EU welcomes collapse of Syrian regime as Assad flees

The dramatic victory of rebel groups in the Syrian civil war is a defeat for Russia and Iran, the European Union’s top diplomat declared, as government forces abandoned their posts and militant groups flooded into the capital.

The end of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s dictatorship is “a positive and long-awaited development. It also shows the weakness of Assad’s backers, Russia and Iran,” EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas said in a statement Sunday.

“Our priority is to ensure security in the region,” she said. “The process of rebuilding Syria will be long and complicated and all parties must be ready to engage constructively.”

Meanwhile, British Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner welcomed the apparent collapse of the ruling faction in an interview on Sky News. “What we need to see is a political resolution in line with the U.N. resolutions,” she added. “We need to see civilians and infrastructure protected. Far too many people have lost their lives, we need stability in that region,”

In the early hours of Sunday morning, Syrian rebels pushed into the capital, Damascus, declaring victory in a brutal civil war that has lasted over a decade and claimed the lives of more than half a million people. The Sunni militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham used a televised statement to say the city had been “liberated, [and] the tyrant Bashar al-Assad has been toppled.”

Multiple reports claim the longtime Syrian president, who took power from his father in 2000, has fled the country. People have taken to the streets in Damascus and other major cities to celebrate the end of his regime, while rebels have opened the gates of Assad’s prisons, freeing thousands of detainees — many behind bars for years without a fair trial.

The news came hours after rebels took the key stronghold of Homs as government forces abandoned their positions. The move effectively cuts off the port of Tartus from the rest of the country, isolating the Russian naval and air bases on the coast. Moscow had for years been actively supporting Assad’s regime, striking rebel-held towns and cities as the civilian casualty count steadily rose.

Syria exploded into outright civil war in 2011 as the Arab Spring swept the region, and later saw ISIS fighters take large swathes of territory before being defeated by a coalition of local and international groups.

Assad’s government stands accused of presiding over the indiscriminate destruction of civilian areas, the use of chemical weapons in contravention of international law, the arbitrary detention of innocent people and widespread use of torture inside the regime’s notorious prisons.