been evacuated. The reason for the reported evacuation is not clear yet.

Welcome back to our live coverage of the rebel offensive that seems to have been successful in toppling the Syrian government, led by longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad.

Here are the latest developments:

• Rebel forces, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, in Damascus have declared the Syrian capital “free” of Assad as government forces withdraw their presence.

• In the capital’s central square, people climbed on top of tanks and cheered as they trampled on a toppled statue of Assad’s father, Hafez.

• The Syrian rebel coalition said it is continuing work to complete the transfer of power in Syria to a transitional governing body with full executive powers.

• Syrian prime minister Mohammed Ghazi Jalali said the government is ready to “extend its hand” to the opposition and hand over its functions to a transitional government. “I am in my house and I have not left, and this is because of my belonging to this country,” Jalili said.

• Syria’s army command notified officers on Sunday that Assad’s regime had ended, Reuters is reporting. But the Syrian army later said it was continuing operations against “terrorist groups” in the key cities of Hama and Homs and in Deraa countryside.

• Assad, who has ruled the country for nearly 25 years, has reportedly left Damascus by plane for an unknown destination.

• US president-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday that Assad had “fled his country” after losing the backing of Russia. “Assad is gone,” he said on his Truth Social platform. “His protector, Russia, Russia, Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was not interested in protecting him any longer.”

• Outgoing US President Joe Biden and his team were monitoring the “extraordinary events in Syria” and were in touch with regional partners, the White House said.

• As armed rebels swept cities across the country, they flung open detention facilities where rights groups estimated that at least 100,000 people were considered missing or forcibly disappeared since 2011 at the hands of the state. This included the Sednaya military prison, a facility notorious as the site of particularly brutal and humiliating methods of torture.

• Iraq has reportedly evacuated its embassy in Syria and moved staff to Lebanon, hours after rebels overthrew Assad and took control of the capital. Reasons behind the evacuation were not made public.