NEWS- The deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his family have arrived in Moscow and been granted asylum on humanitarian considerations.
This announcement by the Russian Government has put an end to speculation about the whereabouts of Syria’s former President after rebel forces seized control of Syrias Capital City Damascus.
The Russian Foreign Ministry had announced that President Assad had decided to resign the Presidency and left the country, giving instructions for a peaceful transfer of power.
Russia, which has two key military bases in Syria, is a staunch ally of Assad and had intervened in Syria’s 13-year civil war in an effort to keep him in power.
Russia has however, been unable to stop the collapse of his government in the face of a lightning rebel offensive that took advantage of his other key allies, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, being distracted by other conflicts.
Assad has not been pictured any where since he met the Iranian Foreign Minister in Damascus a week ago and on that day, he vowed to crush the rebels seizing territory with dizzying speed.
Early on Sunday morning, after their fighters entered the city without resistance, the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its allies declared that the tyrant Bashar al-Assad has fled and with no official confirmation from the Syrian presidency, military or state media, rumours swirled about Assad’s whereabouts.
The head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group Rami Abdul Rahman reported that a plane believed to be carrying Assad “left Syria via Damascus international airport before the army security forces left” the facility.
People also followed flights in and out of Damascus to work out when Assad might have left and where he might have gone, but they could not locate where it was and speculation indicated that it had gone missing from the radar.
Two unnamed senior Syrian Army officers are reported that President Assad had boarded a Syrian Air Cargo plane Air Ilyushin Il-76T at Damascus Airport early on Sunday with an undisclosed destination.
According to data from Flightradar24, the plane initially flew towards the Mediterranean coast, which is a stronghold of Assad’s Alawite sect and is also home to two key Russian military bases – Hmeimim airbase and the naval base in Tartous.
But after flying over Homs, the plane made a U-turn and started flying eastwards again while also losing altitude and the plane’s signal was lost when it was about 13km (8 miles) west of Homs and flying at an altitude of only 1,625ft.
It was not clear what happened to the plan, but Flightradar24 said the aircraft “was old with an older transponder generation, so some data might be bad or missing”, that it was “flying in an area of GPS jamming, so some data might be bad”, and that the aircraft tracker was not aware of any airports in the area where the signal was lost and there were also no reports of any plane crashes.
Data from Flightradar24 also showed that a Russian military plane took off on Sunday from Latakia’s international airport, next to Hmeimim, and flew to Moscow, but once again, it was not known who was on board.
Russia insisted its air strikes only targeted “terrorists” during its nine-year air campaign in support of Assad, but they regularly killed civilians and destroyed civilian infrastructure, but the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said in September that more than 21,000 people, including 8,700 civilians, had been killed in Russian military operations.
Additional Reporting by Associated Press
