Syria Live Updates: U.S. Tries to Manage Fallout From al-Assad’s Ouster
U.S.-backed fighters said they had reached a truce with Turkish-supported forces in a northern Syrian town. The head of the U.S. military’s Central Command visited Syria and Iraq.
Damascus, Syria
Days after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, Syrians continued to celebrate on Tuesday.
By Matthew Cassel and Alessandro Pavone
Damascus
Driving through Umayyad Square, where people gathered to celebrate the fall of the regime.
Nicole Tung for The New York Times
DamascusA rebel fighter in a room full of gifts given to Bashar al-Assad at the abandoned presidential palace.
Nicole Tung for The New York Times
DamascusA defaced portrait of Bashar al-Assad in the abandoned presidential palace.
Nicole Tung for The New York Times
Damascus
Relatives looking for bodies of loved ones at the Sednaya Prison.
Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
Israeli-occupied Golan Heights
Israeli military vehicles returning from the buffer zone with Syria.
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Cilvegozu border crossing
Syrian families arriving to cross into Syria from Turkey.
Kurdish-led fighters backed by the United States said early Wednesday that they had agreed to a U.S.-brokered cease-fire in the city of Manbij in northern Syria, where they have been battling to fend off forces backed by Turkey, as Washington and its allies try to contain the fallout from the stunning collapse of the Assad regime.
The rebel offensive that swept through Syrian towns and cities to take control of the capital over the weekend set off fresh fighting among armed factions elsewhere in the country, trying to fill the void left by retreating government forces. Clashes in recent days have centered around Manbij, pitting proxies of the U.S. and Turkey, both NATO allies, against each other.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, reported that Turkish-backed forces had captured Manbij on Monday, which the U.S.-backed group, the Syrian Democratic Forces, denied. U.S. officials have not confirmed a cease-fire for Manbij.
The announcement came as U.S. officials mount a diplomatic push to promote stability in Syria in the wake of the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad. President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, is scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel on Thursday. And Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will visit Turkey on Friday to discuss the developments in Syria, according to a Turkish official, who declined to be named under diplomatic protocol.
Here is what else to know:
Israeli attacks: The Israeli military has launched hundreds ofairstrikes against military assets across Syria in recent days, in an effort to keep them out of the hands of Islamist extremists. The rebel group that led the toppling of Mr. al-Assad was formerly linked to Al Qaeda and is still designated as a terrorist group by the United States and the United Nations. While Israeli officials have cast the strikes as a security measure, the campaign has been exceptional in force and scope, trying to ensure that whoever ends up in power in Syria will be significantly disarmed.
Rebels in Damascus: The rebels who seized the Syrian capital gave New York Times journalists a tour of Mr. al-Assad’s former palace on Tuesday. The ostentatiousness of the palace and the scruffiness of the fighters who now occupy it encapsulated the differences between the former dictator and those who had taken his place.
Prison horrors: The conquering rebels have thrown open the gates to Syrian prisons where the Assad government detained large numbers of people. No prison is more infamous than Sednaya, north of Damascus, where human rights groups say tens of thousands of people were detained, many of them tortured and deprived of food.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said today that the U.S. continues to work with Kurdish-led forces coming under attack in northern Syria from fighters backed by Turkey. “We have a good relationship with them, and I think it’ll remain that way,” he told reporters in Japan, without confirming whether the U.S. had helped to mediate a cease-fire for the Kurdish-led fighters to retreat from the city of Manbij.
Austin said his “No. 1 priority” after Assad’s fall was to protect U.S. troops in the area. About 900 U.S. troops in northeast Syria work with Kurdish fighters in operations against Islamic State. Austin said: “We remain in close contact with our partners in the region and we’re going to, as things occur, we’re going to consult with them and ensure that we’re doing the right things to protect our interests.”
Relatives look for bodies of loved ones who were taken or disappeared at the Sednaya Prison on Tuesday.Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
With the end of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, the task of tallying the cost in human lives of a nearly 14-year-long civil war is continuing. Death toll estimates from the conflict are as high as 620,000, a staggering number in a country with a prewar population of 22 million.
Experts say establishing the true scale of death is complicated, as estimates are drawn from different sources and methods and calculated in varying ways. Here’s what we know:
What is the latest death toll?
As of March, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights had documented the names of 507,567 people who had died in Syria since the outbreak of the conflict in March 2011. The independent Syrian-run organization, which is based in Britain and collates information from multiple sources, said that it had verified another 110,343 deaths of people who were not named, bringing the total of civilians and combatants killed throughout the war to 617,910.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights, another independent human rights organization that has been tracking the toll since the start of the conflict, had counted a total of 231,495 civilian deaths through June.
What does the United Nations say?
The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights last released an accounting in 2021, when it estimated that at least 580,000 people had been killed to that point, including 350,209 “identified individuals.” The U.N. human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, cautioned at the time that the figure was “not a complete number of conflict-related killings” but that it indicated a “minimum verifiable number, and is certainly an undercount of the actual number.”
Before 2021, the United Nations had not released a report on deaths in Syria since 2014 because it said conditions on the ground made accurate documentation impossible. However, when the war reached its 10th year, the organization responded to the need for updated information with a new report. By then, the war had shifted from large-scale military hostilities to regional clashes between multiple armed groups, making access and accuracy even more complicated, so the U.N. stopped reporting numbers.
How is the death toll calculated?
The U.N. and the Syrian human rights organizations say they rely on on-the-ground interviews, news reports and publicly available information such as death certificates and hospital records. They then identify and exclude duplicates and records with only partial information from the total and check the results against other statistical estimates.
Cases where people had been taken into government custody with no documentation — the forcibly disappeared — are not part of the total, nor are cases in which victims are killed and their bodies not recovered.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights focuses on tallying civilian deaths. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also tracks deaths among the Syrian military, rebel factions, foreign militias and armed units sent by other governments that are party to the conflict, such as Israel, Russia and Iran.
Will we ever know the final toll?
The end of the conflict will bring some clarity. When Damascus fell on Dec. 8, rebel groups opened Syria’s prisons, freeing thousands of surviving detainees to the relief of friends and families. But thousands of other people remain missing.
Fadel Abdul Ghany, the founder of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, has counted more than 100,000 men, women and children who were “forcibly disappeared” by the Assad regime since 2011 and who were not included in any death toll. So far, he says, very few have emerged from the prisons, and he has been able to identify only about 3,000 death certificates.
Based on what he has seen from the jails and the documents his team has obtained, Mr. Ghany estimated that at least 85,000 of those forcibly disappeared have been killed in al-Assad’s detention centers.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has made his first public comments since the fall of Bashar al-Assad, a key ally. “There should be no doubt that what happened in Syria is the product of a joint American and Zionist conspiracy,” Khamenei said in a televised speech.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will visit Turkey on Friday to discuss the events in Syria, according to a Turkish official who requested anonymity under diplomatic protocol. Blinken’s visit comes as the Biden administration, in its final weeks, tries to manage the fallout from Bashar al-Assad’s ouster.
Turkish-backed fighters at a frontline position on the outskirts of Manbij last year during fighting against Kurdish-led forces.Credit...Bakr Alkasem/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Kurdish-led fighters in northern Syria said early Wednesday that they had agreed to a cease-fire in the city of Manbij, where they had been fighting to repel forces backed by Turkey for more than two weeks.
The rebel offensive that swept through Syria and took control of the capital left competing factions elsewhere in the country jostling to fill the void left by retreating government forces. The battle for Manbij has pitted proxies of the United States and Turkey against each other: Washington backs the Kurdish-led forces, while Ankara has armed and funded the umbrella group of rebels they are fighting.
On Wednesday, the commander of the Kurdish-led fighters said that the cease-fire in Manbij was reached through U.S. mediation “to ensure the safety and security of civilians.” His forces would “be removed from the area as soon as possible,” the commander, Mazloum Abdi, wrote on social media.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, had reported that the Turkish-backed forces captured Manbij on Monday. The Kurdish-led forces denied that.
There was no immediate comment from the U.S., which over the weekend said that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had spoken to his Turkish counterpart and “reaffirmed the importance of close coordination” between the countries to prevent any further escalation, “as well as to avoid any risk to U.S. forces and partners.”
The U.S. has been backing the Kurdish fighters since 2014, a partnership forged amid the threat posed by the Islamic State. Underscoring the importance of the relationship, Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, chief of the U.S. military’s Central Command, visited U.S. and Kurdish-led forces in Syria on Tuesday, according to a statement, and also traveled to Iraq.
Belal Dalati and his wife Dalal Alia in Anaheim, Calif., on Tuesday.Credit...Kohjiro Kinno for The New York Times
Dalal Alia, 43, and her husband of nearly three decades, Belal Dalati, 59, between them have had 15 cousins killed and at least one other gone missing since the start of the Syrian civil war 13 years ago.
The couple, who own an insurance agency in the Little Arabia section of Anaheim, some 30 miles southeast of Los Angeles, are part of a tightly knit, largely well-educated Syrian-American community in Orange County that has watched closely since Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster over the weekend. Hundreds of people are expected for a celebration in the area’s commercial district on Saturday afternoon.
Though many are thrilled to see the Assad regime end — mixed with some trepidation about what comes next — some are focused more on what it will mean for their relatives in Syria.
Mr. Dalati’s uncle and aunt, who live in the suburbs of Damascus, have been scouring prisons in Syria looking for their 30-year-old son, Eyad Dalati, who has been missing since 2011 and used to drive a truck delivering groceries to stores in the Damascus suburbs.
Mr. Dalati said hopes of finding his cousin, an only child, alive are dimming by the day.
“It’s painful,” he said. “We’re still hoping that our cousin will show up.”
Meanwhile, 10-days after two of Ms. Alia’s brothers joined the Free Syrian Army rebels in their rapid march from the northwestern Syrian city of Idlib to Damascus, the brothers reunited for the first time since 2015 with other siblings and relatives.
The two, aged 48 and 29, were among thousands shuttled to Idlib for refusing to join Mr. al-Assad’s military machine. Ms. Alia on Monday proudly shared videos of the reunion, which featured scenes of celebration including one brother singing as he brandished a rifle.
For the last 10 days, the brothers texted and talked by phone with her intermittently on their march to Syria’s capital. They were just as shocked at the whirlwind speed at which the Assad regime folded as their Syrian-American kin, she said.
“Even my brother on the ground, he’s fighting and he’s telling me, ‘It’s like a dream,what’s going on right now,” Ms. Alia said. She said he described being astonished by “how easy things are going, how the army is running away, how they’re leaving their weapons behind.”
Now, she hopes her birthplace of Syria can change for the better.
“I love this country,” she said of the United States, “and I want Syria to be kind of similar. I want all people to love each other — Muslim, Shiite, Christian, Jew, I don’t care what they are.”
She said that she wants a new president, unlike Mr. Assad, to “be able to rule for a small period of time and know that he’s nothing but a worker, not God, and he’s there to serve the people, not the people to serve him.”
In short, Ms. Alia wants Syria to be a true democracy, where everyone can express their views without fear of reprisal.
“This is a true revolution that has occurred,” Ms. Alia said, adding everyone is going to learn a lot more about the atrocities committed by the Assad regime as people held in prisons are freed.
Abu Oweis, a rebel fighter, in the office of a longtime senior adviser to Bashar al-Assad at the abandoned presidential palace in Damascus, Syria, on Tuesday.
Red carpets still run down the airy hallways of the mountaintop presidential palace in the Syrian capital, Damascus. Large chandeliers hang in ornate reception rooms filled with wooden Damascene furniture. Modernist sculptures remain in place in offices and sitting rooms.
But since Bashar al-Assad, who ruled Syria for more than two decades, fled the country on Sunday, the armed rebels who burst out of the country’s north and stormed days later into the capital have taken charge of this monument to a brutal reign.
They man the palace gate, keeping out looters and curious civilians. They sleep on couches in a cavernous reception hall. And they marvel at how much it must have cost to build and maintain the giant building from which Mr. al-Assad ruled for so long.
“It is wrecked now, but we want to fix it,” said a fighter with his face covered who gave only his nom de guerre, Abu Oweis. Of the palace, he said: “It is beautiful, but it was all for Bashar.”
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The presidential palace on Sunday, the day Mr. al-Assad fled the country.Credit...Omar Haj Kadour/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The rebels allowed reporters from The New York Times to explore the palace, mostly accompanied by Abu Oweis, for no other apparent reason than to make clear that they controlled it.
Much of it had been looted soon after the city fell. Many of the offices were missing televisions. The floor of one giant conference room was littered with boxes that appeared to have held jewelry and fine glassware, perhaps gifts kept on hand for V.I.P. visitors.
But there was little damage to the complex itself, a sprawling cubic structure that is visible from much of the city below. On the long table in one formal dining room sat plates from the Chateau collection of Villeroy & Boch, with a matching teapot adorned with the Syrian flag.
The ostentatiousness of the palace and the scruffiness of its new masters encapsulated the differences between the leader who had fallen and those who had taken his place.
Mr. al-Assad, a trained ophthalmologist, inherited the presidency from his father, Hafez al-Assad, in 2000. While many of the Arab world’s dictators have emphasized their military credentials, the younger al-Assad had none to speak of. So he mostly appeared in suits, often alongside his elegant British-born wife, Asma, a former investment banker.
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A defaced portrait of Mr. al-Assad inside the presidential palace.
By contrast, Abu Oweis, our rebel guide, had been born in Idlib in Syria’s northwest, one of the country’s poorest provinces. He was 7 when the uprising against Mr. al-Assad began in 2011 and had grown up as Mr. al-Assad’s military, backed by Russia and Iran, had used tremendous military force to try to stamp out the rebels.
Abu Oweis had dropped out of high school, he said, and joined Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist rebel group that led the assault that ousted Mr. al-Assad.
Now 20, the young rebel had never left Syria nor visited its largest cities, Aleppo and Damascus.
“It’s a big city,” he said of the Syrian capital. “Really big.”
He had little interest in the offices that occupied the palace’s upper floors. Mr. al-Assad’s regime ruled viciously, throwing opponents in prisons where many were tortured or just disappeared. The palace, by contrast, handled the bureaucratic trappings of governance, the public performance of a presidency.
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Abu Oweis unfurling an Iranian flag found inside the palace. Iran was a major backer of the Assad regime.
An office with commanding views and an en suite bathroom had belonged to Bouthaina Shaaban, who advised the al-Assad dynasty for decades. Framed photos of what appeared to be her 70th birthday party sat on a table.
A bookshelf behind her desk held a plaque showing the younger Mr. al-Assad and a framed 1983 cover from Time magazine, which featured his father.
The text read, “Syria: Clashing With the U.S., Bidding for a Bigger Role.”
Nearby was a protocol office, in charge of organizing official visits. Its unnamed occupant had on hand a binder from the Protocol School of Washington and a book called “Honor and Respect,” a guide to official titles.
A large storeroom was packed to the ceiling with gifts Mr. al-Assad had received from visitors from around the world. A cursory tour revealed plaques and busts featuring Mr. al-Assad, sometimes alongside other world leaders.
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Gifts and other objects in a storeroom inside the palace.
There was a two-foot-tall camel with a bejeweled saddle (origin unknown); a golden castle from Saudi Arabia in a large green case; and a photo of Queen Elizabeth II of Britain and her husband, Prince Philip, dated 2002. That was long before Mr. al-Assad became an international pariah for his brutality during the war, including using poison gas on his own people.
Rummaging through the loot, Abu Oweis found three paintings of Asma al-Assad, ripped one from its frame and threw it on the floor to be stepped on by anyone else who entered the room.
The palace bore some indications that the mood inside had soured as the rebels approached the city. A dumpster overflowed with shredded papers. A table in one office held a half-finished cup of coffee, a dozen cigarette butts and a remote control, evoking the image of its former occupant smoking nervously while watching the news of the rebel advance. The television had been torn from the wall.
Outside the palace, a group of Syrians who had never dared to come so close before wandered around, marveling at the grandeur of the structure and the landscaped gardens around it.
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Residents of Damascus could now venture closer to the presidential palace than ever before.
“He led the life of a king, and we lived like rabbits and dogs,” said Khaled Bakkar, 58.
He had attended an anti-government protest early in the 2011 uprising, he said, and was arrested, beaten and thrown into a crowded jail for two months.
“We were packed in like rocks,” he said.
He and those with him lamented how hard their lives had become during the war: the collapse of the economy, the lack of reliable electricity, the bribes they had to pay for simple government services or to get their cars through police checkpoints.
“The state didn’t provide us with anything, and when we said a single word, they arrested us,” Mr. Bakkar said.
His daughter, Batoul Bakkar, 28, was an internal medicine doctor at a government hospital and described poor wages and insufficient medical supplies, which she attributed to corruption and the effects of punishing international sanctions aimed at Mr. al-Assad’s regime.
She had followed the news of the rebels’ approach with great anticipation, she said, and now felt relieved that they had toppled the regime.
“Of course people are scared for the future, but we have faith that we will be better in the end,” she said. “We want to forget the past and build the future.”
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Abu Oweis said he had never been to Damascus before the rebels took over.
A man praying inside a liberated cell in Sednaya prison, in the suburbs of Damascus, Syria, on Monday.Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
As the Assad regime in Syria crumbled over the weekend, the conquering rebels threw open the gates to the prisons where the government had detained tens of thousands of its people, torturing and killing them on an industrial scale.
Throngs of Syrians rushed to the facilities to search for loved ones who had disappeared into the prison system during the 13-year civil war. No prison is more infamous than Sednaya, just north of the capital, Damascus.
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Rebel forces released many detainees from the notorious Sednaya military prison in Damascus. The government complex has a long history of human rights abuses under the rule of fallen President Bashar al-Assad.CreditCredit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
Even before the civil war, Sednaya was known for widespread torture and abuse. But during the conflict, it became a site of depravity and violence, used to commit some of the worst atrocities of Bashar al-Assad’s rule when he was president.
Human rights groups say tens of thousands of people were detained in Sednaya. They were tortured, beaten and deprived of food, water, medicine and basic sanitation. Thousands were executed in mass hangings after sham trials. One group estimated that more than 30,000 detainees were killed there.
In most cases, the families of prisoners were given no information about their fate.
Who was sent to Sednaya prison?
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Around 2,000 people emerged on Sunday from Sednaya, a facility used to detain, torture and kill tens of thousands of prisoners during Syria’s 13-year civil war. These prisoners were released after the Assad regime in Syria fell to conquering rebels last weekend.
The prison, built in 1987 on a hill north of Damascus, was a military prison that housed political prisoners.
As The New York Times has reported, it was the most notorious prison in a brutal system that was the government’s main weapon against the civilian opposition. Amnesty International described Sednaya as a “human slaughterhouse.”
According to a report by a group representing prisoners, it was protected by hundreds of guards and soldiers and surrounded by a ring of minefields.
The prison held an estimated 1,500 inmates in 2007, but its population surged to as many as 20,000 people at once after Syria’s civil war began, according to a 2017 report by Amnesty International.
What was its history?
Before the civil war began, in 2011, a majority of Sednaya’s inmates were Islamists, who had been encouraged by the Syrian government to join an offshoot of Al Qaeda that was fighting the United States in Iraq. Once they returned home, Mr. al-Assad jailed them to prevent them from threatening his rule.
As antigovernment protests spread across Syria in early 2011, the government released many of those jihadists and began imprisoning thousands of protesters, activists, journalists, doctors, aid workers, students and other Syrians. Many were sent to Sednaya.
The prison was the last place detainees were often dumped after long periods in other detention centers.
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Former detainees described abysmal, overcrowded cells at Sednaya prison.Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
What were the conditions?
The Amnesty report and a separate investigation by the United Nations found that the Syrian authorities had deliberately exterminated detainees at Sednaya after torturing and housing them in appalling conditions. The U.N. investigators determined that such acts could amount to crimes against humanity.
The detainees were sexually assaulted, beaten on the genitals and forced to beat, rape or even kill one another, according to rights groups and a Times investigation. In 2017, the United States accused the Syrian government of using a crematory to hide mass murders in Sednaya, listing methods of physical torture such as beatings, stabbings, sexual assault, electric shocks and cutting off ears and genitals.
The few who won release, often through family connections or bribes, described detainees left to die of untreated wounds and illnesses in filthy, overcrowded cells. Prisoners were given just seconds to use latrines, so were often forced to relieve themselves in the cells, which lacked toilets. Meals usually consisted of a few mouthfuls of spoiled food. Many people developed serious infections, diseases and mental illnesses.
The conditions were similar at many prisons across the system. But at Sednaya, treatment could be especially sadistic, according to ex-inmates.
Prisoners were not allowed to look at the guards, talk or make any noise, even during torture. They could be punished by being denied water or forced to sleep naked, without blankets, in freezing cold.
Every morning, guards collected the bodies of those who had died overnight and took them to a military hospital, where their deaths were recorded as cases of heart or respiratory failure, according to the Amnesty report. Then, they were trucked to mass graves outside Damascus.
Loved ones outside the prison often never knew their fates.
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Relatives in the morgue area of Damascus Hospital looking on Tuesday for the bodies of loved ones who had been taken to Sednaya prison. Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
A grim protocol
According to former officials cited in the Amnesty report, detainees at Sednaya were routinely tortured into giving confessions. Then they were taken to military field courts, where they were convicted after trials that lasted two or three minutes.
Every week and often twice a week, according to the report, guards pulled groups of up to 50 people from their cells, telling them they were being transferred to civilian prisons. Instead, they were blindfolded, beaten severely in the prison’s basement and then taken to another building, where they were hanged in the middle of the night, the report said.
Prison officials called the mass hangings “the party.”
From 2011 to 2015, Amnesty found, 5,000 to 13,000 people, most of them civilians, were put to death in this way. The group did not have direct evidence of executions after 2015, but because detainees were still being transferred to Sednaya and sham trials still being held, it was likely the executions continued.
What is happening now at the prison?
Some 2,000 prisoners emerged from Sednaya on Sunday, according to Fadel Abdul Ghany, the director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, which has rigorously monitored Mr. al-Assad’s labyrinth of prisons. But the rest of the approximately 11,000 detainees who he said were being held there when the government was overthrown were nowhere to be found.
“Where are the remaining prisoners?” Mr. Abdul Ghany said. “They have been killed.”
Still, in the confusion, different groups had different estimates of the numbers, and many Syrians held out hope that their disappeared relatives could still be found. Journalists, armed fighters and civilians, including children, roamed the prison, looking for signs of them.
“Seizing the city is a joy — we are joyous,” said one rebel fighter, Mohammad Bakir. “But the real victory will be when I find my family.” He had not heard from his mother, brother and cousin since they disappeared in 2012 after protesting against the government.
Videos sent to The Times by a group of doctors visiting Sednaya showed crowding and the dire conditions inside. Numbered cells, each of which appear to have held a dozen or more people, were littered with debris, clothing and belongings.
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Syrians made the trek to the prison to find news of people they knew on Monday.Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
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Syrians heading to the prison on Monday.Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
The White Helmets, a volunteer civil defense organization in Syria, said it had helped to release about 20,000 to 25,000 people from Sednaya, but noted that thousands more prisoners remained unaccounted for.
The Association of Detainees & the Missing in Sednaya Prison said that it had obtained a document showing there had been about 4,300 detainees as of Oct. 28 and that approximately that number had already walked free. In a statement, it said there was “no truth to the presence of detainees trapped underground.”
On Monday in Aleppo, a vehicle dropped off one former prisoner from Sednaya, his face gaunt and his legs and body weakened by years of detention. Two relatives helped him stand. A small band of musicians beat drums to celebrate his survival.
The man was soon thronged by people holding their cellphones up to his face. They were showing him photographs of detainees, hoping he might have news.
Aryn Baker, Ephrat Livni and Muhammad Haj Kadour contributed reporting.
The aftermath on Tuesday of an overnight strike on the Barzah scientific research center, which had been linked to the Syrian government’s chemical weapons program.Credit...Omar Haj Kadour/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
As soon as it became clear on Sunday that there would be regime change in neighboring Syria, Israel began a sweeping aerial campaign.
By Tuesday, at least 350 airstrikes had leveled military assets across Syria, taking out the Navy, fighter jets, drones, tanks, air-defense systems, weapons plants and a wide array of missiles and rockets, according to the Israeli military.
Israeli officials said they were destroying weapons and military facilities to keep them out of the hands of Islamist extremists. The rebel group that led the toppling of the president, Bashar al-Assad, was formerly linked to Al Qaeda and is still designated as a terrorist group by the United States and the United Nations.
“We have no intention to meddle in Syria’s internal affairs, but we certainly intend to do whatever is needed to guarantee our security,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Tuesday.
The Israeli campaign over the past two days has been exceptional in force and scope, trying to ensure that whoever ends up in power in Syria will be significantly disarmed.
It followed months of intensified Israeli airstrikes on Syria, including on weapons depots belonging to Iran and Hezbollah. But the large-scale bombings this week have been far more comprehensive and devastating to Syria’s military capabilities, analysts said.
The assault delivered a blow to the infrastructure in Syria that Iran used to transport weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon. And Mr. Netanyahu warned the country’s future leaders to prevent Iran from using Syrian territory again for its own military purposes.
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An Israeli airstrike on Damascus on Sunday.Credit...Omar Haj Kadour/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, congratulated the country’s missile ships on Tuesday for completing “the destruction of the Syrian Navy” the night before.
But the intense air assault on Syria at such a fragile moment raised alarm among some in the international community.
“This needs to stop,” the U.N. special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday. As Syrian factions attempt an orderly transition to a new government, it is “extremely important that we don’t see any action from any international actor that destroys the possibility for this transformation in Syria to take place,” he added.
The U.N. also expressed concern about Israel’s actions on the ground.
On Saturday, even before Mr. al-Assad fled the country, Israeli forces entered Syrian territory for the first time in 50 years. They have since taken control of a 155-square-mile demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights that has been patrolled by U.N. troops since the 1973 Middle East war. The zone abuts Syrian-controlled territory.
Approximate advance of the Israeli military into the buffer zone
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Israel shared photos of its troops on Mount Hermon.
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Reported Israeli military advances into buffer zone, as of Dec. 9
Military zone closed by Israel
Israel told residents in five villages to stay in their homes.
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Israel shared photos of its troops on Mount Hermon.
Reported Israeli military advances into buffer zone, as of Dec. 9
Military zone closed by Israel
Israel told residents in five villages to stay in their homes.
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Israel captured the Golan during the 1967 Middle East war and annexed most of it in 1981. Most of the world views the area as Israeli-occupied Syrian territory, but over the past decades, Israel has firmly defended the land.
Israeli’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, said Israel’s incursion into the U.N.-controlled buffer zone was “limited and temporary.”
Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the U.N. secretary general, told reporters that the presence of Israeli forces in the area violated the 1974 agreement that created the buffer zone.
“There should be no military forces or activities in the area,” he said.
Mr. Netanyahu said on Monday that the 1974 agreement had collapsed because Syrian troops protecting some of the buffer zone had abandoned their posts.
Egyptian officials said Israel’s actions “violate international law, undermine the unity and integrity of Syrian territory and exploit the current instability to occupy more Syrian land.” Egypt called on the U.N. Security Council to “take a firm stance against Israeli attacks on Syria, ensuring its sovereignty over all its territories.”
The Israeli military said its airstrikes had destroyed much of Syria’s military capabilities. Its targets included airfields, hangars, military structures, launchers, firing positions, at least 15 naval vessels and dozens of weapons-production sites. The strikes against Syria’s Navy also destroyed dozens of sea-to-sea missiles with ranges of 50 to 120 miles, the Israeli military said.
Photographs from Syria on Tuesday showed sunken boats at a shipyard, crumbled buildings and the charred remains of a science research center that had been linked to the country’s chemical weapons program, according to the news agencies that distributed the images.
“I’ve just watched dots all over the place — it’s been literally hundreds of attacks in the last 48 hours,” said Miri Eisin, a retired Israeli colonel who has been tracking the strikes for the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism.
“Thank Israel that Israel just destroyed the chemical weapons that nobody else was willing to touch,” she said.
Under Mr. al-Assad, the Syrian government used chemical weapons — particularly sarin nerve agent — against citizens numerous times during the 13-year civil war.
Over the past years, Israel had periodically bombed targets in Syria, and the intensity of those attacks had escalated recently.
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Israeli military vehicles entering the buffer zone with Syria from the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights on Tuesday.Credit...Jalaa Marey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In April, Israeli forces bombed an Iranian Embassy building in Damascus, killing senior Iranian military and intelligence officials. And in September, Israeli struck a Hezbollah missile production site in Syria before commandos rappelled down from helicopters to collect evidence.
But nothing had come close to the scale of this week’s attacks.
Mr. Netanyahu said Israel would like to forge relations with the new Syrian government — on certain conditions.
“If this regime allows Iran to reestablish itself in Syria, or allow for the proliferation of Iranian weapons or any other weapons to Hezbollah or attack us, we will respond forcefully and exact a heavy price,” he warned.
Ms. Eisin, the retired colonel, said Israel took advantage of a window of opportunity in Syria.
“You are trying to cut what you could never do in the past because if you did, you would be in an all-out war against Syria, Hezbollah” and Iran, she said.
Mr. Katz, the defense minister, said Israel’s move into the buffer zone on the Golan Heights aimed to prevent militants from amassing near Israel, as had happened in Gaza and Lebanon.
He said that Israeli forces would “establish a defensive area clean of weapons and terror threats in southern Syria.”
The ground advances generated nervous speculation that Israel might go further in capturing territory.
Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, confirmed that Israel forces had moved outside the buffer zone in several areas. But he said that was because of the landscape and “not an offensive.”
Israeli forces “are not advancing toward Damascus,” Mr. Shoshani told reporters on Tuesday.
“We are not a side in this conflict, and we do not have any interests other than protecting our borders and the security of our civilians.”
Reporting was contributed by Johnatan Reiss, Nick Cumming-Bruce, Aaron Boxerman, Gabby Sobelman and Vivian Yee.
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