Who are the Syrian rebels claiming control of Damascus?
Rebel forces have taken control of the Syrian capital after storming through the country in less than two weeks.
Authoritarian ruler Bashar al Assad has fled Damascus, ending his 24-year rule.
While Syrians celebrate in the streets with chants for freedom, attention will also turn to the insurgents and what happens next.
Who are the rebels?
The initial assault on regime forces, which began in the northern city of Aleppo last week, was carried out by a variety of Mr Assad’s opponents.
This included rebels under the banner of the Syrian National Army, backed by Turkey, but the offensive has mostly been led by jihadi group Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS).
Once known as the Nusra Front, a former wing of al Qaeda, HTS is said to have around 30,000 troops and has long been designated a terrorist group by the US and Russia.
It was formed to oppose the Syrian government and was founded by Abu Muhammed al Jolani, cutting ties with al Qaeda in 2016 and making an effort to appear moderate.
Read more: Latest as Assad flees Syria
Rebel fighters in the city of Homs. Pic: Reuters
As rebels entered Aleppo, video showed him issuing orders by phone, forbidding fighters from entering homes and reminding them to protect citizens.
Aron Lund, a fellow at think-tank Century International, said Mr Jolani and HTS have clearly changed, while adding they remain “pretty hardline”.
“It’s PR, but the fact they are engaging in this effort at all shows they are no longer as rigid as they once were,” he said.
“Old-school al Qaeda or the Islamic State would never have done that.”
But the US’s Commission on International Religious Freedom said in 2022 that despite the “rebrand”, HTS “restricts religious freedom” and threatens the safety of religious minorities.
What plans do they have?
Mr Jolani, himself designated a terrorist by the US in 2013, has tried to reassure Syrian minorities who fear jihadists.
In 2023, he allowed the first Christian mass in years in the northwestern city of Idlib, and on Wednesday insisted he would protect residents of a Christian town south of Aleppo.
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Syrian rebels announce Damascus ‘freed’
The group’s political plans remain to be seen, with Robert Ford, former US ambassador to Syria, telling Sky News he has not seen “detailed programs”.
“We don’t know exactly what they’re going to do,” he said. “I would say here that after a 13-year incredibly bloody and vicious civil war, right now it’s a day for Syrians to celebrate, and to hope for things that will turn out better.
“There will be plenty of hard work quickly waiting for them.”
Why has this happened now?
These anti-Assad victories are years in the making, more than a decade on from the start of Syrian civil war.
But the rapid rebel progress has stunned the international community.
Key locations in Syria as well as the Iraqi town of Al Qaim, where troops sought refuge.
Former head of the British Army’s chemical weapons unit, Hamish De Bretton-Gordon, said the timing is “no coincidence”.
“With Hezbollah much diminished, the Iranian proxy in the region, and also other Iranian militias, it gave the rebels an opportunity,” he told Sky News.
“With Russia taking so many forces away from Syria to bolster their special military operation in Ukraine, it left Assad exposed and the rebels have really taken advantage of it.”
What other nations have interests in Syria?
The assault had raised the prospect of another front reopening in the Middle East, at a time when US-backed Israel has been fighting Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both Iran-allied groups.
Russia, which was Mr Assad’s main international backer, is also preoccupied with its war in Ukraine.
Previous military intervention by Russia and Iran – alongside support from other groups – had allowed Mr Assad to remain in power and retain 70% of Syria under his control.
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The US has about 900 troops in northeast Syria to guard against a resurgence by the Islamic State, which was defeated in Syria and Iraq by 2019, by a US-led coalition that included Kurdish fighters and UK air support.
Turkey, which also opposes Kurdish expansion, has forces in Syria alongside its reported influence with the broad alliance of opposition forces.
Can it be a coincidence that US planes attacked Syria around the very time the Epstein files were released?
It would be cynical – but then again, it would be how politics works.
The deadline-day release of the Epstein files had White House media management written all over it, unredacted.
Initial searches for Trump’s name within the Department of Justice search function returned nothing, while the presence of former president Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was everywhere.
It is PR strategy 101 – front-load the release of documents with the Democrat stuff and save any possible Trump content for a soft landing sometime between Christmas and New Year.
Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. Pic: NBC
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By that time, the public will have softened its focus on the story – it’s what the festive season does.
The presence of celebrity in the latest release might also feather Trump’s bed.
It’s clear that iconic superstars like Mick Jagger and Diana Ross were courted by Epstein as innocents, ignorant of his criminality. To see them in the files cements a narrative of a monster who lured the unsuspecting into his orbit.
We support Jagger and Ross as treasured icons, so we remind ourselves that simply being included in the files doesn’t equate to wrongdoing or knowledge of it. In turn, it shapes an empathy around the predicament that will extend to Trump and, perhaps, the benefit of any doubt.
Of course, not everyone will see it that way – the people who see a cynical exercise in delay and obfuscation, constituting a gross insult to the Epstein survivors at the heart of the story.
Jeffrey Epstein and Michael Jackson. Pic: US DoJ
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For all the talk (by the Trump administration) of a tight time scale and a willingness to act transparently, survivors and their supporters point out that Donald Trump could have published all the Epstein files long ago, never mind drip feed them with wide-ranging redactions.
Not to have done so is an affront to them and an attempt to evade accountability.
For all the talk about the release of the files, their significance is undermined by the lack of context. We are shown pictures and documents that reflect the life of a thoroughly unpleasant individual who inflicted suffering on an industrial scale. But with redactions, and without explanations, we are left having to join the dots in an effort to establish criminal behaviour and blame.
It is a level of uncertainty surrounding the Epstein files and a source of dissatisfaction to survivors, for whom justice further delayed is justice further denied.
Ukraine has struck a Russian tanker in the Mediterranean Sea for the first time, a Kyiv intelligence source has said.
The ship, called the Qendil, suffered “critical damage” in the attack, according to a member of the SBU, Ukraine’s internal security agency.
The tanker is said to be part of Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” – a group of ageing vessels that Kyiv alleges helps Moscow exports large quantities of crude oil despite Western sanctions.
The SBU source said Ukrainian drones hit the ship in neutral waters more than 2,000 kilometres (1,243 miles) from Ukraine.
They said: “Russia used this tanker to circumvent sanctions and earn money that went to the war against Ukraine.
“Therefore, from the point of view of international law and the laws and customs of war, this is an absolutely legitimate target for the SBU.
“The enemy must understand that Ukraine will not stop and will strike it anywhere in the world, wherever it may be.”
The vessel was empty at the time of the attack, the Ukrainian source added.
Speaking during a live TV event, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, claimed the attack would not disrupt supplies, but vowed that Russia would retaliate nonetheless.
He added that Russia regularly responded with “much stronger strikes” against Ukraine.
Putin also warned against any threat to blockade Russia’s coastal exclave Kaliningrad, which he said would “just lead to unseen escalation of the conflict” and could trigger a “large-scale international conflict”.
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Sky military analyst Michael Clarke said Ukraine’s claim about causing significant damage to the ship was “probably true”.
He added: “The Ukrainians obviously feel that they can legitimise this sort of operation.”
The Qendil, pictured near Istanbul last month. Pic: Reuters
The attack comes after the European Union announced it would provide a €90bn (£79bn) interest-free loan to Ukraine.
Oleksandr Merezhko, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the Ukrainian parliament, told Sky News that the money would “tremendously enhance” Kyiv’s defensive capabilities.
However, he said the International Monetary Fund estimated that Ukraine needed $137bn to “keep running”.
“The aggressor should be punished”, Mr Merezhko added, as he argued that frozen Russian assets in Europe should be used to help fund his country’s defence.
He vowed that Ukraine would “continue to fight” for the move, adding that it was “a matter of justice”.
Protesters have stormed the headquarters of two major newspapers in Bangladesh, amid widespread unrest following the death of a political activist.
A mob set fire to the offices of the Bengali-language Prothom Alo daily newspaper and the English-language Daily Star in the capital Dhaka, leaving journalists and other staff stuck inside.
The Bengali-language Prothom Alo daily was one of the two newspapers that were targeted. Pic: AP.
One of the Daily Star’s journalists, Zyma Islam, wrote on Facebook: “I can’t breathe anymore. There’s too much smoke.”
Both dailies stopped updating their online editions after the attacks and did not publish broadsheets on Friday.
Troops were deployed to the Star building and firefighters had to rescue the journalists trapped inside. The blaze was brought under control early on Friday.
The latest protests erupted a year after the July Revolution ousted PM Sheikh Hasina. Pic: PA.
Political activist Sharif Osman Hadi died in hospital late on Thursday, six days after the youth leader was shot while riding on a rickshaw in Dhaka.
Bangladesh’s interim government urged people on Friday to resist violence as police and paramilitary troops fanned out
across the capital and other cities following the protests overnight. They have sparked concerns of fresh unrest ahead of national elections, which Mr Hadi had been due to stand in.
He was a prominent activist in the political uprising last year that forced the then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to flee the country. Mr Hadi spent six days on life support in a hospital in Singapore before he succumbed to his injuries.
Mr Hadi died a week after he was shot by a man on a motorbike. Pic: PA.
Hundreds of protesters took to the streets following news of Mr Hadi’s death on Thursday night, where they rallied at Shahbagh Square near the Dhaka University campus, according to media reports.
A group of demonstrators gathered outside the head office of the Muslim-majority country’s leading Bengali-language Prothom Alo daily, before vandalising the building and setting it on fire.
A few hundred yards away, another group of protesters pushed into the Daily Star offices and set fire to the building. The protesters are believed to have targeted the papers for their alleged links with India and closeness to Bangladesh‘s interim leader, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus.
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Although calm had returned to much of the country on Friday morning, protesters carrying national flags and placards
continued demonstrating at Shahbagh Square in Dhaka, chanting slogans and vowing not to return until justice was served.
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Last year’s mass uprising erupted from student protests against a quota system that awarded 30% of government jobs to relatives of veterans.
The July 2024 protest, which resulted in as many as 1,400 deaths according to the United Nations, was dubbed the first “Gen Z” revolution.
Bangladesh’s former prime minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed was forced to resign in August 2024 and fled to India. She was later sentenced to death in absentia.
Sheikh Hasina was sentenced to death in absentia. Pic: AP
Dr Yunus was then sworn in as interim leader.
The country’s Islamists and other opponents of Ms Hasida have accused her government for being subservient to India.
Mr Hadi was a fierce critic of Ms Hasina and neighbouring India.
He had planned to run as an independent candidate in a constituency in Dhaka at the next national elections due to be held in February.
Authorities said they had identified the suspects in Mr Hadi’s shooting, and the assassin was also likely to have fled to India. Two men on a motorbike followed Hadi and one opened fire before they fled the scene.
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