For the first time in more than seven years, the Syrian government raised its flag Thursday over Daraa, the first city to revolt against President Bashar Assad in 2011 and plunge the country into a calamitous civil war.
The display is laden with symbolism as the government moves to stamp out the last of the uprising against the 52-year-old. His father Hafez Assad was president for three decades before him.
Officials accompanied by state media crews hoisted the two-star flag over the rubble of the city's main square, allowing it to wave in sight of the shell of the Omari Mosque where protesters first gathered in demonstrations demanding reforms then Assad's ouster in the spring of 2011.
The mosque has since been destroyed in the government's brutal crackdown against the city, which ranged from alleged torturing of dissidents to shelling the city with tanks and planes.
Government forces backed by Russian airstrikes have recovered swathes of Deraa province in the last three weeks, advancing unopposed by Assad's Western and regional foes into the strategically vital southwest region near Jordan and Israel that serves as an important corridor for trade between Syria and Jordan, and onward to the oil-rich Persian Gulf states.
Ahmad Masalmeh, a media activist formerly based in Daraa, said fighters in the city had accepted an offer of amnesty from the government, and allowed back in the state institutions and symbols of Assad's rule.
Opposition fighters refusing to accept the deal will be exiled with their families to other rebel-held parts of the country.
According to several reports, senior Russian military delegation entered the rebel-held area of the city on Thursday and began negotiations with Free Syrian Army commanders over its handover to state rule, rebel officials and a witness said.
A rebel official said negotiations were proceeding smoothly, with the Russians so far abiding by the terms of the deal, under which rebels would hand over weapons, and fighters who do not wish to live under state rule would be evacuated.
"Everyone is committed to the agreements," said rebel official Abu Jihad, adding rebels had already begun since late Wednesday to hand over their heavy weapons.
One rebel official said fighters hoped the Russians would keep a pledge to maintain a permanent Russian military police presence to protect civilians and former rebels who remain.
The agreement follows a template imposed by the government and its Russian and Iranian backers that has forced hundreds of thousands of Syrians, including media activists, army defectors, and draft dodgers and their family members to give up their homes to lift the sieges against their cities.
Human rights monitors say the arrangements amount to a program of political and demographic engineering in Syria to secure Assad's rule.
The southern rebels were once armed as part of an aid program run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and backed by Assad's regional foes including Saudi Arabia. The United States, which shut down the program last year, told the rebels not to expect its military aid as the southern offensive began.
Government forces launched an offensive to recapture southwest Syria and the areas neighboring Jordan and Israel on June 19. They surrounded Daraa's rebel-held quarters on Monday. Dozens have been killed in the campaign, including 162 civilians, according to Rami Abdurrahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights — among them women and children.
The offensive has prompted the single biggest displacement of the war, uprooting over 300,000 people. Many are sheltering at the frontier with the Israeli Golan Heights. Both Israel, which is in a state of war with Syria, and Jordan have refused to let refugees in.
Ahmad al-Hariri, one of thousands sheltering near the Golan frontier, said he did not know where to go after the army took his village of Hrak in Daraa.
"I'm lost. ... Even if they want to expel or slaughter us, I don't want to hand myself over to the Syrian regime. You can't trust it," he said. "Under the warplanes ... I carried my kids and did not expect to arrive here."
U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres told reporters at a news conference that the world body had tried "to prevent a bloodbath" in the region.
Late last month, Guterres had called for an immediate end to military operations and a return to cease-fire arrangements agreed to by Russia, the United States and Jordan.
"I think that our action was useful in that regard," he said. "But again the objective must be and remains entirely for us a political solution."
Russian mediators are warning fighters and civilians against leaving Daraa for Idlib, the northwest Syrian province where over a million displaced Syrians are living in dire conditions and exposed to government airstrikes and the possibility of a future offensive.
"Idlib is a crematory," the activist said Russian mediators warned him.
Anti-Assad rebels still control a chunk of the northwest, and the northeast and a large chunk of the east are controlled by Kurdish-led militia.
The rebel-held northwest has previously been a refuge for rebels and civilians who fear a return of Assad's rule. But some fear areas there could be the next target.
