Syria Live Updates: Rebels Assert Control in Damascus as Questions Loom Over Their Plans

“Seizing the city is a joy — we are joyous,” said one rebel fighter, Mohammad Bakir, who sat in the back of a mud-caked car en route to the prison, his rifle tucked between his knees. He said he had not heard from his mother, brother and cousin since they disappeared in 2012 after they protested against the government and were presumably detained.

“But the real victory will be when I find my family,” Mr. Bakir, 42, said above the din of car horns.

Prisons were central to Mr. al-Assad’s ability to crush the civilian uprising that began in 2011 and the rebellion that followed. He set up an industrial-scale system of arbitrary arrests and torture prisons, according to reports by human rights groups.

More than 130,000 people were subjected to arbitrary arrest and detention by the government, according to a report in August by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a nonprofit, which began its count when the conflict started in 2011. The network said that more than 15,000 people had died “due to torture” by government forces from 2011 to July this year.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a separate organization that is based in Britain and that documents abuses in Syria, has estimated that more than 30,000 detainees were killed in Sednaya alone.

A crucial element of the pall that the prisons cast over the country was secrecy. People were swallowed up by the system, and families often struggled to discover whether their relatives had even been detained, much less to determine their fate. As a result, the opening of the prisons became an imperative for the rebels.

Videos sent to The New York Times by a group of doctors visiting Sednaya appeared to show the dire conditions inside. The footage was shared by the Independent Doctors Association, a group providing humanitarian and medical assistance in Syria.

Numbered cells, each of which appear to have held a dozen or more people, are seen littered with debris, clothing and personal belongings. Journalists, armed fighters and civilians, including children, roam the prison. Several men scrape at the concrete and grates along a wall in an apparent attempt to reach hidden cells.

In the northwestern city of Aleppo, dozens of families gathered at a traffic circle, hoping for the arrival of loved ones who had been detained. The spot was known during the war as the Death Roundabout because it was a regular target of government airstrikes.

Some were certain that their family members were alive and would arrive soon. Others had no information, only hope.

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.

Syria has modest oil reserves, and President-elect Donald J. Trump said during his first presidency that they should be secured, but markets were largely shrugging off the risk that conflict in the Middle East could lead to disruption of supplies. There are about 900 U.S. troops in Syria.

In more than a year since Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel from Gaza, there has been little interruption to flows of oil and natural gas, beyond rerouting tanker traffic to avoid attacks by Houthi fighters in Yemen.

The markets have instead focused on the tepid growth of global demand that can probably be met by new supplies from the United States, Brazil, Canada and other producers not bound by the agreements of the OPEC Plus cartel.

On Thursday, OPEC Plus pushed back plans to increase output to at least the second quarter of next year, the third delay in recent months.

Richard Bronze, head of geopolitics at Energy Aspects, a research firm, said, “There’s still a residual view that the oil market will be oversupplied next year.” He added that traders were worried that Mr. Trump’s policies would push oil prices lower “whether due to higher U.S. production or tariffs disrupting economic activity.”

Mr. Bronze said he thought that those theories would prove incorrect, but “the market will have to see it to believe it.”

Syria is in the neighborhood of large oil producers such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, but its own production has been sharply curtailed by a decade of civil war.

In 2023, Syria produced 40,000 barrels of oil a day — a trickle relative to major oil producers, according to the Statistical Review of World Energy, published by the Energy Institute, a London-based nonprofit.

In the early 2000s, Syria pumped more than 600,000 barrels a day, comparable to midsize producers like Azerbaijan or Egypt. That performance gives hope that with a stable political environment and improved management, oil sales could be an important source of revenue for a future Syrian government.

“We were like fish out of water when we left,” said Yasmeen Ali Armoosh, 30, speaking this past week from the dilapidated home they have rented for years in the town of Binnish, in northwestern Syria. “We felt suffocated.”

She and her family had withstood years of airstrikes from Syrian and Russian warplanes, she said, and had refused to leave their home in Saraqib, a town in northwestern Syria that became an opposition stronghold soon after the civil war began. But once government forces captured Saraqib in 2020, Ms. Armoosh’s family fled — fearful, she noted, of what living under a brutal dictatorship again could mean.

The 13-year civil war in Syria caused one of the “largest displacement crises in the world,” according to the United Nations. Some 7.2 million Syrians were displaced from their homes inside the country, mostly to rebel-held areas, while more than six million fled and became refugees.

The rebel offensive that ultimately drove President Bashar al-Assad from power on Sunday has prompted an untold number to start making their way back, crowding some border crossings with neighboring countries.

In Binnish, Ms. Armoosh, a teacher, was only around 10 miles from her hometown for around four years, but she said that it felt like living in another country.

On Nov. 29, she was feverishly messaging with dozens of friends about the rebel advance. One friend wrote, “Yasmeen, they liberated Saraqib, you’re finally returning home.”

The day after, as rebels pushed on from Saraqib toward the city of Aleppo, Ms. Armoosh went with her brother and two friends to see what had become of their hometown.

Driving on the road leading to Saraqib was a familiar comfort, she said.

Ms. Armoosh was relieved to find her house is still standing — many homes have been destroyed during the war — but government soldiers had used it as some kind of outpost, she said.

Pro-Assad graffiti was written on the wall, and the floors were littered with bullet casings, she added.

Ms. Armoosh and her family will need to work to make it habitable again, but it is still home.

“A person’s homeland is where their home is, where their friends are,” she said.

The fall of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, a longtime ally of Iran, is seen in Israel as the crowning consequence of that yearlong campaign against Iran and its interests, even if it is also tinged with uncertainty about what comes next.

Without Israel’s blows against Hezbollah and Iran, Israeli analysts and leaders say, Syria’s rebels might not have dared revive their rebellion against Mr. al-Assad. And Iran and Hezbollah, which had propped up his regime for a decade, might have been better placed to save him.

Mr. al-Assad’s collapse “is the direct result of our forceful action against Hezbollah and Iran, Assad’s main supporters,” said Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, as he toured the Golan Heights on Sunday, a territory that Israel captured from Syria during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.

“It set off a chain reaction of all those who want to free themselves from this tyranny and its oppression,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

Still, Israelis are concerned about who will succeed Mr. al-Assad in Syria.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the main opposition alliance, has been fighting Hezbollah and its Iranian allies in Syria for years and is unlikely to allow Iran to continue to use Syria as a thoroughfare for arms deliveries to Lebanon. Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham who uses a nom de guerre, said in an address in Damascus on Sunday that the Assad regime had brought many ills upon Syria and had allowed the country to become “a farm for Iranian greed.”

But Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is also a hard-line Islamist group with no love for the Jewish state. The name Abu Mohammad al-Jolani is derived from the Arabic word for the Golan Heights.

And the rebels’ main foreign backer, Turkey, has been strongly critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza — leading to unease in Israel about the prospect of a Turkish-backed government controlling one of Israel’s northern borders.

“The collapse of the Assad regime, the tyranny in Damascus, offers great opportunity but also is fraught with significant dangers,” Mr. Netanyahu said on Sunday.

Pre-empting any fallout from Mr. al-Assad’s departure, the Israeli military openly crossed into sovereign Syrian territory over the weekend for the first time since the 1970s, seizing strategic positions close to the border.

Israel is also talking with Kurdish rebels that control northeast Syria, which have a fraught relationship with the Islamist factions that led the charge on Damascus, Gideon Saar, the Israeli foreign minister, said at a press briefing on Monday. Mr. Saar declined to give more details.

This past summer, the Golan Heights was in the spotlight when a rocket launched from Lebanon struck a soccer field in Majdal Shams, a picturesque Druse Arab village, killing 12 children and injuring dozens more. The following day, the entire town, where it seems everybody knows everybody, wore black.

On Sunday, at a military outpost near Mount Hermon — which straddles the borders of Israel, Syria and Lebanon and was the scene of fierce fighting between Israel and Syria in 1974 — old tanks, now used for practice, were parked on muddy roads with their barrels pointed east toward Syria.

Tucked away behind the dirt roads stood an old pyramid-like structure made of volcanic rocks, now held together with metal wires. Israeli soldiers were patrolling the area, carrying out some general monitoring tasks and trying to keep warm.

Mahmoud Abu-Shaheen, 39, a grocery store owner from the Druse village of Buka’ata, in the north of the Golan Heights, stopped his car along a road outside the old structure, which overlooks the buffer zone between Israel and Syria. He said he was “curious and hopeful” about the current situation, which, he added, was “not surprising to me.”

“I drove out here to get a close sense of the fighting,” he said, as powerful explosions were heard in the distance and the sound of jet engines pierced a foggy sky.

“I have relatives in Suwayda, in Syria,” Mr. Abu-Shaheen continued. “We have been in touch all of these years and they told us that over this past year the situation became very difficult for them. They have no work and no regular income. They have been telling us how only the people who are close to Assad’s regime were able to make money, but this is not clean money.”

Like others in the Golan Heights and elsewhere, Mr. Abu-Shaheen is uncertain of how the near future will play out. He said he doesn’t know what role Israel might play, given its “active front in Gaza. At least Hezbollah is now weak.”

But, he said, “I hope Israel can make peace with Syria, and solve the status of the Golan Heights. But we can at least return to the days when Israel used to sell our apples to our Syrian neighbors.”

Dafna Meir, 47, a tour guide from Moshav Alonei Habashan, an Israeli settlement in the eastern Golan Heights, echoed Mr. Abu-Shaheen’s expressions of hope mixed with uncertainty and trepidation.

“This has been a difficult year, with endless explosions, fires, sirens and tension in the air,” she said, speaking by phone. “And when the cease-fire was announced we were so relieved, thinking to ourselves that this terrible year was finally over and that life here could finally return to normal,” she said, referring to the cease-fire that took effect between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon late last month.

“We are now again in a state of uncertainty, unsure where this is all going,” Ms. Meir added, citing the proximity to the Syrian border and “the danger of a security escalation, with errant fire crossing over the border.”

“This is such a beautiful area, all I want is for the nature to recover and for the beauty to return,” she said.

Hours later, Israeli forces took control of the mountain summit of Mount Hermon on the Syrian side of the border.

Checkpoints typically manned by Syrian intelligence and security forces, who would question drivers and passengers for hours on end, were empty. A few miles from the border, a body of a man in military uniform lay sprawled on the ground next to an abandoned pickup truck.

Down the road from one Syrian military base, a convoy of 10 rebel vehicles sped down the highway. They drove four-wheel drive vehicles — their doors and windows caked in mud as makeshift camouflage — and Syrian military vehicles armed with rockets that once belonged to the al-Assad government.

There were also signs of the lawlessness that many fear could seize the country, the celebration over the fall of Mr. al-Assad mixed with the uncertainty of what comes next.

A duty free shop just across the border from Lebanon appeared to have been broken into — its storefront windows smashed while bottles, chocolates and bags of snacks were strewn across its floor. Windshields and windows of dozens of abandoned cars along the roads were broken and their doors flung open.

Two young men fiddled with the wires beneath one abandoned truck, in apparent attempt to jump start the vehicle.

Nearby, one young man stood in front of an abandoned tank taking a selfie. He then picked up his toddler, placed him on top of the tank and told him to hold his fingers up in a V for victory before taking a photo.

In Old Damascus, the centuries-old city center of winding, narrow alleys, Victor Dawli, 59, stood in his apartment’s entryway, a cigarette in hand. As a truck carrying Syrian rebels passed, Mr. Dawli waved. One fighter, clutching his rifle and hunched over in the bed of the truck, nodded in response.

Mr. Dawli’s neighborhood, Babsharqi, is home to mostly Christians, many of who supported the Assad government and now fear they could face retribution from rebels and others who were part of the uprising.

As dawn broke on the second day of life in Syria without Mr. Assad, there was a sense of unease in the neighborhood, as people here walked a tightrope. Some have kept their heads down and stayed inside their homes. Others like Mr. Dawli say they have secretly supported the rebels from the start of their offensive.

When one neighbor passed by, Mr. Dawli shouted to him: “Good morning, congratulations!” The man gave him a blank stare, then hurried down a nearby alleyway.

“There are people who are scared, you tell them congratulations and they feel uneasy,” he said.

Numbered cells, each of which appear to have held a dozen or more people, are seen littered with debris, clothing and personal belongings. In one area, tomatoes and dirty coffee filters are scattered on the floor. The walls and ceilings are crumbling. Journalists, armed fighters and civilians, including children, roam the prison. Several men scrape at the concrete and grates along a wall, in an attempt to access hidden cells where more prisoners are believed to still be held.

In another scene, family members pore through paper records seeking information on their loved ones. “They’re looking at the medical records and prisoner records — hoping,” says the doctor recording the scene.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based organization that documents human rights abuses in Syria, has estimated that more than 30,000 detainees have been killed in Sednaya Prison.

The clashes preceded a call on Sunday between Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and his Turkish counterpart, Defense Minister Yasar Guler.

The other fighters, the Syrian National Army, were supported in their assault of Manbij by Turkish air power, including warplanes, according to a spokesmen for the Syrian Democratic Forces. And a Turkish “kamikaze drone” exploded at a Kurdish military base on Saturday, according to the monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Turkey and the United States are allies, sworn to protect each other as members of the NATO alliance. Though both countries celebrated Sunday’s ouster of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, their interests diverge over support for the Kurds in northern Syria, far from Damascus, the capital.

In their call on Sunday, Mr. Austin and Mr. Guler agreed that coordination was necessary “to prevent further escalation of an already volatile situation, as well as to avoid any risk to U.S. forces and partners,” according a readout of the conversation released by the Pentagon. The United States also acknowledged Turkey’s “legitimate security concerns.”

The Kurds have been instrumental partners for the United States in fighting the Islamic State, an Islamist terrorist group that rose to power early in Syria’s civil war, more than a decade ago.

The Kurds now control much of Syria’s northeast under an autonomous civil administration. About 900 U.S. troops are deployed to Syria to support the Kurdish forces. American forces have patrolled around Manbij with Turkey in the past, but it was not immediately clear if any U.S. troops were in the city this weekend during the Turkish bombardment.

On Sunday, the United States announced it had conducted one of the largest strikes against Islamic State targets in months.

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.

Turkey has backed several rebel groups in Syria, including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group of seemingly reformed Al Qaeda members whose lightning-fast push to Damascus toppled the authoritarian government on Sunday. Turkey also has backed the Syrian National Army, a ragtag force made up of mercenaries and criminals, to help maintain a buffer zone along its border with Syria to guard against the activities of Kurdish militants.

Turkey and its proxies in the S.N.A. “are looking to utilize the current chaos to rewrite the map in Turkey’s favor,” said Devorah Margolin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “They are using the distraction of Damascus to continue to grab power during this time of chaos and to undermine the S.D.F., ensuring its negotiating power is weakened.”

The power vacuum created by the fall of Damascus presents an opportunity for Turkey to increase its power and influence in Syria generally but particularly along its border, said Natasha Hall, a senior fellow with the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The weekend’s fighting was condemned by the Kurdish-run civil administration of northern Syria.

“The other part of Syria is liberated from the tyranny of Assad,” said Sinam Mohamad, who represents the Kurdish autonomous region in its dealings with the United States.

Turkey and its proxies, he said, “want to create another conflict,” adding, “We don’t want to have conflict in the region.”

“It is the Syrian people who must decide on the future of their country and its political and governmental system,” said President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran in a meeting with his cabinet on Sunday, according to state media outlets. He added that Syrians must be free to do so without violence and foreign meddling.

It was yet another remarkable turnabout for Iran after withdrawing its military forces on Friday when the collapse of Mr. al-Assad’s government became inevitable.

State television channels candidly discussed Iran’s policies, with officials and pundits admitting that Iran had misjudged the regional dynamics and officials had overlooked Mr. al-Assad’s unpopularity among Syrians, which also reflected Iran’s lack of support there.

Hatef Salehi, an analyst who supports Iran’s government, said in a live town hall discussion on the audio chat app Clubhouse that “the most important lesson of Syria for the Islamic Republic is that no government can last without the support of the people.”

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said on a live television interview that Iran had received intelligence suggesting that rebels in Syria’s Idlib Province were organizing an uprising in the north. He said Iran had relayed the report to Syria’s government and army, but still “nobody could believe” Mr. al-Assad’s collapse.

“What caught us off guard was, one, the inability of Syria’s army to confront the movement and, second, the speed of developments,” Mr. Araghchi said.

Mr. Araghchi said that when he traveled last week to Syria, Mr. al-Assad had expressed concern to him and complained about the army’s unwillingness to fight back. Mr. Araghchi said his impression was that the Syrian president did not have an accurate read of the situation.

Mr. Araghchi confirmed that Iran and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel group that led the offensive against Syria’s government, had exchanged diplomatic messages ahead of the fall of Damascus, Syria’s capital. He said Iran had requested protection for its embassy and Shiite religious shrines and that the rebels had agreed.

Still, a crowd of rebel supporters stormed Iran’s Embassy in Damascus shortly after the fall and ransacked the building, destroying furniture and documents, according to videos and photographs circulating in Iranian media. They also climbed the entrance fence of the embassy and tore down huge posters of Hezbollah’s leader who was recently killed by Israel, Hassan Nasrallah, and Iran’s slain top general, Qassim Suleimani, who had commanded troops in Syria’s civil war in support of the Assad government.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry said all of its diplomatic staff were safe and no one was present when the building was vandalized.

Ordinary Iranians experienced a range of emotions as they watched jubilant Syrians flood the streets, tearing down symbols of Mr. al-Assad’s oppressive government.

“All I can think about is the fall of Iran’s dictatorship regime. Will this sweet moment finally arrive?” Behrouz, 33, an engineer from Iran, said in a telephone interview.

He and other Iranians The New York Times interviewed asked to be identified by only their first names for fear of reprisals.

Lili, a 40-year-old university professor, said her first emotion upon hearing the news of Mr. al-Assad’s fall was “a sense of escape, of being let go, of freedom. And then will I, will we, ever see this day?”

But supporters of Iran’s government lamented on social media and in live town hall discussions that the loss of Syria was yet another devastating blow to Iran’s network of militant allies in the region.

“The Berlin Wall of unity for the axis of resistance has collapsed. That’s it,” said Meysam Karim Jaffari, a conservative journalist and analyst affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards Corps, referring to Iran’s network of regional allies that included Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Syrian government, the Houthis of Yemen and armed groups in Syria and Iraq.

In just a few months, several top leaders of these militant groups were eliminated by Israeli assassinations or political upheaval. Analysts noted that these events signified a pivotal shift in the region’s history, particularly after Hamas’s attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, but in a direction that starkly contradicted Iran’s aspirations.

“The fall of Assad puts an exclamation point on the fact that decades of Iranian strategy and investment in the Levant have come undone in a matter of weeks,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran director for the International Crisis Group, a conflict resolution organization.