Western Mail

Syrian flag raised over city of Daraa

- PHILIP ISSA Associated Press newsdesk@walesonlin­e.co.uk

THE Syrian government has raised its flag over Daraa, the first city to revolt against President Bashar Assad in 2011 and plunge the country into its calamitous civil war.

The display is laden with symbolism as the government moves to stamp out the last of the uprising against Assad, who has ruled with an iron fist over Syria for 18 years.

The 52-year-old’s father Hafez Assad was president for three decades before him.

Officials accompanie­d by state media crews hoisted the two-star flag over the rubble of the city’s main square, allowing it to wave in sight of the shell of the Omari Mosque where protesters first gathered in demonstrat­ions demanding reforms and then Assad’s removal in the spring of 2011.

The mosque has since been destroyed in the government’s brutal crackdown against the city, which ranged from alleged torturing of dissidents to shelling the city with tanks and planes.

With control over Daraa, government forces can now focus on clearing the last pockets of the opposition and, separately, the Islamic State group from the frontier at the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in a 1967 war.

The corner of south-west Syria is an important corridor for trade between Syria and Jordan, and onward to the oil-rich Gulf states.

But most of the important fighting against the revolt has already been concluded in shattering battles farther to the north for the main cities of Damascus, Aleppo and Homs, and territorie­s in between.

Some 400,000 people have been killed in seven years of war.

Protests in Daraa in 2011 against the government’s mistreatme­nt of teenage detainees ignited a national revolt against decades of authoritar­ian rule.

Ahmad Masalmeh, a media activist formerly based in Daraa, said fighters in the city had accepted an offer of amnesty from the government, and let back in the state institutio­ns and symbols of Assad’s rule.

Rebels refusing to accept the deal will be exiled with their families to other rebel-held parts of the country.

The agreement follows a template imposed by the government and its Russian and Iranian backers that has forced hundreds of thousands of Syrians, including media activists, army defectors, and draft dodgers and their family members to give up their homes to lift the sieges against their cities.

Human rights monitors say the arrangemen­ts amount to a programme of political and demographi­c engineerin­g in Syria to secure Assad’s rule.

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