SYRIAN jihadists took control of the capital yesterday as President Bashar al-Assad was reported to have fled the country.

But activists labelled yesterday’s collapse of President Bashar Assad’s Syrian government a “victory for imperialism.”

The defeat of the Syrian government came after a lightning offensive by jihadist insurgent groups, mainly under Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which seized control of the capital, Damascus.

Syrian state television aired a statement by a group of men saying that President Bashar Assad had been overthrown and all detainees in jails had been set free.

The man who read it said the opposition group known as the Operations Room to Conquer Damascus called on all opposition fighters and citizens to preserve state institutions of “the free Syrian state.”

The statement emerged hours after the head of a Syrian opposition war monitor said President Assad had left the country for an undisclosed location, fleeing ahead of insurgents who said they had entered Damascus following a remarkably swift advance.

Communist Party of Kenya’s General Secretary Booker Omole said: “The fall of Damascus and the collapse of the Assad government, engineered by imperialist forces, marks a sombre milestone in the unrelenting assault on Syria’s sovereignty.”

He added: “This is not a triumph of democracy or self-determination; it is a victory for imperialism and reaction.”

Vijay Prashad, director the Tricontinental Centre for Social Research, said: “There is no Syrian revolution. Syria will face a Libyan future,” referring to the overthrow of Muammar Gadaffi in 2011.

Posting on the X social media platform, Mr Prashad explained that “the Syrian state had been devastated by the war from 2011 to 2014, and then by the sanctions placed on the country. 

“The Syrian army had never fully recovered in the aftermath of the major fighting to take back the main cities of Hama, Homs and Aleppo.”

He added that Israeli attacks on Iranian supply depots and military facilities in Syria, as well as the conflict in Ukraine, meant “Syria’s government no longer had its Iranian and Russian military allies for assistance” against the reinforced insurgents.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed direct credit yesterday for the overthrow of President Assad and said he had instructed his forces to seize the buffer zone and the dominant positions near it,” created in 1974.

Mr Netanyahu said the aim of this was “to ensure the protection of all Israeli communities in the Golan Heights, both Jewish and Druze, so that they face no threats from across the border.”

Former ambassador and historian Craig Murray said: “I am looking for one single word of condemnation from any Nato government of Israel’s current invasion further into Syria.

“Cue the tumbleweed.”