Syrians topple and trample on statues of Assad's father

Syrians around the country on Sunday toppled and trampled on statues of President Bashar al-Assad's late father Hafez, who founded the brutal system of government that his son inherited.

In the capital Damascus, people cheered as they stood on a toppled statue of former president Hafez al-Assad, in a highly symbolic moment for a country ruled with an iron fist for five decades by his clan.

The scenes came as Islamist-led rebels declared Bashar al-Assad had fled the country following a lightning offensive that wrested city after city from his control, culminating with their arrival in Damascus.

After five decades in power, most Syrians are too young to remember a time when the country was not ruled by the Assads.

Even prior to the rebels' declaration of the fall of Damascus, statues of Hafez al-Assad had been toppled in other cities around the country.

The images recalled footage from Iraq in 2003, when a US armoured vehicle toppled a statue of former dictator Saddam Hussein with the help of a crowd of jubilant Iraqis on the day Baghdad fell to a US-led military coalition.

In Jaramana, in the suburbs of Damascus, protesters brought down a statue of the late Syrian leader, cheering, applauding and chanting as it came down, according to images posted on social media and verified by AFP.

In Aleppo in northern Syria, images showed people toppling a statue of Bashar al-Assad's brother Bassel as well as one of their father.

In Daraa in southern Syria, the cradle of the 2011 uprising, online images verified by AFP showed a rebel fighter driving a motorbike down a road and dragging a toppled statue of Hafez al-Assad behind him.

The large metal statue appeared to be light enough to pull because it was hollow.

In the port city of Tartus, resident Oday al-Khatib told AFP that protesters destroyed a statue of the former president.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor confirmed that Tartus residents had "destroyed a statue of Hafez al-Assad in the city", and another in Latakia, also on the Syrian coast, a stronghold of the Assad clan's Alawite minority.

- 'Freedom' -

Bashar al-Assad ruled Syria from 2000, when he inherited power from his father.

Since 2011, he oversaw the crackdown on the democracy movement that began with peaceful protests.

The Assad government's repression of the protests morphed into one of the bloodiest wars of the century, killing hundreds of thousands of people and displacing millions.

Hafez al-Assad took power in a 1970 coup, and set up a paranoid and brutal regime under which anyone suspected of dissent could be jailed or killed.

Long after his death, his statues and image remained a powerful symbol of the Assad clan's grip over Syria.

His photograph was pasted on walls, institutions, offices and schools around the country, often side by side with his son's.

In the city of Hama, the site of a 1982 massacre by the army, rebels cheered earlier this week as they brought down a statue of Assad as they seized the city.

Young men celebrated the rebels' takeover of Hama, yelling "freedom for eternity".

Fighters there also paraded down one of the city's wide streets in vehicles that appeared to be stained completely brown from desert dust, past a building bearing a mural of Bashar al-Assad.