It was the clock tower that settled it. The images of rebels driving around the central square of Homs, its famous clocktower visible, confirmed they had taken the city. This meant they could now sever Damascus from the coastal regions, cutting the Assad regime off from the remaining pockets of support it had outside the capital. It was over.

The Assad regime in Syria is gone. 

A tectonic shift in the Middle East just happened over the weekend. On Sunday morning, Syrian rebels finally took Damascus. They took Bashar al-Assad’s palace. The Assad regime is no more. Assad has fled to Moscow where he is being granted some sort of asylum because the Russians backed the Assad regime.

The end came fast. The opposition offensive, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, began on November 27. Aleppo fell first, then Hama, and in a blink of an eye, Damascus.. And just like that, after more than 13 years of war, and more than 600,000 killed, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was gone. 

he war had begun in 2011. With the Arab Spring as a backdrop, children in Deraa were accused of scrawling graffiti that demanded al-Assad step down. Their arrest and torture led to protests, peaceful at first.

Thirteen years after they joined the revolutionary wave sweeping across the Middle East and north Africa, Syrians can say they have consigned the name of Bashar al-Assad to the history books alongside Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen. But as the past 13 years have shown in all those countries, liberation requires more than removing one man from the presidential palace. We women, especially, know that.

Syrians awakened on Monday to a hopeful if uncertain future after rebels seized the capital, Damascus, and President Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia following 13 years of civil war and more than 50 years of his family’s brutal rule.

The lightning advance of a militia alliance spearheaded by Hayat al-Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al-Qaeda affiliate, marked one of the biggest turning points for the Middle East in generations.

Assad’s fall wiped out a bastion from which Iran and Russia exercised influence across the Arab world.

The red, white, green and black Free Syrian Army flag flew over Damascus on Sunday as thousands of residents lined the main square in bursts of defiant jubilation – after President Bashar al-Assad relinquished his grip on power.

Over the past 11 days, a rebel alliance charged through Syria in the boldest challenge to the Assad rule in years – following decades of brutal reign by the Assad dynasty marked by fighting, bloodshed and an oppressive political crackdown.

President Joe Biden's administration has kept hundreds of U.S. soldiers in place in Syria with no major policy plans, even as Russia, Iran and Turkey turn up the heat in the long-running conflict.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on Sunday defended President Trump’s declaration of “mission accomplished” in the Syria missile strikes, saying the president was talking in military terms about a singular task, not about foreign policy, while reinforcing that the “United States’ work in Syria is not done.”

Syrian President Bashar Assad is telling President Donald Trump "F you" by continuing to fly military aircraft from the base that United States tomahawk missiles struck on Thursday, Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday morning.

As late as earlier this week, some in the White House were saying that for the U.S. to pursue the ouster of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad would be “silly.” But after President Donald Trump’s strong statement on Wednesday about Assad’s use of chemical weapons and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s denunciation of both the Syrian government and its Russian enabler, the notion of American action — both diplomatic and possibly even military — directed against Assad can’t be considered so silly.