Baath

The dismantling of the decades-old apparatus behind the oppressive machine of the Assads, such as the country's army and the ruling Baath party, meant the sacking of hundreds of thousands of people.

At the centre in Damascus, formerly an office of Assad's Baath Party, hundreds of men were thronging to the gate, hankering to be let in.

Assad’s fall ends more than six decades of Baath Party rule that sought to center Syria as a leader in the Arab world, but instead left it corruption-riddled and impoverished.

A strike hit the headquarters of the Baath political party in the densely populated Ras al-Naba neighbourhood on Sunday, according to Lebanon's state-run National News Agency.

Most of the headquarters of the Lebanese branch of the Syrian Baath party was destroyed in the strike, as rescue and civil defence teams rushed to aid a number of people trapped under the rubble, the National News Agency reported.