Seventy-nine Pakistani pilgrims have been evacuated to Beirut while the Syrian rebels now in power have appointed Mohammed al-Bashir as head of a transitional government that will be in place until March 1, state media said on Tuesday, a day after talks began on the transfer of power following ex-president Bashar al-Assad’s ouster.

Assad fled Syria as the opposition alliance swept into the capital Damascus, bringing a spectacular end on Sunday to five decades of brutal rule by his clan.

He oversaw a crackdown on a democracy movement that erupted in 2011, sparking a civil war that killed 500,000 people and forced half the country to flee their homes, millions of them finding refuge abroad.

In a brief address on state television, Bashir, a figure little known across most of Syria who previously ran an administration in a small pocket of the northwest controlled by rebels, said he would lead the interim authority until March 1.

“Today we held a cabinet meeting that included a team from the Salvation Government that was working in Idlib and its vicinity, and the government of the ousted regime,” he said.

“The meeting was under the headline of transferring the files and institutions to caretake the government.”

Behind him were two flags: the green, black and white flag flown by opponents of Assad throughout the civil war, and a white flag with the Islamic oath of faith in black writing, typically flown in Syria by Sunni fighters.

A statement attributed to Bashir on state television’s Telegram account referred to him as “the new Syrian prime minister”.

Before being tapped for the role, he had been head of the rebels’ so-called Salvation Government in northwest Syria and previously held the role of its development minister.

A source within the political affairs department of the Salvation Government also told AFP that Bashir would head the transitional government.

The new interim Syrian leader has little political profile beyond Idlib province, the small, largely rural region of the northwest where rebels had maintained an administration during the long years that Syria’s civil war front lines were frozen.

A Facebook page of the rebel administration says he was trained as an electrical engineer, later received a degree in sharia and law, and had held various posts in areas, including education.

Israel’s incursion in the southwest and its airstrikes on the bases of the defeated army create an additional security problem for the new administration, although Israel insists its intervention is temporary.

The Salvation Government, with its own ministries, departments, judicial and security authorities, was set up in the Idlib bastion in 2017 to assist people in the rebel-held area people cut off from government services.

It has since begun rolling out assistance in Aleppo, the first major city to fall from government hands after the rebels began their offensive.

Meanwhile, a meeting of the federal cabinet was briefed on the evacuation of Pakistanis from Syria in the context of the latest situation, according to a statement by state broadcaster PTV.

The cabinet members were informed that 79 out of 250 Pakistani pilgrims in Syria had reached Beirut from where they would be brought back to Pakistan. The statement added that seven out of around 20 teachers and students in Syria had also reached Beirut.

The meeting’s participants were further informed that the authorities of the Pakistani embassy in Syria and Lebanon were taking all possible steps to ensure the safe return of citizens from Syria.

Earlier, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said he spoke with Lebanon PM Najib Mikati yesterday evening to coordinate the return of “some 500-600 Pakistanis” from Syria via Beirut.

Addressing the federal cabinet meeting, the premier quoted PM Mikati as agreeing to the request readily and assuring that there would be no visa-related issues.

PM Shehbaz added that the government was suggested to schedule chartered flights through Lebanon’s Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport.

The prime minister recalled that he contacted the Pakistani envoys in Syria and Lebanon, with the latter confirming he spoke with PM Mikati about the matter.

PM Shehbaz called the return of 250 Pakistani pilgrims as well as 300 others, including students and teachers, a “matter of concern”, noting the need to make quick preparations.

Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar, who is also the foreign minister, was in touch with Pakistan’s ambassador in Syria for the repatriation of citizens, the premier noted.

In the Syrian capital, banks reopened for the first time since Assad’s overthrow.

Shops were also reopening, traffic returned to the roads, construction workers were back fixing a roundabout in the Damascus city centre and street cleaners were out sweeping the streets.

There was a notable decrease in the number of armed men on the streets.

Two sources close to the rebels said their command had ordered fighters to withdraw from cities and police and for internal security forces affiliated with the main rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Shams (HTS), to deploy there.

While Syria had been at war for over 13 years, the government’s collapse came in a matter of days led by HTS.

Syria’s war has killed more than 500,000 people and forced half of the population to flee their homes.

Assad’s departure comes less than two weeks after the HTS group challenged more than five decades of Assad family rule with a lightning rebel offensive that broke long-frozen frontlines in Syria’s civil war.

HTS is rooted in Syria’s Al-Qaeda branch but broke ties with the group in 2016. The group and its leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, are under EU sanctions.

They announced on Sunday they had taken Damascus and that Assad fled, prompting nationwide celebrations and a ransacking of Assad’s luxurious home.

A Kremlin source told Russian news agencies the deposed leader and family were now in Moscow.

Germany and France said in a statement they were ready to cooperate with Syria’s new leadership “on the basis of fundamental human rights and the protection of ethnic and religious minorities”.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, in Saudi Arabia a day ago, said HTS must reject “terrorism and violence” before Britain could engage with the group designated “terrorist” by London.

Washington’s top diplomat, Antony Blinken, had said the United States, with hundreds of troops in Syria as part of a coalition against the militant Islamic State group (IS), was determined to prevent IS from re-establishing safe havens.

“We have a clear interest in doing what we can to avoid the fragmentation of Syria, mass migrations from Syria and, of course, the export of terrorism and extremism,” Blinken said.

Rebel leader vows to pursue former officials for torture, war crimes

Meanwhile, Syria’s rebel leader vowed to pursue former senior government officials responsible for torture and war crimes, a day after he began talks on the transfer of power.

“We will not hesitate to hold accountable the criminals, murderers, security and army officers involved in torturing the Syrian people,” al-Jolani, now using his real name Ahmed al-Sharaa, said in a statement on Telegram.

“We will offer rewards to anyone who provides information about senior army and security officers involved in war crimes,” he said, adding the incoming authorities would seek the return of officials who have fled abroad.

Sharaa held talks a day ago with outgoing prime minister Mohammed al-Jalali “to coordinate a transfer of power that guarantees the provision of services” to Syria’s people, according to an earlier statement on Telegram.

War monitor says Israel conducted 300 strikes on Syria since Assad’s fall

Even as some Syrians rejoiced and others rushed to search for loved ones in Assad’s notorious jails, Israel continued to carry out air strikes aimed at destroying the former government’s military capabilities, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Since his ouster, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it had recorded more than 300 Israeli strikes.

AFP journalists in the capital Damascus heard loud explosions today, but could not independently verify the source or scope of the attacks.

The Syrian Observatory said that Israel had “destroyed the most important military sites in Syria” with a flurry of air strikes.

They targeted weapons depots, boats from the Assad government’s navy, and a research centre that Western countries suspected of having links to chemical weapons production, it said.

Near the port city of Latakia, Israel targeted an air defence facility and damaged Syrian naval ships as well as military warehouses.

In and around the capital Damascus, strikes targeted military installations, research centres, and the electronic warfare administration.

Israel, which borders Syria, also sent troops into a buffer zone east of the Israel-annexed Golan Heights after Assad’s fall, in what Foreign Minister Gideon Saar described as a “limited and temporary step” for “security reasons”.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which had been allied to Assad, condemned the strikes a day ago and lambasted Israel for “occupying more land in the Golan Heights”.

Prison nightmare

At the core of the system of rule that Assad inherited from his father Hafez was a brutal complex of prisons and detention centres used to eliminate dissent by those suspected of stepping out of the ruling Baath party’s line.

Thousands of Syrians gathered a day ago outside a jail synonymous with the worst atrocities of Assad’s rule to search for relatives, many of whom had spent years in the Saydnaya facility outside Damascus, AFP correspondents said.

Rescuers from the Syrian White Helmets group had earlier said they were looking for potential secret doors or basements in Saydnaya.

“I ran like crazy” to get to the prison, said Aida Taha, 65, searching for her brother who was arrested in 2012.

“But I found out that some of the prisoners were still in the basements. There are three or four floors underground.”

Crowds of freed prisoners wandered the streets of Damascus distinguishable by the marks of their ordeal: maimed by torture, weakened by illness and emaciated by hunger.

‘We are reborn’

In central Damascus a day ago, despite all the uncertainty over the future, the joy was palpable.

“It’s indescribable. We never thought this nightmare would end. We are reborn,” Rim Ramadan, 49, a civil servant at the finance ministry, told AFP.

“We were afraid for 55 years of speaking, even at home. We used to say the walls had ears,” Ramadan said, as people honked car horns and rebels fired their guns into the air.

Syria’s parliament, formerly pro-Assad like the prime minister, said it supported “the will of the people to build a new Syria towards a better future governed by law and justice”.

The Baath party said it would support “a transitional phase in Syria aimed at defending the unity of the country.” Syrian state television’s logo on the Telegram messaging app now displays the rebel flag.

During the offensive launched on November 27, rebels met little resistance as they wrested city after city from Assad’s control, opening the gates of prisons along the way and freeing thousands, many of them held on political charges.

Some, like Fadwa Mahmoud, whose husband and son are missing, posted calls for help on social media.

“Where are you, Maher and Abdel Aziz? It’s time for me to hear your news. Oh God, please come back,” wrote Mahmoud, herself a former detainee.

Assad in Moscow?

The United Nations said that whoever ends up in power in Syria must hold the Assad regime to account. But how the ousted leader might face justice remains unclear, especially after the Kremlin refused a day ago to confirm reports by Russian news agencies that he had fled to Moscow.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, however, said that if Russia granted asylum to Assad and his family, it would be a decision taken by President Vladimir Putin.

The Syrian embassy in Moscow raised the opposition’s flag, and the Kremlin said it would discuss the status of its bases in Syria with the new authorities.

Russia played an instrumental role in keeping Assad in power, directly intervening in the war starting in 2015 and providing air cover to the army during the rebellion.