Amid ashes of Assad family's mausoleum, Syrian rebels vow to erase their legacy

By Tuvan Gumrukcu and Umit Bektas

QARDAHA, Syria (Reuters) - Now covered in ashes and empty bullet casings, the grand mausoleum of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's family stood in the eyes of rebels as a symbol of the injustice Syrians endured under their long rule.

The marble mausoleum in the Assads' western Syrian hometown of Qardaha was stormed, looted and torched by rebels after they took the capital Damascus, ending a family dynasty that began with Assad's father Hafez seizing power in a 1970 coup.

Bullet casings littered the mausoleum floor as fighters and civilians fired guns into the air, chanted slogans and stomped on Hafez al-Assad's torched memorial as winds blew ashes about. The tomb of the elder Assad's wife was also burnt and destroyed.

Ahmet al-Abdullah, a rebel from Aleppo who helped sack the mausoleum, said that while he had mixed feelings watching the monuments burn, the new Syrian leadership was determined to remove any signs of the Assad legacy from public life.

"God willing, we will wipe all of Syria's streets clean of the Assad family and their injustices. We will become a civilised country without an image of anyone no matter their status," he said, referring to the ubiquitous public portraits and statues of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad that marked their rule.

As he spoke on Thursday, armed men and local families walked around the Qardaha compound and scrawled graffiti slogans on its walls.

"Our flag will be the revolution flag, it will not be the terrorist flag of the (Assad) regime which engaged in terrorism against the Syrian people," al-Abdullah said. "None of the remains of the Assad family will remain."

In nearby Latakia, the main city in the coastal region that was long the epicentre of the Assads' Alawite minority sect, residents celebrated the ruling family's fall. Dozens of people holding flags and guns posed in front of a monument in the city centre, taking photos and videos as honking cars drove by.

(Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu, Bulent Usta and Umit Bektas; editing by Mark Heinrich)