DAMASCUS: Bashar al-Assad and his family are in Moscow, where he has been granted asylum on humanitarian grounds, Russian news agencies Interfax, TASS and Ria Novosti announced on Sunday evening, citing a Kremlin source, hours after he fled Syria.

The Kremlin had earlier said he had “stepped down” as president and “left Syria” hours after rebel forces took control of the Syrian capital, BBC News reported on Sunday.

Assad has not been pictured since he met the Iranian foreign minister in Damascus a week ago. That day, he vowed to “crush” the rebels seizing territory with dizzying speed.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said Assad left on a private plane that took off from Damascus international airport at 1900 GMT on Saturday night, without specifying where he headed.

After that, the army and security forces pulled out of the airport, with commercial flights already suspended earlier, the UK-based Observatory added.

The rebels, who began a lightning offensive on Oct 27, quickly announced they had toppled “tyrant” Assad and that Damascus was a “free” city, calling on millions of Syrians who fled the war for safety abroad to return home.

Assad’s location was not clear on Sunday morning, and it was being speculated that he had headed to Russia, Iran or the UAE. Meanwhile, Reuters cited two unnamed senior Syrian army officers as saying that Assad had boarded a Syrian Air plane at Damascus airport early on Sunday.

It noted that a Syrian Air Ilyushin Il-76T cargo plane took off from the airport at 01:59 GMT with an undisclosed destination.

According to data from Flightradar24, the plane initially flew east away from the capital before turning to the north-west and heading towards the Medit­erranean coast.

After flying over the central city of Homs - which fell to the rebels on Saturday night — at an altitude of 20,000ft (6,095m) the plane made a U-turn and started flying eastwards again while also losing altitude.

The plane’s transponder signal was lost at around 02:39 GMT, when it was about 13km west of Homs and flying at an altitude of 495m.

Flightradar24 said in a post on X that the aircraft “was old with an older transponder generation, so some data might be bad or missing”, that it was “flying in an area of GPS jamming, so some data might be bad”, and that there was not aware of any airports in the area where the signal was lost.

Published in Dawn, December 9th, 2024