The reports began trickling in barely 24 hours after Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad was ousted. “Several Assad regime officials arrive in Libya’s Benghazi,” read a headline on a local Libyan news site on Monday, December 9 – the morning after rebels arrived in Damascus to find the Syrian president had fled.While Assad was taken to Moscow, Libyan news reports said “a number of Syrian officials” loyal to Assad had landed in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. No details of the fleeing officials were provided, although officials at Benghazi’s Benina airbase and global flight tracking sites confirmed the plane landing. By the end of the week, air traffic between Syria and Libya had increased. Russia was withdrawing significant amounts of military assets from Syria, primarily from its Khmeimim airbase in Latakia, and transporting them to Libya, according to several news reports. n18oc_world n18oc_crux
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