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BREAKING: Assad flees Syria after 24 years in office *Rebels take over poser
The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, is believed to have fled the country his family has ruled over for 50 years as rebels said they had captured the capital after a lightning advance completed in just under two weeks.
Two senior Syrian officers told Reuters that Assad had fled Damascus, his destination unknown. The report could not be independently verified.
The senior Emirati diplomat Anwar Gargash declined to say whether Assad was fleeing to the United Arab Emirates.
“When people ask where is Bashar al-Assad going to, I say, you know, when you really look at this, this is really at the end of the day a footnote in history,” he told reporters at a conference in Bahrain.
The Syrian leader had been publicly absent as Islamist militant insurgents spearheaded a sweeping offensive that began in a small enclave in north-western Syria, and within 11 days appeared to have toppled Assad’s rule.
In their first announcement on state television following the offensive that took the world by surprise, rebels said they had ended Assad’s 24-year authoritarian rule.
A group of people were shown at the state television news studio, with one reading a statement from the “Damascus conquest operations room” announcing “the liberation of the city of Damascus and the fall of the tyrant Bashar al-Assad and the release of all the unjustly detained from the regime prisons”, calling on fighters and citizens to safeguard the “property of the free Syrian state”.
Syria’s army command notified officers on Sunday that Assad’s regime had ended, a Syrian officer who was informed of the move told Reuters. But the Syrian army later said it was continuing operations against “terrorist groups” in the towns of Hama and Homs and Deraa countryside.
Rebels said they had freed prisoners from Damascus’s notorious Sednaya prison, regarded as a symbol of the Assad regime’s brutality, while video from Damascus showed a man climbing on top of a hospital sign to tear down a poster of Assad’s face. In the capital’s central square, people climbed on top of tanks and cheered as they trampled on a toppled statue of Assad’s father, Hafez, AFPTV images showed.
In Syria’s second city of Aleppo, claimed by insurgent forces just one week before, celebratory singing broadcast from the speakers of mosques was interspersed with the sound of ululating and cheering ringing out across the rooftops.
The Assad family have ruled Syria since 1971 when Hafez al-Assad seized power in a military coup, before his son Bashar inherited the presidency in 2000. Their control of the country was enforced through a vast security state, crushing dissent through a broad network of detention centres and government surveillance.
Bashar al-Assad suppressed a popular uprising against him in 2011, when Syrians first took to the streets of major cities to demand his overthrow. What began as peaceful demonstrations later spilled over into a civil war that is estimated to have killed more than 300,000 people in 10 years of fighting.
Assad willingly turned the full might of the state on his own people in order to maintain control, including pummelling the civilian population with airstrikes and using chemical weapons including the deadly nerve agent sarin.
“Today is the end of 54 years of the reign of Assad family in Syria. This is the only regime I knew all of my life,” said doctor Zaher Sahloul, a Syrian-American physician who organised medical missions into Syria, including hospitals in Aleppo that were targeted by Syrian and Russian airstrikes.
“I don’t cry often in my adult life but today I did. It has been 14 long years of horror. This is our Berlin Wall moment,” he said.
Intervention from Russia and Iran had allowed Assad to survive almost 14 years of unrest and civil strife, leaving him in charge of a fractured state. His rule over Syria had appeared inevitable, until an insurgent advance led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham began to seize control of major towns along a highway leading to Damascus.
As the insurgency drew closer along the highway that leads to the capital, rebel groups across southern Syria took control of a swath of towns south of Damascus. Armed opposition groups closed in on the capital from three directions as Syrian army officers retreated, or fled. Video from Damascus showed soldiers rapidly changing into civilian clothes on the streets of the capital before dispersing.
The prime minister, Mohammed Ghazi Jalali, said in a video statement that the government was ready to “extend its hand” to the opposition, offering to work with a transitional government.
“I am in my house and I have not left, and this is because of my belonging to this country,” Jalili said, without addressing Assad’s whereabouts.
Promising a “new Syria” in their own statement, the insurgents said: “We turn the page on the dark past, and open a new horizon for the future.”
As armed rebels swept cities across the country, they flung open detention facilities where rights groups estimated that at least 100,000 people were considered missing or forcibly disappeared since 2011 at the hands of the state.
This included the Sednaya military prison, a facility notorious as the site of particularly brutal and humiliating methods of torture. Video circulating online showed tens of people streaming into the streets around the facility, running into the night.
The exiled Syrian human rights defender Ranim Badenjki of the Syria Campaign said she was crying tears of joy at the news of Assad’s departure, as “it’s all too good to be true”.
“We always thought that Assad was lucky, supported by strong allies, and world leaders rushing to shake hands with him. But I’m happy to see that Syrians themselves made this dream come true,” she said.
“I am thinking of everyone we lost in recent years, killed for protesting or writing a post on social media. I think of the people tortured to death because they provided medicine or help to people in need. I think of my grandpa who was tortured by Hafez al-Assad,” she said.
Badenjki said her joy was also tinged with sorrow, fearful to learn the fate of some of the people missing or potentially lost in Syria’s labyrinthine detention facilities.
“I want to be happy – but I also want to see my friend’s father alive. He was forcibly disappeared by the regime 11 years ago. I want to know he is still alive and that he can be released. I want to know the fate of my missing cousin.”
Moayad Hokan, a Syrian analyst living in exile, said the events of the past day were “unbelievable.”
“Just a few months ago all of us were operating under the assumption that this day would never come,” he said. “Every time I say to myself the words the Assad regime has fallen, I still can’t really believe it.”
Culled from The Guardian
Succour has come to students of the Nnamdi Azikiwe University Teaching Hospital (NAUTH), following the decision of the management to shelve implementation of the newly introduced ₦580,000 tuition fee for nursing students – a move that followed immediate protests from the students.
Joseph Ugboaja, Chief Medical Director of the hospital, a guest on The Morning Brief a breakfast programme on Channels Television, told his audience on Thursday, that the plan had been shelved.
Street protests had broken out early in the week as the students, challenged the institution for shooting up the fees from the initial N90,000 to the new figure, representing more than 500 per cent increase.
Ugboaja, who said the decision to suspend the new fee followed meetings with student leaders, the school management and the governing board after the protest, adding that more consultations would now be undertaken to ensure that all parties were carried along.
His words: “What the students complained was that they were not carried along at the final decision making for the fees. They know that there was a review, their opinion was sought, but at the level of taking decision they said there were not carried along.
“So, I had a meeting with them, I had a session with the school management, I also had a session with the board and we have decided that the management will suspend the implementation of the new policy.
“So, we have stopped it and then the committee is now going back to them to have a session with the students and all of them will come together and agree on the way forward.
Stressing the need for consultations with the students, the varsity boss who defended the proposed fee, maintained that even at the new amount it remained the lowest in the South-East region, adding that the review became necessary following the transition from the basic nursing programme to a National Diploma and Higher National Diploma structure.
“What we were running before is the RN/RM programme, that is the basic nursing programme but recently we moved to the ND programme articulated by the Nigerian Nursing and Midwifery Council. So, we are now running the ND/HND programme.
“Now we have two sets of students, the basic nursing and basic midwifery students and then we have the ND and HND students. People that were paying the N90,000 are the basic nursing and midwifery students. But the ND and HND students, they have paid the fees, they don’t have issues, people that have issues are the people that have been paying the ₦90,000.
“The basic nursing and basic midwifery students have been paying the ₦90,000 since the school commenced, in fact we have not reviewed our fees since we started the school, that fee has been paid like that. Now what the board did was to adjust the fees to come up with current realities. Even with the ₦580,000, our fee remains the lowest in the region, you can find out, I can give you the comparative figures.”
The CMD also lamented that teaching hospitals do not benefit from intervention funds from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), which he said contributed to the need for an upward review of the fees.
He added that the fee adjustment was also linked to the hospital’s vision of building a teaching hospital that will rank among the top three in the country by 2030.
“There’s no doubt about it. I am a die-hard democrat. I followed that belief wholeheartedly, committed to a united Nigeria, and that principle and the philosophy will live and die with me,” were the exact words of President Bola Tinubu on Wednesday night, with which he tried to showcase his democratic credentials to the world.
Coming against criticisms of his government taking Nigeria towards a one-party state owing to his emasculation of the opposition, Tinubu maintained that nothing could be further than that as he was only trying to follow the principle of democracy by respecting the decisions of the majority.
The President, who spoke at an inter-faith breaking of the fast with members of the National Working Committee of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the leadership of the Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC) at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, told his audience that he actually had the marks of lacerations from his struggle against the military to prove his status.
He said: “The Chairman of IPAC, Yusuf Dantalle, provoked some questions. I am glad we are all democrats. And we all subscribe to this democracy voluntarily, willingly, and we’ve been at it selflessly in the last 26 years.
“Some of us had been bruised struggling for it. We were detained, we protested, we had street demonstrations, we went into exile, and all of that. We formed NADECO. I followed the leadership destiny that God has chosen for me.”
Stressing that the unity and stability of the country rested on the pillars of good governance and assured that his administration would uphold these principles for posterity, Tinubu also told his audience that strengthening internal democracy within political parties remained fundamental to building credible electoral institutions, processes, and systems.
Regarding the contentious issue of direct primaries being the only way of producing candidates of political parties outside the consensus option, the President argued that it provided party members with better opportunities to participate and determine their representatives at various levels of governance.
He said: “The majority will have their way, and the minority will have their say and their way. I must not stand in their way. That is the sweetness, the essence of democracy. I am a registered voter. I am on the same platform as you. I’m going to stick to my platform.
“When it was against me years ago, I toed the line. I was in opposition without a threat to any human being except the military junta. I want democracy, and since democracy is back here, there’s a fundamental voluntariness that is enshrined, and I am extremely glad to listen to you.”
Nigerians hoping that the Federal Government would intervene to cut down the price of petroleum products particularly Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), currently on the upward spiral, had their hopes dashed with indications that such a move is not coming sooner or later.
Wale Edun, Minister of Finance, who conveyed the said news on Wednesday morning, maintained that the days of government intervening in regulating petrol prices were over and would not do so now even with the growing volatility in global oil markets triggered by the escalating conflict in the Middle East.
Edun, who said the government would instead introduce measures to cushion the economic impact of the war involving the United States, Israel, and Iran, added that President Bola Tinubu had already announced plans to provide an additional 100,000 Compressed Natural Gasconversion kits to help motorists switch from petrol to CNG, which costs about 25 to 30 percent of the price of petrol.
FG’s position is coming on the heels of the demand by the African Democratic Congress (ADC) that the government should cap the price of fuel to prevent it from soaring beyond a certain threshold to cushion the effect on Nigerians, citing examples in other parts of the world.
His words: “When there is market failure is where the regulator steps in. But in terms of balancing pricing, what we are looking to do is to manage the disruption and we don’t know how permanent or temporary it could be.
“But in the meantime, rather than reverting back and taking backward steps, we’ll look at every other measure that we have that can help the cost of living of Nigerians.”
The conflict in the Middle East has triggered sharp fluctuations in global energy markets, with crude oil prices briefly rising above $100 per barrel on March 9 their highest level since July 2022 before easing to about $87 the following day.
Earlier, the finance ministry warned that the conflict could affect Nigeria’s crude oil and gas prices, capital flows in financial markets, as well as global logistics and supply costs.
The surge in crude prices has also pushed up ex-gantry petrol prices, with many retail stations across Nigeria increasing pump prices. The development has led to higher transport fares on several major routes.
Edun said price adjustments by private sector operators reflect prevailing market conditions, citing developments at the Dangote Refinery.
The refinery recently reduced its ex-gantry petrol price to about ₦1,075 per litre after implementing three earlier increases, although retail pump prices remain elevated.
“Dangote reduced their price from, I think, around ₦1,200 to now just over ₦1,000 to ₦1,050, and that’s the dynamics of the market,” the minister said.
He added that Nigeria’s refining capacity is strengthening the country’s economic resilience, pointing to investments by Aliko Dangote, president of the Dangote Group.
“But I think we should be thankful at this time for the capacity we have in Nigeria to refine crude into petrochemicals and petroleum products,” Edun said.
He also noted that several countries lacking domestic refining capacity are facing greater economic disruption as energy prices rise.
BREAKING: Succour to NAUTH students, as authorities shelves N580,000 tuition fees
Nobody can question my democratic integrity in Nigeria – Tinubu
BREAKING: Dashed hope! *We won’t intervene in fuel price – FG
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