Syria PM says govt still functioning but foreign and domestic challenges loom
Prime Minister Mohammed Ghazi Jalali, who remained in his post after Assad and most of his top officials vanished over the weekend, has sought to project normalcy.
“We are working so that the transitional period is quick and smooth,” he told Sky News Arabia TV on Monday, saying the security situation had already improved from the day before, when joyful crowds gathered in public squares and celebratory gunfire rang out across the capital.
He said the government is coordinating with the insurgents, and that he is ready to meet rebel leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani, who made a triumphal appearance at a famed Damascus mosque on Sunday.
Syrians who only days ago were working at all levels of the bureaucracy in Assad’s regime were now flipping to the new reality.
At the court of Justice in Damascus, which was stormed by the rebels to free detainees, Judge Khitam Haddad, an aide to the justice minister in the outgoing government, said Sunday that judges were ready to resume work quickly.
“We want to give everyone their rights. We don’t their rights to be wasted,” Haddad told AP outside the courthouse. “We want to build a new Syria and to keep the work but with new methods.”
Meanwhile, a Syrian opposition war monitor said a top aide to Assad's brother, Maher, was found dead in his office near Damascus. A video that circulated on social media purportedly showed Maj. Gen. Ali Mahmoud covered with blood and with his clothes burned. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it was not clear if he was killed or died by suicide.
Maher Assad, whose whereabouts are unknown, led the army's 4th Armored Division, which played a major role in the civil war that erupted in 2011, after a popular uprising against Assad led to a violent crackdown on dissent and the rise of an insurgency.
Source: Associated Press
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