President-elect Donald Trump sent a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin following the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria after Islamist opposition fighters captured Damascus. He called for an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine.
“Assad is gone. He has fled his country,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on the morning of Dec. 8. “His protector, Russia, Russia, Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was not interested in protecting him any longer. There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place.”
The incoming president also said that Moscow had “lost all interest in Syria because of Ukraine, where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead, in a war that should never have started, and could go on forever.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel’s military has taken over a buffer zone in the Golan Heights that was established decades ago, after Syrian opposition fighters ended the rule of President Bashar al-Assad’s decades-long reign.
The reason Israel seized the territory is because “we have to take action against possible threats” caused by the power vacuum left by the Assad regime’s collapse, he said.
Syrian insurgents, led by terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), announced on Dec. 8 that Damascus is “now free of Assad.”
“We declare the city of Damascus free from the tyrant Bashar al-Assad,” a post on Telegram reads. “After 50 years of oppression under Baath rule, and 13 years of crime, tyranny and displacement ... we announce the end of this dark era and the beginning of a new era for Syria.”
The rebel forces also said that President Bashar al-Assad had fled Damascus.