After Damascus seize, Syrian rebels storm Assad’s palaces, loot furnishings

Syrians strolled by the palaces of President Bashar al-Assad on Sunday following his sudden ouster, wandering from room to room, posing for images, and with some taking away objects of furnishings or ornaments.

Video obtained by Reuters confirmed individuals getting into the Al-Rawda Presidential Palace, as kids ran by the grand, formal rooms and males slid a big trunk throughout the ornate patterned flooring.

A number of males marched out of the constructing carrying chairs over their shoulders. In a storeroom, cabinets had been ransacked and objects strewn throughout the ground.

Video of one other palace, the older-style Muhajreen Palace, verified by Reuters, confirmed teams of women and men strolling throughout a white marble flooring and thru units of tall wood doorways. A person carried a vase in his hand, and a big cupboard stood empty with its doorways ajar. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling.

The scenes have been harking back to the autumn of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime in Iraq twenty years in the past. Then, Iraqis noticed the extravagant luxurious of his palaces the place the bogs have been famously fitted with gold faucets.

Syrian rebels seized management of Damascus on Sunday, forcing Assad to flee and ending his household’s a long time of rule after greater than 13 years of civil battle in a seismic second for the Center East.

One other video verified by Reuters confirmed rebels firing celebratory photographs on the entrance gate to the New Shaab Palace (Peoples’ Palace), an unlimited advanced on the western fringe of Damascus that sits atop Mount Mazzeh.

“The military of Islam (the rebels) is within the presidential palace. God is nice, we’ve seized management of it,” mentioned one of many rebels. The group then filmed their stroll by the abandoned grounds and the stark, monumentalist structure of the palace.

Assad, who had not spoken in public for the reason that sudden insurgent advance per week in the past, flew out of Damascus for an unknown vacation spot earlier on Sunday, two senior military officers instructed Reuters, as rebels mentioned they’d entered the capital with no signal of military deployments.

Russia, certainly one of Assad’s closest allies, confirmed that Assad had left Syria however didn’t say the place he was, together with whether or not Moscow had given him refuge.