By Tuvan Gumrukcu and Umit Bektas
Now coated in ashes and empty bullet casings, the grand mausoleum of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s household stood within the eyes of rebels as an emblem of the injustice Syrians endured beneath their lengthy rule.
The marble mausoleum within the Assads’ western Syrian hometown of Qardaha was stormed, looted and torched by rebels after they took the capital Damascus, ending a household dynasty that started with Assad’s father Hafez seizing energy in a 1970 coup.
Bullet casings littered the mausoleum ground as fighters and civilians fired weapons into the air, chanted slogans and stomped on Hafez al-Assad’s torched memorial as winds blew ashes about. The tomb of the elder Assad’s spouse was additionally burnt and destroyed.
Ahmet al-Abdullah, a insurgent from Aleppo who helped sack the mausoleum, stated that whereas he had blended emotions watching the monuments burn, the brand new Syrian management was decided to take away any indicators of the Assad legacy from public life.
“God prepared, we’ll wipe all of Syria’s streets clear of the Assad household and their injustices. We are going to change into a civilised nation with out a picture of anybody regardless of their standing,” he stated, referring to the ever-present public portraits and statues of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad that marked their rule.
As he spoke on Thursday, armed males and native households walked across the Qardaha compound and scrawled graffiti slogans on its partitions.
“Our flag would be the revolution flag, it won’t be the terrorist flag of the (Assad) regime which engaged in terrorism in opposition to the Syrian folks,” al-Abdullah stated. “Not one of the stays of the Assad household will stay.”
In close by Latakia, the principle metropolis within the coastal area that was lengthy the epicentre of the Assads’ Alawite minority sect, residents celebrated the ruling household’s fall. Dozens of individuals holding flags and weapons posed in entrance of a monument within the metropolis centre, taking photographs and movies as honking vehicles drove by.
This text was produced by Reuters information company. It has not been edited by World South World.
