“The further assessment of the protection status of recognized Syrian refugees living in Germany depends on further developments in Syria,” she said in a statement to journalists on Monday. Deportations for Syrians who have been convicted of crimes will also be suspended until the situation becomes clearer, her office said.

Asylum decisions in German are based in part on whether a person would be endangered if they were returned to their home country. It was not immediately clear how many applications would be affected.

The rebels that toppled the repressive Assad government were led by an Islamist group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which was once linked to Al Qaeda but has since tried to gain international legitimacy by eschewing global jihadist ambitions.

More recently, the group’s leader has tried to reassure minority communities from other sects and religions that they would not be treated harshly — but it remains to be seen if they will follow through. And just a day after Bashar al-Assad fled Syria, it is also unclear who will lead a new government.

Nearly a million Syrians currently live in Germany, the vast majority having left during the civil war and Mr. Assad’s brutal crackdown of dissent. Former German chancellor Angela Merkel refused to close the borders during an exodus of Syrians in 2015.

A majority of those who arrived then have learned German and have integrated. Last year alone, 75,000 of them became German citizens. But the issue of migration has become increasingly divisive in Germany, as in several other Western countries, with some local leaders saying the large influx of migrants has strained their resources.

As Germany readies itself for the likelihood of a snap parliamentary election campaign this winter, the question of what to do about Syrian refugees has become a hot topic.

Jürgen Hardt, a foreign affairs specialist with the conservative Christian Democratic Union, which is ahead in the polls, said he believed the end of the Assad government would change things for Syrians living in Germany.

“I think that at the end of the day, a great many Syrians who are here will go back to Syria,” he said.

Jens Spahn, a fellow conservative member of the Christian Democrats who has taken a hard line in the past on migration, suggested providing free flights and 1,000 euros for all Syrians who want to return.

Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister and a member of the center-left Green party, warned of trying use the fall of Mr. al-Assad for domestic politics.

“Anyone who is now trying to turn this situation in Syria, where the future is completely unclear, into a political issue has completely lost touch with reality in the Middle East,” she said.

Many Syrians already have asylum protection in Germany, so the decision on Monday would apply to relative newcomers.

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The new, de facto leaders of Syria appeared to be striving for security, stability and continuity. Though there were reports over the weekend of looting at the Central Bank and of people ransacking Mr. al-Assad’s personal residence and the embassy of Iran, his main backer, rebel fighters on Monday stood guard outside government institutions throughout the capital. The new authorities also circulated images on social media of security personnel patrolling the streets of Damascus.

Their goal appeared to be to avoid the kind of chaos that has gripped other Arab nations when rebellions overthrew longtime dictators. In Libya during the 2011 Arab Spring revolt and Iraq during the 2003 American invasion, for example, looting was widespread and order broke down, prompting armed groups to jockey for power and leading to years of dysfunction and violence.

Jerome Drevon, an expert at the International Crisis Group who has studied and spoken extensively with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist group that spearheaded the rebel offensive, said the fighters had told him since taking Damascus that they would focus first on establishing security and providing basic services.

That will be easier said than done, especially because the rebels across Syria do not all belong to the same group. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham leads the group in Damascus, which now controls most of the country. Another group dominates in the south. Kurdish-led, U.S.-backed forces hold sway in the northeast.

So far, however, other rebels appear to be heeding the main coalition’s directives to preserve state institutions and avoid looting and acts of revenge.

“You need to present as much continuity as possible to avoid what happened elsewhere,” Mr. Drevon said. “Security is a major, major issue, because as people start fighting, weapons start spreading, everything goes down from there.”

There were signs that Mr. al-Assad’s bureaucrats were accepting their new leaders. A day after Syria’s foreign ministry said in a statement that embassies overseas would continue providing services to Syrian citizens, the Syrian Embassy in Russia raised the rebels’ green, white and black flag over its mansion in central Moscow on Monday morning, according to news footage.

It was not immediately clear whether many foreign governments would soon recognize the transitional government, a step that would add to the rebels’ legitimacy and one that would help unlock more international humanitarian aid. Many countries, including the United States, designate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham as a terrorist organization and have not had formal contacts with the group.

A British minister told the BBC that Britain was considering striking the group from its list of banned terrorist groups, the first step toward a direct relationship. Mr. Drevon said France had also made overtures toward the rebels. The New York Times reported on Sunday that the Biden administration is also weighing how much to engage with Damascus.

Those moves were likely to expand the influence of Turkey, which has long maintained ties with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and openly backs other Syrian rebel factions. It is now emerging as a crucial go-between for the rebels and outside powers.

Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, said in a televised address to diplomats in Ankara on Monday that Turkey was in touch with all parties.

“The new administration must be established in an orderly manner,” he said in remarks on Sunday, outlining principles he said Turkey wanted respected in Syria. “The principle of inclusiveness must never be compromised. There must never be a desire for revenge. It is time to unite and reconstruct the country.”

Mr. Fidan also called on Syria’s new leaders to secure any chemical weapons stores left over from the Assad regime, preserve state institutions and ensure equal treatment for Syrian minorities, including Christians, non-Arabs and Kurds.

Western countries are likely to demand similar conditions in exchange for dropping Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s terror designation and granting the group the international legitimacy it has long craved, Mr. Drevon said.

Among Arab governments, most of whom regard Islamist groups with extreme wariness and had long ago resigned themselves to working with Mr. al-Assad, the mood appeared even more cautious.

“We’ve seen countries in the region fall in a deep abyss after temporary moments of jubilation,” Tamim Khallaf, a spokesman for Egypt’s foreign ministry, said on Monday. “Egypt will continue to work with regional and international partners to assist Syria during this delicate stage in its history.”

Safak Timur contributed reporting from Istanbul, and Rania Khaled from Cairo.

As the rebel alliance that toppled President Bashar al-Assad held meetings in the Syrian capital, Damascus, and announced on Monday that it intended to form a transition government, the violence elsewhere highlighted Syria’s complex web of opposition groups, many of them holding different objectives and visions for a post-Assad future.

There were fierce battles in the northern city of Manbij, near Syria’s border with Turkey, which has for years been under the control of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led coalition of rebel groups supported by the United States. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group based in Britain, the city was captured on Monday by the Syrian National Army, a ragtag coalition of armed opposition groups backed by Turkey. A spokesperson for the Syrian Democratic Forces said fighters with the Syrian National Army had taken only 60 percent of the city. The claims could not be independently verified.

The offensive has been supported by Turkish airstrikes, leaving dozens of combatants dead and forcing many of the city’s hundreds of thousands of residents to flee, according to Kurdish-led forces and the Observatory.

Since the separate rebel assault against the Assad regime gathered pace last month, the Turkish military appears to have ramped up its attacks on areas controlled by the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led forces. Among them, a Turkish drone strike on a house killed 11 civilians, six of them children, the Observatory said on Monday.

Turkey and the United States are allies, sworn to protect each other as members of the NATO alliance. Though both countries celebrated the ouster on Sunday of Mr. al-Assad, their interests diverge over support for the Kurds in northern Syria, and the conflict in Syria has long strained the alliance between Ankara and Washington.

Turkey views the presence of armed Kurds so close to its border as a threat. For years, the Kurdish-led forces in Syria have been important partners for the U.S. in fighting Islamic State, the Islamist terrorist group that swept through the country and neighboring Iraq more than a decade ago amid the chaos of Syria’s civil war.

Although the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate has since been destroyed, the group has reconstituted in recent years in the Syrian desert and has launched sporadic attacks against Syrian regime troops.

The head of the Syrian Democratic Forces, Mazloum Abdi, warned last week of the Islamic State’s resurgence, stating at a news conference that there had been “increased movement” by the group in the desert region.

The warning added to growing fears that the Islamic State could exploit the power vacuum left by the Assad regime’s downfall — a key concern for U.S. leaders.

“We’re cleareyed about the fact that ISIS will try to take advantage of any vacuum to reestablish its capability, to create a safe haven,” President Biden said on Sunday, using an acronym for the terror group.

“We will not let that happen,” he added.

Hours later, Mr. Biden authorized U.S. airstrikes against Islamic State camps and operatives inside Syria. A swarm of B-52, F-15 and A-10 warplanes hit more than 75 targets in central Syria with about 140 munitions, according to U.S. officials.

Eve Sampson contributed reporting.

“Seizing the city is a joy — we are joyous,” said one rebel fighter, Mohammad Bakir, who sat in the back of a mud-caked car en route to the prison, his rifle tucked between his knees. He said he had not heard from his mother, brother and cousin since they disappeared in 2012 after they protested against the government and were presumably detained.

“But the real victory will be when I find my family,” Mr. Bakir, 42, said above the din of car horns.

Prisons were central to Mr. al-Assad’s ability to crush the civilian uprising that began in 2011 and the rebellion that followed. He set up an industrial-scale system of arbitrary arrests and torture prisons, according to reports by human rights groups.

More than 130,000 people were subjected to arbitrary arrest and detention by the government, according to a report in August by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a nonprofit, which began its count when the conflict started in 2011. The network said that more than 15,000 people had died “due to torture” by government forces from 2011 to July this year.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a separate organization that is based in Britain and that documents abuses in Syria, has estimated that more than 30,000 detainees were killed in Sednaya alone.

A crucial element of the pall that the prisons cast over the country was secrecy. People were swallowed up by the system, and families often struggled to discover whether their relatives had even been detained, much less to determine their fate. As a result, the opening of the prisons became an imperative for the rebels.

Videos sent to The New York Times by a group of doctors visiting Sednaya appeared to show the dire conditions inside. The footage was shared by the Independent Doctors Association, a group providing humanitarian and medical assistance in Syria.

Numbered cells, each of which appear to have held a dozen or more people, are seen littered with debris, clothing and personal belongings. Journalists, armed fighters and civilians, including children, roam the prison. Several men scrape at the concrete and grates along a wall in an apparent attempt to reach hidden cells.

In the northwestern city of Aleppo, dozens of families gathered at a traffic circle, hoping for the arrival of loved ones who had been detained. The spot was known during the war as the Death Roundabout because it was a regular target of government airstrikes.

Some were certain that their family members were alive and would arrive soon. Others had no information, only hope.

A vehicle dropped off one former prisoner from Sednaya, his face gaunt and his legs and body weakened by years of detention. Two relatives helped him stand. A small band of musicians beat drums to celebrate his survival.

The man was soon thronged by people holding their cellphones up to his face. They were showing him photographs of detainees, hoping he might have news.

Syria has modest oil reserves, and President-elect Donald J. Trump said during his first presidency that they should be secured, but markets were largely shrugging off the risk that conflict in the Middle East could lead to disruption of supplies. There are about 900 U.S. troops in Syria.

In more than a year since Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel from Gaza, there has been little interruption to flows of oil and natural gas, beyond rerouting tanker traffic to avoid attacks by Houthi fighters in Yemen.

The markets have instead focused on the tepid growth of global demand that can probably be met by new supplies from the United States, Brazil, Canada and other producers not bound by the agreements of the OPEC Plus cartel.

On Thursday, OPEC Plus pushed back plans to increase output to at least the second quarter of next year, the third delay in recent months.

Richard Bronze, head of geopolitics at Energy Aspects, a research firm, said, “There’s still a residual view that the oil market will be oversupplied next year.” He added that traders were worried that Mr. Trump’s policies would push oil prices lower “whether due to higher U.S. production or tariffs disrupting economic activity.”

Mr. Bronze said he thought that those theories would prove incorrect, but “the market will have to see it to believe it.”

Syria is in the neighborhood of large oil producers such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, but its own production has been sharply curtailed by a decade of civil war.

In 2023, Syria produced 40,000 barrels of oil a day — a trickle relative to major oil producers, according to the Statistical Review of World Energy, published by the Energy Institute, a London-based nonprofit.

In the early 2000s, Syria pumped more than 600,000 barrels a day, comparable to midsize producers like Azerbaijan or Egypt. That performance gives hope that with a stable political environment and improved management, oil sales could be an important source of revenue for a future Syrian government.

“We were like fish out of water when we left,” said Yasmeen Ali Armoosh, 30, speaking this past week from the dilapidated home they have rented for years in the town of Binnish, in northwestern Syria. “We felt suffocated.”

She and her family had withstood years of airstrikes from Syrian and Russian warplanes, she said, and had refused to leave their home in Saraqib, a town in northwestern Syria that became an opposition stronghold soon after the civil war began. But once government forces captured Saraqib in 2020, Ms. Armoosh’s family fled — fearful, she noted, of what living under a brutal dictatorship again could mean.

The 13-year civil war in Syria caused one of the “largest displacement crises in the world,” according to the United Nations. Some 7.2 million Syrians were displaced from their homes inside the country, mostly to rebel-held areas, while more than six million fled and became refugees.

The rebel offensive that ultimately drove President Bashar al-Assad from power on Sunday has prompted an untold number to start making their way back, crowding some border crossings with neighboring countries.

In Binnish, Ms. Armoosh, a teacher, was only around 10 miles from her hometown for around four years, but she said that it felt like living in another country.

On Nov. 29, she was feverishly messaging with dozens of friends about the rebel advance. One friend wrote, “Yasmeen, they liberated Saraqib, you’re finally returning home.”

The day after, as rebels pushed on from Saraqib toward the city of Aleppo, Ms. Armoosh went with her brother and two friends to see what had become of their hometown.

Driving on the road leading to Saraqib was a familiar comfort, she said.

Ms. Armoosh was relieved to find her house is still standing — many homes have been destroyed during the war — but government soldiers had used it as some kind of outpost, she said.

Pro-Assad graffiti was written on the wall, and the floors were littered with bullet casings, she added.

Ms. Armoosh and her family will need to work to make it habitable again, but it is still home.

“A person’s homeland is where their home is, where their friends are,” she said.

Despite the Biden administration’s fears that such attacks might spiral beyond control, those operations strengthened Israel without drawing a sustained response from Iran, leaving many Israelis feeling vindicated.

Hezbollah was left weakened before a cease-fire last month, its leaders mostly assassinated. Iran’s air defenses and missile factories were damaged, limiting its ability to harm Israel. And diplomats believe that Hamas, Iran’s beleaguered ally in Gaza, may soon compromise in cease-fire talks with Israel.

Now, the fall of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, a longtime ally of Iran, is seen in Israel as the crowning consequence of its yearlong campaign against Iran and its interests, even if it is also tinged with uncertainty about what comes next.

Without Israel’s blows against Hezbollah and Iran, Israeli analysts and leaders say, Syria’s rebels might not have dared revive their rebellion against Mr. al-Assad. And Iran and Hezbollah, which had propped up his regime for a decade, might have been better placed to save him.

Mr. al-Assad’s collapse “is the direct result of our forceful action against Hezbollah and Iran, Assad’s main supporters,” Mr. Netanyahu said as he toured the Golan Heights on Sunday, a territory that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

“It set off a chain reaction of all those who want to free themselves from this tyranny and its oppression,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

Still, Israelis are concerned about who will succeed Mr. al-Assad in Syria.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the main opposition alliance, has been fighting Hezbollah and its Iranian allies in Syria for years and is unlikely to allow Iran to continue to use Syria as a thoroughfare for arms deliveries to Lebanon. Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, said in an address in Damascus on Sunday that the Assad regime had brought many ills upon Syria and had allowed the country to become “a farm for Iranian greed.”

But Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is also a hard-line Islamist group with no love for the Jewish state. Abu Mohammad al-Jolani is a nom de guerre derived from the Arabic word for the Golan Heights.

And the rebels’ main foreign backer, Turkey, has been strongly critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza — leading to unease in Israel about the prospect of a Turkey-backed government controlling one of Israel’s northern borders.

“The collapse of the Assad regime, the tyranny in Damascus, offers great opportunity but also is fraught with significant dangers,” Mr. Netanyahu said on Sunday.

Pre-empting any fallout from Mr. al-Assad’s departure, the Israeli military openly crossed into sovereign Syrian territory over the weekend for the first time since the 1970s, seizing strategic positions close to the border.

Less openly, Israeli fighter jets also struck military infrastructure in Syria that Israel feared might otherwise have fallen into the hands of the rebel forces, according to Israeli officials.

Israel has also been talking with Kurdish rebels that control northeast Syria, Gideon Saar, the Israeli foreign minister, said at a press briefing on Monday.

Mr. Saar declined to give more details, but analysts have said that it was most likely an effort to increase Israel’s influence in postwar Syria. The Kurdish-led forces form a secular alliance, backed by the United States, that played a leading role in the defeat of jihadist groups in Syria over the past decade.

The Kurdish factions also have a fraught relationship with the Islamist factions that led the charge on Damascus last week, and analysts say Israel may see them as a good counterweight to Turkish influence as well as a jihadi resurgence.

But an Israeli alliance with the Kurds is a risky move because it could bring about a clash with Turkey, said Itamar Rabinovich, an Israeli expert on Syria.

For now, Turkey has other matters to deal with “before they mess with us,” said Mr. Rabinovich, a former ambassador who led back-channel talks with Syria in the 1990s.

But if Israel forms a partnership with the Syrian Kurds, whom Turkey sees as a threat, “This would be a way of turning Turkey into a real enemy,” Mr. Rabinovich said. “The profit does not justify the risk.”

More generally, some Israeli analysts see Mr. al-Assad’s downfall as another sign of the failure of Hamas’s effort to undermine Israel over the past year.

Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, was partly intended to upend the status quo in the Middle East in favor of Hamas and its Iran-led alliance.

Instead, Hamas has been hugely damaged by a year of Israeli bombardment and ground operations in Gaza. Its leader Yahya Sinwar is dead, and so is his predecessor Ismail Haniyeh. Hezbollah, which began clashing with Israel in solidarity with Hamas, is now severely weakened. Iran’s regional influence is diminished. And now Mr. al-Assad is gone.

“The mad megalomaniac, Yahya Sinwar, dreamed of changing the map of the Middle East,” Ehud Yaari, an Israeli commentator on Arab affairs, said in a television interview. “He succeeded, but the map of the region is now changing before our very eyes in the very opposite way that he had hoped for.”

Still, other Israeli analysts say that so long as Hamas still survives in Gaza, holding roughly 100 hostages, it is premature to celebrate.

“Hamas still controls Gaza, it still has cells in the West Bank, it holds 100 hostages,” Seth Frantzman, an Israeli security analyst, wrote in a social media post. “While Iran’s axis may be weaker, the larger threat to Israel still comes from Hamas in many ways in the long term.”

And it is unclear how Iran will respond to its loss of influence, with some in Israel warning that it may now rush to build a nuclear weapon in order to project strength.

“Iran is more dangerous now,” said Benny Gantz, Israel’s former defense minister, in comments distributed by his spokesman. “A nuclear breakout in response to these developments is a realistic option.”

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

This past summer, the Golan Heights was in the spotlight when a rocket launched from Lebanon struck a soccer field in Majdal Shams, a picturesque Druse Arab village, killing 12 children and injuring dozens more. The following day, the entire town, where it seems everybody knows everybody, wore black.

On Sunday, at a military outpost near Mount Hermon — which straddles the borders of Israel, Syria and Lebanon and was the scene of fierce fighting between Israel and Syria in 1974 — old tanks, now used for practice, were parked on muddy roads with their barrels pointed east toward Syria.

Tucked away behind the dirt roads stood an old pyramid-like structure made of volcanic rocks, now held together with metal wires. Israeli soldiers were patrolling the area, carrying out some general monitoring tasks and trying to keep warm.

Mahmoud Abu-Shaheen, 39, a grocery store owner from the Druse village of Buka’ata, in the north of the Golan Heights, stopped his car along a road outside the old structure, which overlooks the buffer zone between Israel and Syria. He said he was “curious and hopeful” about the current situation, which, he added, was “not surprising to me.”

“I drove out here to get a close sense of the fighting,” he said, as powerful explosions were heard in the distance and the sound of jet engines pierced a foggy sky.

“I have relatives in Suwayda, in Syria,” Mr. Abu-Shaheen continued. “We have been in touch all of these years and they told us that over this past year the situation became very difficult for them. They have no work and no regular income. They have been telling us how only the people who are close to Assad’s regime were able to make money, but this is not clean money.”

Like others in the Golan Heights and elsewhere, Mr. Abu-Shaheen is uncertain of how the near future will play out. He said he doesn’t know what role Israel might play, given its “active front in Gaza. At least Hezbollah is now weak.”

But, he said, “I hope Israel can make peace with Syria, and solve the status of the Golan Heights. But we can at least return to the days when Israel used to sell our apples to our Syrian neighbors.”

Dafna Meir, 47, a tour guide from Moshav Alonei Habashan, an Israeli settlement in the eastern Golan Heights, echoed Mr. Abu-Shaheen’s expressions of hope mixed with uncertainty and trepidation.

“This has been a difficult year, with endless explosions, fires, sirens and tension in the air,” she said, speaking by phone. “And when the cease-fire was announced we were so relieved, thinking to ourselves that this terrible year was finally over and that life here could finally return to normal,” she said, referring to the cease-fire that took effect between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon late last month.

“We are now again in a state of uncertainty, unsure where this is all going,” Ms. Meir added, citing the proximity to the Syrian border and “the danger of a security escalation, with errant fire crossing over the border.”

“This is such a beautiful area, all I want is for the nature to recover and for the beauty to return,” she said.

Hours later, Israeli forces took control of the mountain summit of Mount Hermon on the Syrian side of the border.

Checkpoints typically manned by Syrian intelligence and security forces, who would question drivers and passengers for hours on end, were empty. A few miles from the border, a body of a man in military uniform lay sprawled on the ground next to an abandoned pickup truck.

Down the road from one Syrian military base, a convoy of 10 rebel vehicles sped down the highway. They drove four-wheel drive vehicles — their doors and windows caked in mud as makeshift camouflage — and Syrian military vehicles armed with rockets that once belonged to the al-Assad government.

There were also signs of the lawlessness that many fear could seize the country, the celebration over the fall of Mr. al-Assad mixed with the uncertainty of what comes next.

A duty free shop just across the border from Lebanon appeared to have been broken into — its storefront windows smashed while bottles, chocolates and bags of snacks were strewn across its floor. Windshields and windows of dozens of abandoned cars along the roads were broken and their doors flung open.

Two young men fiddled with the wires beneath one abandoned truck, in apparent attempt to jump start the vehicle.

Nearby, one young man stood in front of an abandoned tank taking a selfie. He then picked up his toddler, placed him on top of the tank and told him to hold his fingers up in a V for victory before taking a photo.

In Old Damascus, the centuries-old city center of winding, narrow alleys, Victor Dawli, 59, stood in his apartment’s entryway, a cigarette in hand. As a truck carrying Syrian rebels passed, Mr. Dawli waved. One fighter, clutching his rifle and hunched over in the bed of the truck, nodded in response.

Mr. Dawli’s neighborhood, Babsharqi, is home to mostly Christians, many of who supported the Assad government and now fear they could face retribution from rebels and others who were part of the uprising.

As dawn broke on the second day of life in Syria without Mr. Assad, there was a sense of unease in the neighborhood, as people here walked a tightrope. Some have kept their heads down and stayed inside their homes. Others like Mr. Dawli say they have secretly supported the rebels from the start of their offensive.

When one neighbor passed by, Mr. Dawli shouted to him: “Good morning, congratulations!” The man gave him a blank stare, then hurried down a nearby alleyway.

“There are people who are scared, you tell them congratulations and they feel uneasy,” he said.