Where is Bashar al-Assad?
Just hours after rebel forces seized the capital Damascus, their ally Russia said Bashar al-Assad had stepped down as president and left Syria.
The Russian Foreign Ministry did not provide any further information on Assad’s whereabouts, but it was the first official statement that he had fled the country.
Assad has not been photographed since meeting the Iranian foreign minister in Damascus a week ago. That day, he vowed to “crush” the rebels taking over the area with rapid pace.
On Sunday morning, as their fighters entered the city without any resistance, the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its allies announced that “tyrant Bashar al-Assad has fled”.
The head of the Britain-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) also reported this A plane believed to be carrying Assad “left Syria via Damascus International Airport before military security forces left the scene”.Rami Abdul Rahman said he had information that the plane was scheduled to take off at 22:00 (20:00 GMT) on Saturday.
The Flightradar24 website did not record any departures around that time, although a Cham Wings Airlines Airbus A320 passenger plane departed for Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) at around 00:56 on Sunday.
The plane landed in Sharjah on time. But a diplomatic adviser to the UAE president told reporters in Bahrain that he did not know whether Assad was in the UAE.
Meanwhile, Reuters news agency quoted two unnamed senior Syrian army officers as saying that Assad had boarded a Syrian Air plane. At Damascus airport early Sunday morning.
It was noted The Syrian Air Ilyushin Il-76T cargo plane took off from the airport at 03:59 local time (01:59 GMT) for an undisclosed destination.,
According to data from Flightradar24, the plane initially flew east from the capital before turning northwest and heading toward the Mediterranean coast, which is a stronghold of Assad’s Alawite sect and is also home to Russian naval and air bases .
After flying at 20,000 feet (6,095 meters) over the central city of Homs – which fell to rebels on Saturday night – the plane made a U-turn and began flying east again, losing altitude. Gave.
The aircraft’s transponder signal was lost at approximately 04:39 (02:39 GMT), when it was about 13 km (8 mi) west of Homs and flying at an altitude of 1,625 feet (495 m).
Flightradar24 said in a post on that the aircraft was “old with older transponder generation, so some data may be garbled or missing”, that it was “flying in an area prone to GPS jamming, so some data may be garbled”, and no information about There were no airports in the area where the signal was lost.
There are no reports of plane crashes in the same area.
