Agencies – Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has left Damascus for an unknown destination as rebels announced that they were entering the capital, according to reports.
The President boarded a plane and left for an unknown destination, two senior army officers told news agency Reuters. AFP reported that according to a war monitor, the Army and security forces had abandoned Damascus International Airport. A source close to Hezbollah told AFP that fighters of a key Assad ally had left their positions around the Syrian capital.
The Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group said its forces were moving into Damascus. Soon after, they announced an “end of the era of tyranny in the prison of Sednaya” as the rebels broke into the jail that has become a byword for the darkest abuses of the Syrian regime, AFP reported.
Earlier, the rebel group had said they had captured the strategic city of Homs, on the way to the capital. But the Syrian defence ministry had denied this and said the situation in Homs was “safe and stable”.
The Hezbollah, which backed the Assad regime for years, has asked its forces to withdraw. Hezbollah “has instructed its fighters in recent hours to withdraw from the Homs area, with some heading to Latakia (in Syria) and others to the Hermel area in Lebanon”, a source told AFP.
