Israel Says Its Troops Will Stay in Seized Territory for Now

Mr. Kalin was filmed by dozens of Syrians while leaving the Umayyad Mosque with armed personnel around him. It was the same mosque that the rebel leader Ahmed al-Shara, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, visited on Sunday to mark the success of the offensive he led. MIT did not immediately comment on the purpose of the intelligence chief’s visit to Syria or who he met with while he was there.

Turkey, which shares a 500-mile border with Syria and views its Kurdish minority as a security threat, has already used force in the country in the last week. As Hayat Tahrir al-Sham took control of the capital, fighting flared between the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army and Kurdish rebels supported by the United States. Turkey supported the Syrian National Army with airstrikes.

While Mr. Kalin was visiting Syria, U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was making a trip to Jordan and Turkey; the goal of those visits, he said, was to unite countries in the region behind a peaceful transition to a new Syrian government. In Ankara, Mr. Blinken met with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Before boarding a plane in Aqaba, Jordan, for Ankara, Mr. Blinken indicated concern about fresh Turkish offensives against U.S.-backed Kurdish rebels in Syria’s northeast, declaring it “really important at this time that we’re not sparking any additional conflicts.” During his meeting with Mr. Erdogan later in the day, Mr. Blinken “emphasized the need to ensure the coalition to defeat ISIS can continue to execute its critical mission,” according to a spokesman, Matthew Miller.

Further complicating matters, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the United Nations and others, limiting countries’ ability to engage with the group and help to fund Syrian reconstruction. There is debate in the international community about whether the designation may be removed, and under what conditions, but for now the label snarls an already intensely complex situation that numerous international players are aiming to influence.

Jordan’s foreign ministry announced on Thursday that it would host a series of meetings on Saturday about developments in Syria with representatives of roughly a dozen nations, including Syrian neighbors like Turkey, Iraq and Lebanon, regional players like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and representatives from the United States, the European Union and the United Nations.

Israel, meanwhile, has been taking control of territory inside Syria and relentlessly bombing military assets of the former Assad regime. It has framed its hundreds of attacks as a defensive measure, undertaken to keep the assets — including chemical weapons and long-range missile caches — out of the hands of rebels who could use them against Israel.

Top Israeli officials said on Thursday that its military would remain in Syrian territory it seized this week. Carving out what it says is a defensive perimeter inside Syria, Israel contends that it does not plan to stay but will remain in place until “a new force” is established in Syria that can meet Israeli security demands.

“The collapse of the Syrian regime created a vacuum on Israel’s border and in the buffer zone,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in a statement. “Israel will not permit jihadi groups to fill that vacuum and threaten Israeli communities.”

Safak Timur, Aaron Boxerman, Eve Sampson, Michael Crowley and Lara Jakes contributed reporting.

The designation means that countries and international organizations are severely restricted in providing aid to a Syrian government that desperately needs it to assert control, provide basic services and rebuild after years of war.

Those limits could have broad consequences for Syria and the Middle East, with analysts and regional officials warning that a weak and fractured state would incubate terror groups like the Islamic State. Some experts contend that now is the time to offer Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist group, a prompt path to legitimacy.

“This is that period when things fail,” said Kirsten Fontenrose, a senior fellow in the Atlantic Council Middle East program who served on the National Security Council during the Trump administration. After a regime falls, power vacuums can fill quickly, she argued, so the international community should draft a reconstruction blueprint for Syria that acknowledges Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and offers it financial incentives to transform into a political unit with no paramilitary, supportive of free and fair elections.

Donors have leverage, Ms. Fontenrose said, because anyone leading Syria will need foreign aid, and the group may be at its most amenable to change now, as it seeks legitimacy and support.

Geir Pedersen, the U.N. special envoy for Syria, noted at a briefing in Geneva on Tuesday that offering the possibility of lifting the terror designation could move the group to work on forming an inclusive transitional government. “So far,” he said, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham had been sending messages of “unity, of inclusiveness” to the Syrian people, and seemed to be backing its words with actions.

The leaders of Group of 7 nations on Thursday affirmed their “full support for an inclusive Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political transition process.” But even talking with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham about governance is potentially problematic for the international community, conflicting with a 2015 U.N. Security Council resolution that called on member states to suppress terrorism by a Hayat Tahrir al-Sham precursor, the Nusra Front. At the time, Nusra was an arm of Al Qaeda, but it broke with that group in 2016.

For years, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has tried to gain international legitimacy by eschewing global jihadist ambitions and focusing on governing Idlib province, which it controls, and more recently by saying it would work with competing factions. Still, it has been accused of using authoritarian tactics, raising questions about whether it can gain Syrian or international support, despite attempts to reassure religious and ethnic minorities at home, and officials abroad.

U.S. intelligence agencies and Biden administration officials are cautiously evaluating the group and its leader, Ahmed al-Shara — known until recently by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani — who has tried to allay concerns about the organization’s aims and past affiliations with Al Qaeda.

In security circles around the world there are new questions about whether Hayat Tahrir al-Sham should retain the terrorist designation. Under President Bashar al-Assad, the United States applied a similar label to the Syrian government, calling it a state sponsor of terrorism.

Organizations with the terrorist label have “gone legit” before, like Sinn Fein in Ireland and the African National Congress in South Africa, integrating into the government and shedding paramilitary ties, said Rose Kelanic, director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank in Washington — but that process can take a long time. Events in Syria are moving quickly. And there may be little political will for supporting Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s transformation when the Biden administration is exiting and the Trump administration is about to enter, she said.

The U.S. government “could get money flowing pretty easily” if it wanted, though it would require expending a lot of political capital, and there have been no signs of that, said Jeremy Shapiro, the research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and formerly a policy adviser at the State Department.

The terrorist label is bound to chill Syrian reconstruction efforts, Mr. Shapiro added, since it not only limits state support for terror groups, it also punishes those who engage with the organizations. “Unless the government provides some sort of at least verbal assurance it will not prosecute, people aren’t going to go around the sanctions,” he said.

Ms. Fontenrose said she fears international paralysis could threaten the chances for a Syrian democracy to emerge. In a post for the Atlantic Council on Tuesday, she called for more urgency from the international community.

“Each day that a concrete way forward for governance of Syria is not solidified,” she wrote, “will strengthen the case for Syria’s Islamist military liberators to take full control themselves.”

It is “a time of promise but also peril for Syria and its neighbors,” Mr. Blinken said. He said it was essential that Syria’s new government respect basic principles of human rights, including the protection of minorities and ensuring that Syria “is not used as a base for terrorism by groups like the Islamic State.”

The rebel alliance that toppled President Bashar al-Assad is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni Islamist group once affiliated with Al Qaeda, that is labeled a terrorist organization by the United States and others. In recent years HTS has softened its stand on governing according to its religious principles, insisting that it is prepared to work with all sects, but how it will operate in power remains to be seen.

Minutes before his departure for Ankara, Turkey, Mr. Blinken said he had no updates on the status of Austin Tice, a freelance American journalist who has been believed held in Syria for many years. “Every single day we are working to find him and bring him home,” Mr. Blinken said.

In Ankara, Mr. Blinken met with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Mr. Blinken indicated concern about fresh Turkish offensives against U.S.-backed Kurdish rebels in Syria’s northeast, calling it “really important at this time that we’re not sparking any additional conflicts.”

Ms. al-Hamada said in her post that she had been told her uncle had likely been dead for around a week before his body was found. In a separate post she said that he had been tortured to death.

Mr. al-Hamada’s death, like his life, shed light on the violence of former President Bashar al-Assad’s rule and the debilitating effects of the torture that his government wielded as an instrument of oppression. He spent most of his life in Syria but sought asylum in the Netherlands in 2014 and began spreading the word about conditions in his home country. His family has said he was likely lured back to Syria in 2020 by false promises from the government.

Even as Mr. al-Hamada was applauded for describing in excruciating detail the abuse he received in Mr. al-Assad’s prisons, including rape, the repeated recounting of his trauma began to take a toll. Friends said that in the years he spent in Europe, he began to isolate himself, and his live broadcasts on social media — once stark accounts of the regime’s crimes — sometimes devolved into hate-fueled rants against Syria’s ethnic minorities.

Nonetheless, the announcement of his death prompted an outpouring of grief. That Mr. al-Hamada died at a pivotal moment in Syrian history, one he had so badly longed to see, was especially poignant for many.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” Mouaz Moustafa, director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a U.S.-based nonprofit group, said on Tuesday, responding to Mr. al-Hamada’s death. The two had worked together on publicizing the abuses of the Assad government internationally before Mr. al-Hamada returned to Syria and disappeared.

While working for the French company Schlumberger in eastern Syria, Mr. al-Hamada became a protester and citizen journalist during the 2011 uprising that led to the civil war. He was arrested along with tens of thousands of other Syrians who participated in the pro-democracy protests that had taken hold there and throughout the Middle East.

In 2012, Mr. al-Hamada was again arrested, accused of smuggling baby formula into a Damascus suburb, and this time he was held for more than a year in severe conditions. After his release, Mr. al-Hamada sought asylum in the Netherlands in 2014. He went on to tour the world to speak about what he saw and experienced himself in detention, describing torture, abuse and rape.

“Mazen had endured torture so cruel, so unimaginable, that his retellings carried an almost otherworldly weight,” Sakir Khader, a Palestinian photographer and director based in the Netherlands who was friends with Mr. al-Hamada, said on social media on Monday. Mr. al-Hamada was on a “mission” to share the stories the Syrian regime wanted to keep secret and to hold it accountable, Mr. Khader said, but he was deeply traumatized and struggling with life in the Netherlands.

Mr. Khader’s assessment echoes that of Syrian exiles and activists who had known Mr. al-Hamada abroad before he stunned his community by returning to Syria in 2020. “The one thing you noticed about Mazen was how much he is crying. He speaks and his tears come down like a river,” Omar Abu Layla, a Syrian exile who was in contact with Mr. al-Hamada, told The Washington Post in 2021.

Mr. al-Hamada’s emotional accounts attracted attention to his cause, but those who knew him said he was haunted by memories and unconvinced that his efforts were having a real impact. “The tears shed by his audiences did not translate into tangible efforts to bring justice to the victims,” said the Syrian Emergency Task Force in a biography of Mr. al-Hamada.

Khaled Al Haj Saleh, a friend and fellow exile in the Netherlands, described Mr. al-Hamada’s deteriorating mental state to a magazine in 2021, saying that the activist had become aggressive and unfriendly to those who were closest to him: “As a friend, it was increasingly difficult to be close to him. Not because I didn’t want to, but because we didn’t really know how to help him.”

Mr. al-Hamada started broadcasting his thoughts and obsessions on social media, Mr. Saleh told the magazine. “But more than livestreaming it was a live screaming,” he said, with “disconnected thoughts” about Syria and militant and ethnic groups there.

Mr. al-Hamada’s decision to go back to Syria in 2020 may have been influenced by his precarious mental state and problems he faced in the Netherlands, according to Mr. Khader, who said he had been evicted and was under pressure from Dutch immigration authorities to work. When he returned, he was promptly arrested and was not seen again until his body was found on Monday.

“I hope you know in heaven that we freed Syria after all,” Mr. Moustafa said in his post.

Aryn Baker, Alexander Cardia and Devon Lum contributed reporting.

Mr. Netanyahu said that Israeli soldiers would deploy in Syrian territory only “temporarily.” But he did not provide any clear timeline for when they might leave and gave little indication it would be soon.

Any deal between Israel and the Islamist rebels who led the offensive against Mr. al-Assad appears distant given their mutual animosity. On Monday, Gideon Saar, the Israeli foreign minister, said Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — the most dominant faction — was motivated by “an extreme ideology of radical Islam.”

In the wake of Mr. al-Assad’s fall, Israeli fighter jets conducted more than 350 strikes across Syria, targeting the remnants of Mr. Assad’s navy, as well as chemical weapons and long-range missile caches that Israel feared would fall into the rebels’ hands.

Israel has carved out what it characterizes as a defensive perimeter inside Syria, in the widest-ranging overt operation its ground forces have conducted in the country in decades.

The Israeli military has mostly deployed in a 155-square-mile zone that was intended to be a demilitarized area monitored by United Nations peacekeepers. But soldiers also have taken up positions beyond the zone, deeper inside Syrian territory, according to Israeli officials and the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.

Damascus

Lebanon

Israel shared photos of its troops on Mount Hermon.

Reported Israeli military advances into buffer zone, as of Dec. 11

Military zone closed by Israel

GOLAN

HEIGHTS

Kodana

Israel

Demilitarized

buffer zone

Sea of

Galilee

JORDAN

10 miles

Area of detail

Lebanon

Israel shared photos of its troops on Mount Hermon.

Reported Israeli military advances into buffer zone, as of Dec. 11

Military zone closed by Israel

Israel

GOLAN

HEIGHTS

Kodana

Demilitarized

buffer zone

Sea of

Galilee

JORDAN

10 miles

Area of detail

Israel captured most of the Golan Heights in 1967, during the Six-Day War, and later annexed the territory. Most of the international community still considers the area to be part of Syria, although then-President Donald J. Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty there in 2019.

Since a cease-fire in 1974 after the Yom Kippur war, Israeli and Syrian forces have been deployed along lines that served as the de facto border between the two countries. U.N. peacekeepers belonging to the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force — or UNDOF — patrolled the buffer zone in between.

The sudden collapse of Mr. al-Assad’s decades-long rule on Sunday upended that arrangement. Israeli officials said they feared that armed militants would take advantage of the situation to launch a surprise attack on Israeli civilians, and they swiftly sent forces across the armistice lines.

At least one U.N. post in the buffer zone was also stormed by “unidentified armed individuals” over the weekend, according to the U.N. agency for peacekeeping. The position was ransacked by people who looted weapons and other items, according to a U.N. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. The equipment was returned after the intervention of local leaders and U.N. officials, the official said.

Israel’s allies have mostly stayed quiet on the capture of territory in the buffer zone, although France called on Wednesday for Israel to withdraw and respect Syria’s sovereignty.

Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, said on Thursday that Israel’s move came in response to an imminent threat after the collapse of the Assad government.

Responding to the threat was “logical and consistent” with Israel’s right to self-defense from Washington’s perspective, Mr. Sullivan told reporters after a meeting with Mr. Netanyahu in Jerusalem. He declined to put a time frame on how long Israel’s presence would be acceptable.

“We will develop an elaborate perspective on the best way forward in a coordinated way,” Mr. Sullivan said.

On Wednesday, the Israeli military took a group of Israeli reporters on a guided tour in the area of Kodana, a Syrian village on the other side of the buffer zone. Video from the excursion — including of what were said to be deserted Syrian military fortifications — was later broadcast on several Israeli networks.

“It’s clear that we will remain here for quite some time,” Benny Kata, one of the local military commanders, said in an interview with Israel’s public broadcaster. “We’re prepared for this.”

Isabel Kershnercontributed reporting.

The State Department said it was aware of an American found outside Damascus and was “seeking to provide support.”

Hisham al-Eid, the mayor of Al-Thihabiyeh, a poor, partly rural town east of Damascus, said the man had been found on Thursday morning on a main road. He was barefoot and cold but otherwise seemed to be in good health, Mr. al-Eid said.

The man told reporters he had entered Syria from Lebanon on a Christian pilgrimage, and had been detained for several months. He said he had received food and water while in detention, and was allowed to go to the bathroom three times a day.

“The guards treated me decently,” the man, wearing a beard and a gray hoodie, told the reporters. But he said that he heard others being tortured “daily.”

In another video posted by Al Arabiya, the man said he had been held in a cell alone. When asked how he was freed, he said that on Monday, someone “took a hammer and they broke my door down.”

Richard Timmerman, who identified himself as Travis Timmerman’s great-uncle, said he was shocked to hear Travis — who he said had been working in Chicago before he went missing — had been found in Syria, and more so in a prison.

“The family had been looking for him, but no one’s been able to find anything about him,” Richard Timmerman said.

“He’s very responsible,” he added. “He’s not a criminal kind of person.”

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, speaking of Travis Timmerman, told reporters traveling with him in Jordan that “we’re working to bring him home.” He added that he “can’t give any details on exactly what’s going to happen.”

It was not immediately clear where the man had been held. The fall of the authoritarian Assad regime to rebel forces over the weekend led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has prompted the release of many prisoners held in a sprawling network of detention centers operated by the former government.

The group’s political affairs department said in a statement on Thursday that Mr. Timmerman had been released, and that they were ready to “cooperate directly” with U.S. officials to find other missing Americans inside the country. The group said this included the long-running quest to find the journalist Austin Tice, whose case has been the subject of intense diplomatic efforts since he disappeared near Damascus in 2012.

The United States has listed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham as a terrorist organization, potentially complicating joint efforts to locate and secure the release of American citizens previously held by the Assad regime. On Monday, the State Department spokesman Matthew Miller signaled that the United States could legally communicate with designated terror groups “when it is in our interests.”

On Thursday, the department said the United States was still seeking to locate Tice, the American journalist, and any other Americans in the country who might need help.

This year, the Missouri State Highway Patrol put out a missing persons flier for a man named Pete Timmerman, 29, saying he had last been located in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, on May 28. In August, the Hungarian police put out a call looking for “Travis Pete Timmerman” and shared photos of a man who resembles the one in the Al Arabiya interview.

Mr. Timmerman’s mother, Stacey Collins Gardiner, told National Public Radio that after he went to Hungary they lost contact, though she learned he had gone to Lebanon. She said he had warned her that he would be in places that made communication difficult.

She said she wept with relief at the news that he had been found. When she sees him, “I will hug him,” she added. “And then I probably won’t let him go.”

The man identified as Mr. Timmerman told CBS News that he had been in contact with his family three weeks ago, using a phone that he had while he was in prison. He said that he had left the prison where he had been held with a large group of people and that he had been trying to get to Jordan. It was unclear how he had arrived in the Syrian town where he was found.

Asked by reporters if he had processed his newfound freedom, he said, “I still haven’t really thought about that,” CBS reported. “I’ve been more worried about finding a place to sleep each night since then.”

Rachel Nostrant, Lynsey Chutel, Andrew Higgins, Ismaeel Naar, Euan Ward, Edward Wong and Barnabas Heincz contributed reporting.

With Mr. al-Assad in Russia, according to officials in Moscow, that prospect appears out of reach. Activists, many of whom have devoted years to the effort, remain undeterred.

“We are targeting the system,” said Fadel Abdul Ghany, director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights. “The Assad regime is not just the man himself. We need to target the security forces and the army and the tools Assad used to commit those crimes.”

The war in Syria has been a watershed for human rights work, in part because of the scale of the abuses committed. In addition to the more than 200,000 civilians reported to have been killed in the war, at least 15,000 people are believed to have died from torture or to have been killed in the regime’s prison system, and some 130,000 are still missing, according to Mr. Abdul Ghany’s group.

Organizations including the Commission for International Justice and Accountability and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights have worked to document abuses and crimes to lay the groundwork for future prosecutions.

That drive received a major boost in its early years when a former Syrian police photographer, code-named Caesar, defected in 2013 with gruesome photographs of thousands of prisoners who had been killed in detention.

Rights groups said that they had benefited from the regime’s practice of documenting what happened in the prison system for bureaucratic purposes. The groups have made use of digital tools that were not available in previous conflicts to catalog abuses.

Mr. al-Assad has said that anyone in prison in Syria committed a crime, and cast doubt on testimony about abuses. But activists said the records enabled them to trace links between perpetrators, such as prison guards and policymakers, in a crucial step toward any prosecutions of senior officials.

“Even before he fell from power, we already had enough documents to show beyond reasonable doubt his real power over the machinery of death that the Syrian state was,” said Nerma Jelacic of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability.

Augmenting those efforts, other groups are cataloging the Assad government’s crimes, including a U.N. Syria Commission, which has issued detailed reports, and a group established by the U.N. General Assembly. All that work has borne fruit in several prosecutions of Syrian officials abroad.

The most prominent of them began in The Hague last year at the International Court of Justice, which held a hearing after a complaint by Canada and the Netherlands saying that violations in Syria had been committed on a “massive scale.”

The year before, a German court sentenced a former Syrian intelligence officer to life in prison after he was convicted of crimes against humanity.

French judges last year issued an international arrest warrant for Mr. al-Assad for complicity in both crimes against humanity and war crimes, following an investigation into chemical attacks in 2013. And just this week, the U.S. Justice Department charged two top Syrian military officials with war crimes committed against Americans and others at a prison in Damascus.

But several factors have inhibited the push for accountability. For one, defections stopped around 2015, when Mr. al-Assad’s regime appeared to have stabilized, cutting off one source of testimony about abuses. More significantly, Syria is not a member of the International Criminal Court, so the court does not have jurisdiction over crimes committed on its soil. Russia and China vetoed a resolution in the U.N. Security Council to refer Syria to the court, blocking that avenue.

“Up until now the doors to the courtroom have largely been elusive,” said Balkees Jarrah, a lawyer and senior official with the international justice program at Human Rights Watch. “With this sudden political change there is a critical window, but a better future for Syria requires a comprehensive plan for justice.”

With Mr. al-Assad gone, one option would be for the rebels now in power to accept the international court’s jurisdiction over Syria, giving the court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, the authority to open investigations retroactively, several experts said. In doing so it would follow Ukraine, which has granted the court jurisdiction over its territory even though it is not a member.

Mr. Abdul Ghany, who is Syrian, said the country should also become a member of the court as part of the process of re-establishing the rule of law.

A second option would be for national courts to file charges under the concept of universal jurisdiction, under which any national court may prosecute individuals accused of heinous offenses.

While prosecutions in venues outside Syria matter, it is far more important to restore the country’s own judicial system and start the process of holding officials accountable in national courts, the experts said.

Such prosecutions have had a powerful impact in other post-conflict countries, enabling citizens to witness justice at work, according to Stephen J. Rapp, a former international prosecutor and former U.S. ambassador at large for global justice who has been involved with Syria for more than a decade.

“Even where we have had a successful international justice process, the national cases were more helpful in allowing reconciliation,” Mr. Rapp said.

The leader of the alliance that toppled the government, Ahmed al-Shara, also known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, said on Tuesday that the new administration would hold “criminals, murderers and military and security officials” who committed torture accountable — suggesting at least the possibility that starting a domestic legal process against them was a high priority.

To assist with that effort, one of the most prominent Syrian human rights leaders, Mouaz Moustafa, head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, said on Monday that he was immediately returning to the country.

Across Aleppo on Wednesday there was celebration as exiled residents returned home more than a week after Syrian rebels captured the city in a lightning-fast offensive that ended with Mr. al-Assad’s ouster.

They came back to their city from across the border with Turkey or from elsewhere — somewhere safer — if not permanently, then at least to assess what remained and where they might live. They set out to visit old neighborhoods and homes, some of which no longer existed.

Amar Sabir, 23, fled the city nearly 10 years ago with her family and ended up in Turkey. There, she got married and had two children, but never gave up hope of returning to Aleppo. On Sunday, she did.

“God willing, we’ll never have to leave Syria again,” she said, standing with her back to the horse statue.

Her cousins were taking her around the city to reacquaint her with the landmarks and historical sites. “This is going to become a historic place,” she said.

“This is where they brought down the regime,” said her husband, Basil al-Hassan.

Their first stop had been to the 13th-century citadel, a towering medieval structure rising above the city. Once a fortress, the landmark is the most famous structure in all of Aleppo, and one of the most enduring in the city. There, little boys hawked Syrian flags to people eager to pose with it. At the gated entrance of the citadel, a popcorn seller played a protest song on repeat, the chorus a reproach to the ousted Assad regime: “He who kills his people is a traitor.”

The song was mostly drowned out by a nearby drum circle, which paused its celebration briefly only during the call to prayer. Several men pounded their drums as others jumped and danced, twirling like whirling dervishes.

Ali Siraaj Ali, 44, had also fled Aleppo during the war. Wednesday was his first day back. He, too, went to the citadel first, bringing his son. “God willing, we’ll be happy,” the father said, after dancing excitedly, catching his breath. “But it’s unknown.”

Though excitement and frenzy were on full display in some parts of Aleppo, the city was still gripped by uncertainty and grim reminders of the 13-year civil war.

Farther down the street from the damaged equestrian statue were the remnants of one of Mr. al-Assad’s last acts of violence: a small crater where a rocket tore through a crowd on Nov. 30, killing about 15 people and wounding dozens more. Dried blood stained the sidewalk. But most visitors didn’t seem to notice.

In the Salahuldeen neighborhood, where the first battles between antigovernment rebels and Assad forces were fought beginning in 2012, Zuhair Khateeb felt uneasy.

Standing next to his small mechanics shop, Mr. Khateeb tore pita bread into small pieces and threw them to about 10 pet pigeons at his feet. The clinking of tiny bracelets around the birds’ legs provided a whimsical soundtrack to a grim discussion.

All around Mr. Khateeb, 43, were piles of rubble, what remained of the homes and buildings that had been destroyed by Syrian airstrikes years ago. Other buildings in the neighborhood appeared to be torn in half. The government never came to clear any of it away or to rebuild.

Residents, Mr. Khateeb said, were not allowed to. “No one did anything here,” he said. “This was a slow death. They wanted to kill us slowly, and we couldn’t say anything.”

He worked day and night to save up money to send his eldest son to Dubai so the teenager could avoid mandatory military service under the Syrian government.

In the weeks before the surprise rebel offensive started last month, the military began combing Aleppo’s neighborhoods, sweeping up large groups of men in their 30s and 40s, he said. Now that the regime is gone, he hopes his son can return home from Dubai.

Others are coming back to the neighborhood even though they don’t have anywhere to live, he said. “Based on what people are saying, God willing, there is something better to come,” added Mr. Khateeb. “But we’ve seen and suffered a lot already.”

At a park called President’s Square, another toppled monument lay face down on the ground. What used to represent the head of Hafez al-Assad, Mr. al-Assad’s father and a former president, was barely recognizable, a piece of shattered stone attached to shoulders by a few twisted rods of rebar.

Abdulhadi Ghazal, 17, sat on the pedestal that once held the now-desecrated bust, posing like Rodin’s “Thinker.” Someone had graffitied the words “11/30 the square of the free” on the pedestal.

“I was sitting where the leader was; I wanted to sit in his place,” said the teenager, a smattering of a mustache across his upper lip. But when a few people started taking his picture, he jumped off, fearful of what might happen to him if he were seen disrespecting a regime that still inspires fear in Syria.

“We saw so many people in prison, we got scared,” he said, referring to the images of emaciated and tortured prisoners that have emerged in recent days. “We’re scared the president might return.”

He wasn’t in the square when the bust was destroyed, but after he saw a video of it online, he said, he wanted to come and see it for himself — and to stand where the statue once stood.

Others simply spat at it.

At City Hall across the street, officials with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other rebel groups that helped take down the Assad family are scrambling to form a government that will oversee the cities and towns they now control.

A large photo of Mr. al-Assad still hangs, untouched, outside the building. No one has gotten around to removing it yet.

Muhammad Haj Kadour contributed reporting.

But in recent days, as rebels elsewhere in the country toppled the Assad regime, plunging the country into a new and precarious position, the Kurds, who control northeastern Syria, have come under assault by militant groups backed by Turkey, a longtime adversary. In clashes in Manbij and Kobani their forces have been attacked by fighters aided by Turkish drones and air power.

As the fighting has intensified between the Kurds and Turkey-backed groups, the main Kurdish militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces, said it had to divert fighters from defending the prisons that house accused ISIS members to positions on the front lines.

“This leaves a vacuum behind that can be taken advantage by ISIS and other actors,” the S.D.F.’s top general, known by the nom de guerre Mazlum Kobani, said early on Wednesday.

Over 9,000 ISIS fighters are housed in over 20 S.D.F. facilities throughout Syria, Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, chief of the U.S. military’s Central Command, said in a statement in September.

General Kobani said Washington’s failure to stop Turkey and its proxies from attacking the Kurds had endangered the peace U.S. forces had fought to establish.

“We and the Americans liberated this city together,” Gen. Kobani said of Manbij. The battles there against ISIS, he added, cost “lots of souls and lives.” But when the Turkish-backed rebel groups began their assault on Kurdish forces there last week, he said, “there was no firm position from the U.S. side” to offer help.

The Kurds have been instrumental partners for the United States in fighting ISIS, an Islamist terrorist group bent on establishing a global caliphate, for more than a decade. But Turkey views armed Kurds so close to its border as a threat. For decades Turkey has fought Kurdish separatists, who seek to carve out an independent country.

America’s divided allegiances between their Turkish and Kurdish allies have been expressed in recent comments by U.S. officials.

The U.S. has an interest in defeating ISIS, John Kirby, the White House National Security Communications Advisor, said at a news briefing on Tuesday, and “that means partnering with the Syrian Democratic Forces.”

But he added, “the Turks have a legitimate counterterrorism threat,” for which they “have a right to defend their citizens in their territory against terrorist attacks.”

When those goals overlap or conflict, Mr. Kirby said, the United States and Turkey would discuss “how both those outcomes can be achieved.”

The Department of Defense on Wednesday did not immediately comment on Gen. Kobani’s suggestion that the U.S. was abandoning its Kurdish allies. On Tuesday, ahead of a U.S.-brokered truce in the city of Kobani, General Kurilla visited American and Kurdish forces in Syria and met with Gen. Kobani.

Gen. Kobani said that no U.S. troops had been involved in the recent fighting and that U.S. military support was limited to some drone observation and acting as intermediaries between the S.D.F. and other groups, to ensure the evacuation of civilians from areas with fighting.

On Wednesday, SDF, said it had agreed to a U.S.-brokered cease-fire in the city of Manbij, which included that the group’s forces would be withdrawn. According to a war monitoring group, this withdrawal ends more than eight years of the group’s control of the city.

The United States did not immediately confirm its role.

“There is no American decision to protect the areas we liberated together from ISIS,” Gen. Kobani said in a translated interview. The expansion of fighting in northern Syria between armed Kurdish and Turkish-backed groups, has put the United States and Turkey — two NATO allies — at odds.

In 2019, President Trump withdrew U.S. forces from posts near the Turkish border, leaving the Kurds more vulnerable to attack, but about 900 American troops remain in Syria, working with the Kurds.

John Ismay and Cassandra Vinograd contributed reporting.

The satellite images captured on Tuesday show two of three frigates loitering several miles offshore. It is unclear whether the ships will stay in this location in the near future, or sail to another destination.

Since the deepwater port at Tartus was established in 1971, Moscow has maintained a nearly continuous presence there, first for the Soviet Union and then for Russia. It is Russia’s only such port in the Mediterranean.

Among the vessels still docked at Tartus are what appear to be several small Syrian naval ships, despite claims by Israel’s defense ministry that Israeli airstrikes had completely destroyed the Syrian Navy in the port city of Latakia on Tuesday.

No cargo ships have entered or departed from Tartus since at least Monday, according to ship tracking data from MarineTraffic, a commercial ship tracking agency. Two small commercial vessels arrived in the waters outside the port on Monday and Wednesday morning but have not yet docked at the port itself, according to MarineTraffic.

Other ships are shunning the port entirely. Two Russian vessels that regularly transport grain from Russia and Russian-occupied Ukraine to Syria and appeared to be en route for another delivery to Tartus have altered course in recent days. The ships, including the Mikhail Nenashev, are currently circling off the coast of Cyprus.

An Iranian oil tanker, the Lotus, carrying 750,000 barrels of crude oil and destined for Syria, abruptly turned around in the Red Sea on Sunday morning, The Times reported earlier.

Syria under Mr. al-Assad was heavily dependent on oil from its ally Iran to sustain its refineries, according to Viktor Katona, head of oil analysis at Kpler, a company that monitors global trade.

“With Iranian tankers making a U-turn after Assad’s departure, transportation fuels would be a rarity in Syria as the country would most probably start running out of diesel and gasoline inventories quite soon,” Mr. Katona said.