December 10, 2024: Syria civil war news

After rebel forces took over the presidential palace in Damascus – also known as Qasr al-Shaab, or the People’s Palace – we’re getting more insight into the life and belongings of deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Reuters photographers found various items that showcased Assad’s lavish taste, including a signed photo of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and artwork from around the world.

A rebel fighter examines souvenirs in the palace on December 10.

A portrait of the UK's late Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.

Artworks from around the globe.

Items found in Assad's former residence on Tuesday.

A Syrian rebel-linked government leader, Mohammad Al-Bashir, has been appointed as the country’s caretaker prime minister for the next three months, during which his government will oversee Syria’s transition to a new government, he announced in a televised address on Tuesday.

Ministers of the former HTS-linked Salvation Government, as well as Assad-era civil servants, will continue to serve as ministers in the caretaker government until March 1, 2025, Al-Bashir added.

“A cabinet session was held, including the working team from the Syrian Salvation Government, which operated in the Idlib region and its surroundings, as well as the Syrian government of the ousted regime. The session’s focus was on the transfer of institutions… and managing ongoing affairs,” Al-Bashir said in his address.

Most recently, Al-Bashir served as prime minister of the Salvation Government in Idlib. He had previously held the position of minister for Development and Human Affairs.

He is a trained engineer and holds additional qualifications in English and Sharia law, according to his resume, which is posted on the Salvation Government website.

New Syrian Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir (far right) meets his ousted Assad regime counterpart Mohammed al-Jalali (far left) , with rebel leader Mohammad al-Jolani (second right) in Damascus on December 9.

On the streets of Damascus, young people have been celebrating the fall of former President Bashar al-Assad.

People held up their babies, while others took selfies and cheered. Just behind them, rebel fighters stood near weaponry.

“This is the reaction after 50 years of this regime, of this death, of this darkness… this is the new generation that will come out to the light now this is the reaction,” one young woman named Judi told CNN’s Clarissa Ward, who is reporting at the scene.

The woman stood with her parents amid the cheering, and said she felt that she was “coming to the light again.”

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Syrians flood streets of Damascus to celebrate end of Assad regime

01:59 - Source: CNN

Clarissa Ward in the garage housing Assad's collection of luxury cars on December 10.

Former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad owned several garages full of luxury cars.

I’m standing in one of them, on the compound of the presidential palace.

Aston Martins, Lamborghinis and Ferraris line the parking lot and, outside this carpark, there are more parking lots filled with dozens and dozens of armored cars.

The cars show the deep, deep corruption of the Assad regime, which is a big part of why this uprising started in the first place in 2011.

Assad ruled for quite some years, his father for decades before. The cars symbolize the levels of corruption and greed, they show the opulence and the lavish lifestyle Assad lives while so many Syrians were struggling to put food on the table.

The past 14 years Syrians have been under bombardment, they’ve been tortured, maimed, kidnapped, killed and meanwhile… Assad lived like a king with garages full of cars. With palaces, with incredible mosaics and marble.

Ward explores the lot housing a fleet of luxury vehicles, a symbol of the deep corruption of the Assad regime.

We watched in the palace some ordinary people who managed to sneak in with their jaws dropped. They could not believe how he was living like this at a time when Syria was suffering so acutely.

So, this really is a metaphor for the root of the rot, for where it all started.

While many are celebrating the end of the Assad regime, Syrians are also anxious about who will control the country. The Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group is at pains to show that they are different from the old guard, refusing to use or touch the luxury vehicles to show their difference from Assad.

But, the rebels who were guarding the palace wouldn’t look at me or talk to me until I put my headscarf on, so there are still extremely conservative tendencies from the majority of rebel forces who are controlling this country.

The sound of celebratory gunfire filled the streets of Damascus in the hours following the collapse of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

But the jubilant scenes at the weekend that greeted the end of half a century of tyranny could not mask the scale of the challenge facing the victorious Islamist rebels whose lightning advance on the Syrian capital captured the world’s attention.

Those rebels – led by the group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) – must now try to unite a country cleaved apart by more than a decade of civil war, one in which dozens of heavily armed militias and remnants of the old regime linger.

The rebels had dreamt of this day for years, but even they appear to have been surprised by the speed and ease of their advance.

Now their rush is to keep the lid on Syria’s Pandora’s box, avoid a power vacuum and prevent the sort of chaos that almost inevitably arises when a 50-year regime topples in a matter of days.

Read more about the task the rebels have ahead of them here.

Israeli strikes appear to have hit the Syrian naval base in Latakia, western Syria.

Photos taken by an AFP photographer showed the large-scale destruction of military vessels.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar told reporters Monday that Israel was striking targets in Syria to prevent weapons from falling “into the hands of extremists.”

On Tuesday, the UN special envoy for Syria, Geir O. Pedersen, said: “We are continuing to see Israeli movements and bombardments into Syrian territory. This needs to stop.”

Photos show the aftermath of the strikes:

Syrian naval ships destroyed in an overnight Israeli attack on the port city of Latakia on December 10.

The scene from the naval base in Latakia on Tuesday.

Smoke billows from the remains of the vessels.

Smoke billows following airstrikes in Damascus, Syria, early on December 10.

The collapse of the Assad regime has prompted a punishing military response from Israel, which has launched airstrikes across Syria and deployed ground troops both into and beyond a demilitarized buffer zone established in 1974.

A Syrian activist group, The Voice of the Capital, said that Israeli forces had advanced as far as Beqaasem, about 25 kilometers (16 miles) from Damascus and several kilometers beyond the Syrian side of the buffer zone. CNN could not independently confirm that claim, but the village lies in the Syrian foothills of Mount Hermon, which Israeli forces captured on Sunday.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said he had ordered the military to seize that demilitarized “area of separation” between the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and the rest of Syria.

A spokesperson for the Israeli military denied reports that forces “have advanced on or are approaching Damascus” but said that the military was “positioned within the buffer zone and at defensive points near the border to protect Israeli borders.”

The Israeli defense minister said on Monday that the Israeli military had advanced beyond the buffer zone, but he did not say how deep into Syria the troops had gone.

A CNN team in Damascus heard loud explosions throughout the early hours on Tuesday, a continuation of strikes that began over the weekend.

Foreign Minister Gideon Saar told reporters Monday that Israel was acting to prevent weapons from falling “into the hands of extremists.”

Voice of the Capital said that the overnight bombing campaign was “the most violent in Damascus in 15 years,” saying that Israel had targeted Syrian army centers, Iran-backed militias, strategic weapons depots and armored battalions.

Images taken by an AFP journalist at Mezzeh Air Base southwest of Damascus showed destroyed Syrian military helicopters. Israeli strikes also appear to have hit the Syrian naval base in Latakia, western Syria. An AFP photographer showed large scale destruction of military vessels.

The body of prominent Syrian activist Mazen al-Hamada has been found in a hospital in Damascus, his niece announced on Facebook on Tuesday.

Joud al-Hamada wrote that Mazen’s body had been lying at the Harasta Hospital for a week.

“If only you could have endured that week, my love…

Goodbye, Mazen. Goodbye, honest one.

Goodbye, noble one,” she wrote in her post.

Al-Hamada was a well-known face of the Syrian protests during 2011’s Arab Spring. He fled to the Netherlands where he testified on the torture he had been subjected to by Assad’s regime for nearly two years for his involvement in the demonstrations.

He was arrested in February 2020 at Damascus airport on his return to Syria and had not been seen since.

Israeli military vehicles cross the fence to the buffer zone with Syria near the village of Majdal Shams in the Israel-annexed Golan Heights on December 10.

Middle Eastern nations including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Qatar have condemned Israel’s seizure of the buffer zone that separates the occupied Golan heights from the rest of Syria and accused it of taking advantage of the situation to take more land.

The moves “confirm Israel’s continued violation of the principles of international law and its determination to sabotage Syria’s chances of restoring its security, stability and territorial integrity,” the Saudi foreign ministry said in a statement.

The Arab League accused Israel of “taking advantage of the developments in the internal situation in Syria” while Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi called it an “unacceptable escalation and an attack on the sovereignty of an Arab state.”

Qatar’s foreign ministry called the move “a serious escalation” and said Israel was “imposing realities” through land seizures, and Egypt’s foreign ministry said Israel’s actions “impose a new reality on the ground that contravenes international law.”

“Israel’s actions… constitute an exploitation of the state of fluidity and vacuum in Syria to occupy more Syrian territories,” the Egyptian foreign ministry said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said he had ordered the military to “take control” of the buffer zone that separates the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights from the rest of Syria.

The UN has confirmed that Israeli troops have entered the buffer zone and have been moving within that area, where they remain in at least three locations, according to the UN Secretary-General’s spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric.

The UN’s Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) told Israel its presence in the Syrian buffer zone would violate the 1974 Agreement on Disengagement with Syria, Dujarric said Monday.

Syrians scavenge at the site of an Israeli airstrike that targeted shipments of weapons that belonged to Syrian government forces in Qamishli, northeastern Syria, on December 10.

Geir O. Pedersen, the United Nations special envoy for Syria, has called on Israel to stop striking the country as it finds its feet after 50 years of Assad rule.

Rebel forces swept into the capital of Damascus on Sunday, ousting President Bashar al-Assad and taking control of the country.

Speaking at the United Nations in Geneva on Tuesday, Pedersen said “we are continuing to see Israeli movements and bombardments into Syrian territory. This needs to stop. This is extremely important.”

On Monday, Israel said it struck Syria’s chemical weapons capabilities. It has also moved its troops into the buffer zone that separates the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights from the rest of Syria and ordered the creation of a “security zone” further inside Syrian territory.

Meanwhile, the leadership of Syria is yet to become clear. Pedersen noted that while Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is the main rebel group, there is a “patchwork of groups” who are not formally united and will have to work together.

The UN envoy also added that “no one, absolutely no one” saw the fall of the Assad regime coming, including – he believed – the rebel groups themselves.

“Even the armed groups that are now in control of Damascus have been surprised (about) what has happened,” he told the UN.

Two days after the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was toppled on Sunday, Damascus is calm.

Kids play in the parks and most stores are open. But driving through the capital, no photos of Assad can be seen.

Iman Abi Laben posed with her son where told CNN she thanked God for the end of the Assad rule.

Iman Abi Laben told CNN she thanked God for the end of the Assad rule.

Standing on the street with her 1-year-old son, Laben said she wants a different life for her child to what she knew.

“We just want to live a good life. We want safety. We want our children to live in peace. To go and come as they wish. I want my son to live a different life than I did.”

Walid Hamshu, 67, says he's not worried for the future.

Walid Hamshu, 67, took a more somber tone, telling CNN that the Assad regime took “everything.”

“Seventies, 80s, 90s, 2000, 2010s. It’s (nearly) 2025 now. You calculate how much of my life I lived under the Assads. The number of years under them,” he said.

But Hamshu is more optimistic about the future.

“I’m not worried about the future. The rebels have come to rebuild the country for us. We had enough of the past. Godwilling (rebel leader Abu Mohammad) al-Jolani becomes president. We will support him. He is a pious man. You can tell from their faces what their intentions are. He is a conqueror. He has come to rebuild the country and save us,” Hamshu said.

Employees enter the Syrian Central Bank as they return to work in Damascus, on December 10.

Life appeared calmer in Damascus Tuesday as staff went back to work at Syria’s Central Bank, according to video from Reuters.

The employees’ return comes just two days after rebels overthrew longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad, throwing the country’s future into uncertainty.

Iran has urged the United Nations Security Council to respond to Israeli attacks in Syria and the expansion of its occupation in the Golan Heights.

Tehran’s call to “halt the aggression” and hold Israel accountable comes after Israel said it struck chemical weapons capabilities in Syria and had ordered the creation of a “security zone” inside Syrian territory – which the UN said breached a 1974 agreement.

Tensions between Iran and Israel have heightened fears of an all-out regional war after their decades-long shadow conflict emerged into the open following the October 7 attack on Israel by Iranian proxy Hamas last year. The two countries have traded a series of strikes this year as Israel wages its ongoing war in Gaza.

Loud explosions were heard in Damascus overnight into the early hours of Tuesday, according to a CNN team in the Syrian capital.

Video from the AFP news agency showed a cloud of smoke rising over the city. The cause of the smoke was not immediately clear.

Reuters previously reported that Israel conducted three airstrikes in the Syrian capital on Sunday, citing two regional security sources. Israel’s military at the time declined to comment when asked by CNN if it had conducted strikes on Damascus.

A Palestinian man carries a candle during a demonstration against the attack in eastern Ghouta in Syria, in the West Bank city of Ramallah on August 22, 2013.

Ousted Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad deployed chemical weapons on his own people throughout the country’s brutal civil war, to the outrage and horror of the international community.

In 2013, the Syrian regime launched rockets carrying sarin — a toxic and fast-acting nerve agent — into the Ghouta district of Damascus, killing more than 1,400 people, including hundreds of children.

Images of children suffocating and foaming out of their mouths shocked the world.

Under the threat of US military intervention, Assad agreed to an American-Russian deal to give up Syria’s chemical weapons, under the supervision of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

But even after OPCW said it had destroyed the last of Syria’s declared chemical weapons, the US and others believed Assad had retained a secret stockpile.

The Syrian regime was accused of dozens more chemical attacks in the years that followed.

Now, the toppling of Assad and seizure of Damascus by a US-designated terrorist organization has raised concerns about the safety of Syria’s chemical weapons.

The United Nations’ disarmament chief told the UN Security Council last week that Syria’s purported destruction of chemical warfare agents cannot be fully verified.

On Monday, Israel’s military said it struck Syria’s chemical weapons capabilities to prevent them from falling into the hands of extremist groups.

Briefing reporters Monday, a White House official said the United States has “good fidelity” on where chemical weapons may be located within Syria and is working with its partners to destroy them.

The US State Department is advertising an up to $10 million reward for information leading to the capture of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who the agency designated as a terrorist more than a decade ago, saying his group had “carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria.”

Yet, Jolani is also the leader of the rebel forces that just toppled the tyrannical regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in a fast-moving offensive that surprised the world.

As a result, Jolani is now the de facto leader of more than 23 million Syrians and the several million Syrian refugees who are outside of their country, many of whom will surely want to return home now that Assad is gone.

So, who is Jolani, and what does he want? As a Syrian “foreign fighter” in his early 20s, Jolani crossed into Iraq to fight the Americans when they invaded the country in the spring of 2003. That eventually landed him in the notorious US-run Iraqi prison, Camp Bucca, which became a key recruiting ground for terrorist groups, including what would become ISIS.

Freed from Camp Bucca, Jolani crossed back into Syria and started fighting against the Baathist Assad regime, doing so with the backing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would later become the founder of ISIS.

In Syria, Jolani founded a militant group known as Jabhat al-Nusra (“the Victory Front” in English), which pledged allegiance to al Qaeda, but in 2016, Jolani broke away from the terror group, according to the US Center for Naval Analyses.

Since then – unlike al Qaeda, which promoted a quixotic global holy war – Jolani’s group, now known by the initials HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), has undertaken the more prosaic job of trying to govern millions of people in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib, providing basic services, according to the terrorism scholar Aaron Zalin who has written a book about HTS.

Read more about the rebel leader.

People gather at the Sednaya prison north of Damascus on December 9.

As Syrians rejoiced across the country this week, many began the frantic search for missing loved ones who had been forcibly disappeared under Bashar al-Assad’s brutal dictatorship.

Crowds have descended on the notorious Saydnaya prison, which had become synonymous with arbitrary detention, torture and murder. Under the glaring sun, people poured toward the notorious facility north of Damascus, as traffic stretched for miles and some left their cars to walk the last stretch uphill, past barbed wire fences and watchtowers.

Just as Assad’s palaces revealed the extent of the family’s opulent wealth and luxurious lifestyle, his prisons have confirmed horrors that Syrians have known all too well over the past five decades.

The Assad regime’s notorious detention facilities were black holes where, as far back as the 1970s, anyone deemed an opponent disappeared. Saydnaya was one of the most infamous sites, known as “the slaughterhouse” – where as many as 13,000 people were hanged between 2011 and 2015, according to Amnesty International.

Unsurprisingly, it was one of the first locations rebels focused on as they swept toward Damascus in a lightning offensive.

After rebel fighters toppled Assad on Sunday, sending the dictator fleeing to Russia, images surfaced of Saydnaya prisoners being released – prompting many Syrians to flood social media seeking help to locate their loved ones.

By Monday, many had taken matters into their own hands and surged into the prison, spurred on by rumors that thousands were still imprisoned in deeper levels of the facility, an underground area known as the “red section.”

Read CNN’s reporting from Saydnaya prison.

The Assad regime’s outgoing prime minister agreed to hand over power to Syria’s rebels Monday, a day after insurgents seized the capital and toppled longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad.

News of Assad’s ouster sparked jubilation on the streets of Damascus and in Syrian communities around the world, as rebels and civilians ransacked the former dictator’s palaces. Thousands of political prisoners were released from Assad’s notorious jails.

But the future of the war-ravaged country remains uncertain, with Islamist militants Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) — designated a foreign terrorist organization by the United States — leading the rebel groups who are set to take control.

Here are the latest developments.

Abandoned tanks are seen at Mezzeh Air Base after Syrian government forces deserted their posts in Damascus on December 8.

Two former high-ranking Syrian intelligence officials have been charged with war crimes for allegedly torturing Americans and other civilians who were deemed enemies by the Syrian government and held in a military prison, the Department of Justice said Monday.

US prosecutors say the two officials in former President Bashar al-Assad’s regime oversaw operations of the detention facilities at the Mezzeh Military Airport near Damascus, where detainees were beaten, electrocuted, hung by their wrists, burned with acid and had their toenails removed. The alleged crimes occurred during the civil war that wracked the country for over a decade and culminated in the extraordinary fall of the Assad regime over the weekend.

Former Syrian air force intelligence officers Jamil Hassan, 72, and Abdul Salam Mahmoud, 65, “created an atmosphere of terror at Mezzeh Prison,” prosecutors said. They were charged with conspiracy to commit war crimes through cruel and inhuman treatment, according to an unsealed indictment filed in federal court in Chicago. Warrants for their arrests have been issued, and they remain at large, the Justice Department said.

Read more about the charges.

Many in Syria are celebrating a stunning and unexpected political turn that caught much of the world off guard.

Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, leader of Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), declared victory for the “entire Islamic nation” on Sunday, in his first public remarks since the coup, which he said “marks a new chapter in the history of the region.”

But the change in power is shrouded by uncertainty, too. It’s unclear what a new governing system in Syria would look like, how it will work given the disparate groups and interests involved, and whether the reordering of power will only lead to further instability.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin cautioned on Monday that ISIS could attempt to “take advantage” of a power vacuum in the country.

Jolani has gone to great lengths to reassure Christian and Kurdish Syrians as his offensive spread across the country, but HTS has a history of harsh treatment against political enemies, and it is an open question whether his outreach will continue once the eyes of the world have moved elsewhere.

A video shared by the rebels Monday shows Jolani meeting with the regime’s outgoing prime minister, Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali, to discuss the transfer of power. Mohammed al-Bashir, the HTS-linked prime minister of the Salvation Government, which administers the rebel-held Idlib area of northern Syria, was also at the meeting.

The meeting in Damascus came after the outgoing prime minister pledged to cooperate with the rebels and endorse “a smooth and systematic transition of government functions” and preserve “state facilities,” in a message recorded after the rebels took Damascus.

Read more about the transition of power in Syria.

The search for possible prisoners in secret cells in Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison has ended, according to the Syrian Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets, who added there was “no evidence of undiscovered secret cells or basements.”

The group had deployed specialized teams to look for secret cells or hidden basements that might be holding additional prisoners as speculation mounted about more detainees being held in deeper levels of the prison, dubbed the “human slaughterhouse” by Amnesty International.

The volunteer group said it shared the “profound disappointment” of the families of those who remain missing and urged people on social media to avoid the spread of the “widespread misinformation and rumors circulating about prisons and detainees.”

As rebel forces released prisoners from Saydnaya over the weekend, Syrians took to social media for news of missing or detained loved ones — some families even gathering outside the prison in hope.

Israeli soldiers near the border with Syria on the Israeli side in the Golan Heights on Monday.

The United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) told Israel that its presence in the Syrian buffer zone would violate the 1974 Agreement on Disengagement with Syria, the UN Secretary General’s spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said Monday.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said that he had ordered the military to “take control” of the buffer zone, which separates the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights from the rest of Syria.

The UN has confirmed that Israeli troops entered the buffer zone and were moving within that area, where they remain in at least three locations, according to Dujarric.

Dujarric also said UNDOF personnel, who are tasked with maintaining a ceasefire between Israel and Syria and supervising the areas of separation and limitation, remain at their positions and are carrying out their mandated activities.

“Currently, the situation in the UNDOF area of operations is relatively calm,” he said.

The world now knows the colors of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s parachute: the Russian tricolor.

Assad’s flight to Moscow following the swift collapse of his regime means more than just the loss of a client state for the Kremlin.

The fall of the House of Assad deals a major blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aspirations as a Middle East power broker – and raises new questions about the fragility of his own regime.

Putin’s opponents are already cheering.

“Minus one dictator and ally of Putin,” wrote prominent Russian opposition activist Ilya Yashin on X, posting a photo of an Assad banner in flames.

For observers of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Assad’s departure raises some striking historical parallels.

Assad now joins a onetime Ukrainian counterpart in exile: Former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled Ukraine for Russia in 2014 after weeks of street protests that culminated in a bloody crackdown.

Syrians are now roaming through Assad’s abandoned presidential palace in Damascus, much as Ukrainians were able to visit the grounds of Mezhyhirya, the garish estate once occupied by Yanukovych.

Read the full analysis.

Syrian rebels are calling on the Assad regime’s security forces to register with what they are calling “a settlement center.”

Military Operations Command, the rebel coalition consisting of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), announced the opening of a “settlement center for members of the criminal regime in Homs.”

Former regime members are required to bring all documents, regime-issued equipment and official belongings or they will be subject to prosecution if they provide false or incomplete information.

Earlier on Monday, the rebels issued a general amnesty for conscripted soldiers in the Syrian military, saying, “they are granted safety for their lives, and any harm against them is strictly prohibited.” Amnesty does not apply to officers and soldiers who volunteered to serve.

The armed rebel alliance charged across Syria over 11 days, sweeping through major cities in a lightning-fast offensive before taking control of the capital, Damascus, over the weekend.