Bashar al-Assad has “stepped down” as president and “left Syria”, his ally Russia says, hours after rebel forces took control of the capital Damascus.
The Russian foreign ministry gave no further details about Assad’s whereabouts, but it was the first official statement saying he had fled the country.
Assad has not been pictured since he met Iranian foreign minister in Damascus a week ago. 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”.
The head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group, also reported that a plane believed to be carrying Assad “left Syria via Damascus international airport before the army security forces left” the facility. Rami Abdul Rahman said he had information that the plane was meant to take off at 22:00 (20:00 GMT) on Saturday.
The Flightradar24 website did not record a departure around that time, although a Cham Wings Airlines Airbus A320 passenger plane did leave at around 00:56 on Sunday bound for Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The plane landed in Sharjah on time. But a diplomatic adviser to the president of the United Arab Emirates told reporters in Bahrain that he did not know if Assad was in the UAE.
Reuters news agency meanwhile cited two unnamed senior Syrian army officers as saying that Assad had boarded a Syrian Air plane at Damascus airport early on Sunday.
It noted that a Syrian Air Ilyushin Il-76T cargo plane took off from the airport at 03:59 local time (01:59 GMT) with an undisclosed destination.
According to data from Flightradar24, the plane initially flew east away from the capital before turning to the north-west and heading towards the Mediterranean coast, which is a stronghold of Assad’s Alawite sect and is also home to Russian naval and air bases.
After flying over the central city of Homs – which fell to the rebels on Saturday night – at an altitude of 20,000ft (6,095m) the plane made a U-turn and started flying eastwards again while also losing altitude.
The plane’s transponder signal was lost at around 04:39 (02:39 GMT), when it was about 13km (8 miles) west of Homs and flying at an altitude 1,625ft (495m).
Flightradar24 said in a post on X that 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 there was not aware of any airports in the area where the signal was lost.
There have not been any reports of a plane crash in the same area.
