Transcript of Syria’s rebel leader suspends parliament and constitution | BBC News

In Syria's new dawn, parliament has been suspended along with the constitution for the next 3 months. Rebel leaders who ousted the longtime dictator Bashar al Assad say the moves are necessary to allow for a smooth transition of power. But a spokesman says Syria's religious and cultural diversity won't be threatened. It comes as Syrians continue to search prisons and hospitals for news of missing loved ones who disappeared during Assad's repressive rule. From Damascus, Jeremy Bowen has our top story tonight and a warning there are some details you may find distressing.

They have to find the missing and identify the dead before they can build a new Syria. 35 more bodies of men killed in prison have arrived, and the mortuary of Mushtahed Hospital is full. The only way to find a missing son or father or brother is to look for yourself.

It is painful.

At the

same time, we have hope even if we find him between the bodies, anything, as long as he's not missing. We want to find something of him. We want to know what happened to him. We need an end to this.

The examination room is full of bodies too. If they can't be identified easily, the medics take tissue samples, building up evidence for DNA tests and future prosecutions. Have you managed to find out how these men died?

Most of, sweat. Sometimes because of fractures, The bodies are not in a good shape to say the, exact reasons, but they have, suffered from, fractures.

So they've been beaten?

Yeah. Yes. We think so. I I came here yesterday. This was very difficult for me.

What what future will be we hope that it will be better, but this is very hard.

The presidential palace built high on a crag above Damascus, where it can be seen across the city embodies the arrogance of the Assad's who broke Syria to try to save their regime. It might not be possible to put this fractured country back together. In 2015, I met Bashar al Assad at a guest palace at the presidential compound. His successors need to act fast to undo the legacy of the war he chose to fight. The same corridor is now a patch of quiet in a country full of weapons, anger, poverty, and calls for vengeance, with dozens of armed groups who want their own slice of the Syria Assad left in pieces.

He was extravagantly polite in quite an old fashioned way. Come into the room, he'd leap up off the sofa. Then on the way out, he'd say, after you, and they'd hold back the door and walk walk out first. He didn't seem to be a guy who'd be at home in a torture center, but he certainly seemed to be a guy who'd be very happy giving the orders to get people tortured and killed. On a wall outside Mujdahid Hospital in Damascus are photos of dead men.

It is hard to see the person they knew in a gallery of smashed and decomposing faces. The families of the missing get as close as they can. Often, all they have are the names and places where they were last seen. Mahmud. Mahmud Ali, Damascus, 2013.

50 years of the Assad, 50 years of incarceration, of disappearances, of executions, 50 years of cruelty to the families, the prisoners, to the Syrian people. These people want information, they want a body to bury, and they want

a reckoning.

My husband, Ibrahim, she's saying, taken in Deir ez Zor in 2012. Everyone had a photo, a name, and a date. The regime drilled so much pain into Syrians that some here are terrified that Assad could even return. A new Syria needs to deliver lives without fear. Jeremy Bowen, BBC News, Damascus.

Jeremy with some of his reflections there. While an American who'd been missing since June has been found in Syria after being released from prison by rebels as president Assad's regime fell, Travis Timmerman from Missouri was found by residents near the capital Damascus and said he'd been arrested when he entered the country on foot 7 months ago. Lucy Williamson has that story.

Prisoner of the old Syria, proof of the new 1. Travis Timmerman, an American from Missouri, released by rebel forces on Monday as they swept president Assad from power.

In the middle of the night or early morning, they they came with a hammer and knocked my door and and there was 2 men with, guns and then there's another man, named. And they helped him get out of prison and helped me get into Damascus.

The men who found him put this video on social media, saying he was in safe hands and had been checked by a doctor after 7 months in the custody of Assad's military intelligence.

It wasn't too bad. It wasn't bad. I I was never beaten. The only really bad part was that I couldn't go to the bathroom when I wanted to.

Timmerman was found wandering through this Damascus suburb today by Syrians celebrating freedom themselves. Locals here in this neighborhood are telling us that they found a foreigner wandering in the street outside. They said he was in fairly good condition, but they brought him here, and gave him some food and some water. They said he was very hungry and talking in English, but they couldn't understand what he was saying, and they didn't know exactly who he was. They showed us the selfies they'd taken with him as the militia, now in charge here, looked on.

They found him per foot on the road. He kept repeating that he was helped by military intelligence in Damascus. We helped him, offered him food, treated him well as a human being without any consideration of his American citizenship.

Travis Timmerman's story is 1 among tens of thousands from Assad's notorious prison system. Many more brutal will never be told. Silenced by the man many Syrian see as the biggest criminal of them all. Lucy Williamson, BBC News, Damascus.

Let's rejoin Jeremy who's, in the Syrian capital. Jeremy, parliament and constitution suspended

for

the next 3 months. What that what might that tell us about the new leadership?

Well, Clive, the the parliament was, a rubber stamp for the Assad regime whose members used to compete to praise him on the occasions when he deigned to appear in their chamber. The constitution clearly was no good at all in terms of protecting any Syrian. So, potentially, that could be a good move to rebuild something new. The question is what they put in its place. Now HTS, the the, the militia that overthrew the regime, is an Islamist group that broke from Al Qaeda in 2016.

So clearly, people are wondering whether that change, that conversion was genuine. Here in Damascus, their people have been going around to the minority religious groups, Christians and so on, and saying to them reassuring them that there will be religious freedom, that their people will be able to dress the way that they want. But there have been reports on social media that in Homs, a couple of hours drive from here, female judges have been told to wear headscarves in court, a move that they are resisting, I'm told, at the moment. So the thing is as well that there are, troublesome neighbors from the Syrian point of view who like to interfere in this country, Israel and Turkey in particular. There's what there are questions about how they will affect the equilibrium here.

But I think in terms of the way this is going, we have to remember it is less than a week since Assad was forced out and forced into exile. So it's really very early days, too early to try and make a judgment.