How Bashar al-Assad’s regime crumbled

Three weeks ago Bashar al-Assad was at an Arab summit in Riyadh enjoying the diplomatic attention.

He stood at a podium to lecture about political solidarity, met with powerful Arab leaders, including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and waved from a red carpet as he departed on his presidential plane.

He was the reviled leader of a fractured state, but so rooted in place that even Europeans had been making overtures — via Jordan — in search of a solution to the Syrian refugee crisis.

If not rehabilitation, it was at least resigned acceptance. More than a decade of civil war had failed to topple Assad, allowing him to inch back from pariah status.

Now Assad is an asylum seeker in Moscow, his father’s statue in Tartus has been toppled, and rebels are scouring embassies in Damascus for any sign of the cronies who ran his regime.

The week-long path the Islamist-led rebels trod to reach the capital is strewn with the paraphernalia of conflict, from abandoned tanks to piles of army uniforms left by fleeing soldiers.

It traced the detritus of a war that had sucked world powers into an uneasy détente: US and Russian troops in opposite corners of the country and a Turkish outpost in the north, while Iran and Israel turned Syria into another theatre of their shadow conflict.

The slow demise of the Assad regime has offered Isis space to grow; produced a refugee crisis that reshaped Europe; and killed as many as half a million people. Its fall leaves a strategically crucial nation splintered and facing an uncertain future.

It became clear on December 2 that a regime that had survived 13 years of civil war faced its most serious threat. The rebels stormed into Aleppo, once Syria’s largest city and the site of a four-year battle that ended with a negotiated retreat for Turkish-backed rebels in 2016, when Russian forces came to Assad’s rescue.

As Aleppo was falling this time, Iran, a crucial backer of Assad, made a show of support: foreign minister Abbas Araghchi visited on December 1 and 2 to see Assad, wandered through Damascus’s upscale Mezzeh District and ate shawarma at the famous Dajajati restaurant. “Wish you were here,” he posted on X.

According to Iran’s foreign ministry, he “expressed confidence that Syria . . . would once again overcome terrorist groups”. Privately, though, an Iranian regime insider told the FT, Araghchi had told Assad that “Iran was no longer in a position to send forces to support him.”

Next, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — the Islamist group leading the rebel campaign — captured the countryside around Hama, a city of a million people whose jails held opposition figures from as far back as 1982, when Assad’s father put down a rebellion there, killing tens of thousands of people.

Assad doubled the salary of soldiers, local media reported, and Russia carried out air strikes. But those strikes did little to slow HTS’s advance, unlike earlier in Syria’s civil war, when Russian air superiority was crucial in hammering cities held by rebel groups.

That the insurgents could move so swiftly this time was partly a consequence of two wars: Russia’s in Ukraine, and Israel’s with Hizbollah, and by proxy, Iran. Israel’s war in neighbouring Lebanon had severely weakened Iran; Hizbollah, the Lebanese militant group deployed by Iran to prop up Assad, had been shattered by 14 months of conflict with Israel.

Russia along with Iran made public pledges of support for the regime, but a former Kremlin official told the FT it was likewise powerless to help Assad: Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine had hollowed out Moscow’s forces and distracted security officials from the threat in Syria.

“If there had been no war in Ukraine, there’d have been no fall of Assad. Or at least, the Russians would have been willing to do more,” said Hanna Notte, director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

Assad’s weakness just as Israel was emerging victorious in a battle next door echoed the birth of his own ruling dynasty. Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, jostled his way through internecine palace coups to the presidency just after Syria lost the Golan Heights to Israel in the 1967 war.

“This collapse is the direct result of our forceful action against Hizbollah and Iran, Assad’s main supporters,” bragged Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday. “It set off a chain reaction.”

To make his point, a few weeks earlier, Netanyahu had sent his closest aide on foreign policy, Ron Dermer, to Moscow with a message: tell Assad that if he does not rein in the Iranians, if he allows Hizbollah to regroup in Syria, if he does not close the border with Lebanon to weapons and cash transfers, “we are going after him”.

As the rebels kept up their pace towards Hama, the fall of Damascus itself still seemed unlikely. The ancient city had held strong through most of the civil war, even as the state itself came close to bankruptcy.

But behind the scenes, a diplomat told the FT, the Iranians had begun abandoning Assad. The elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, diplomats and their families were leaving in large numbers, some towards Iraq.

Within two days, the rebels took Hama, then Homs, the last major city on the highway to Damascus. HTS mirrored the practice of previous Islamist rebel groups by negotiating deals with local tribal leaders and warning local warlords to remain neutral, a western intelligence official told the FT. “It was a festival of marriages of convenience,” he said.

HTS itself was surprised at how quickly the Syrian army melted away, a diplomat told the FT. At the start of the offensive, they sent 300 fighters to try to breach a 2019 deconfliction line by attacking Syrian army positions — “and the Syrian army just disappeared”, the diplomat said.

The rebels assumed Aleppo would be a bigger battle, but encountered little resistance. It was not until Hama that the Syrian army put up a “serious fight, but in the end it just proved how weak the [regime] forces’ morale was”, said the diplomat.

The US and its allies were scrambling to keep up. US deployments in Syria were along its border with Turkey, far from the rebel advance. “Things were changing faster than we could process,” said the official.

Turkish intelligence, which has backed separate rebel factions and helped them to hold a wide swath of land just south of the Turkey-Syria border since 2016, provided significant help to the advancing offensive, said a person with knowledge of the events.

Turkish surveillance drones had mapped out the military facilities on the road to Damascus for their own operational reasons before the rebel offensive, so they were able to provided detailed inventories of the fighting materiel stored at some sites, this person said.

Turkey does provide weapons to some rebel factions, which operate under the banner of the Syrian National Army and which co-ordinated with HTS in the offensive, the person said, declining to share details. In exchange, it received assurances that as the Islamist rebels swelled in membership, they would refrain from joining forces with the US-backed Kurdish rebels that already hold large areas of Syrian territory.

Turkey considers those rebels to be a part of the Kurdistan Workers’ party, designated a terrorist group by the EU and the US, even as the US considered them an essential bulwark in their battle with Isis.

“We advised the [Kurds] that this would be a good time for them to watch their walls and mind their fences,” said a western official. This is not “their battle”, he said.

Damascus lay ahead. As the HTS swarmed south, engorged with weapons left behind by fleeing soldiers and buoyed by public support, other rebel groups headed north from Deraa province, the birthplace of the 2011 civil war.

The regime forces appeared to have vanished overnight; local war monitors have suggested that they had cut a deal with the rebels to leave the highway uncontested in exchange for being allowed to flee.

The race to Damascus had echoes of a similar one in 1918, when western troops raced against Arab militias — aided by TE Lawrence — to capture Damascus from the retreating Ottoman army at the end of the First World War.

The prize then, as now, was Syria. The immediate outcome then, as now, was chaotic. On Saturday night, Damascenes lived through a terrifying night of air strikes — some of them Israeli, looking to destroy Iranian infrastructure to stop it from falling into rebel hands — and nonstop gunfire.

But by morning, Damascus was theirs. For now, the HTS has imposed an evening curfew, placed guards outside administrative buildings, secured the central bank, and removed Syrian Prime Minister Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali from his offices into the Four Seasons Hotel, from where he pledged to help with a transition.

Assad’s departure was announced not by his office, but by the Russian foreign ministry, a reminder that his fall was also a repudiation of Putin’s decision in 2015 to come to the Syrian’s aid.

John Foreman, former UK defence attaché in Moscow, said that “it was only a matter of time” before Russia’s air base in Hmeimim and naval base at Tartus fell. “If they can’t ensure base security, then they’ll have to leave,” he said. At the same time, the Russian state newswire TASS reported, citing a Kremlin source, that the rebels had guaranteed the security of Russia’s bases and diplomatic facilities in the country.

Without the two bases, it would be harder for Russia to challenge Nato’s navy or project air power in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and to support its presence in northern and sub-Saharan Africa, Foreman added.

Social media posts seem to show Russian equipment being pulled back towards both its major bases, while heavy lift-aircraft have been shuttling between Russia and Syria. A mammoth An-124 — with a 74m wingspan and capable of carrying large items — was caught in satellite images on the tarmac on December 7.

But the scale of the Russian drawdown is unclear and may not be as dramatic as that of the Iranians, who were hunted both by Israelis and at least a few angry Syrians, who ransacked Tehran’s embassy in Damascus.

One plane — most likely Russian — did take off from somewhere in Syria in recent days, carrying the country’s most hunted man: Assad himself. The 59-year had spent most of his adult life as the dictator of Syria. In the capital he left behind, looters had broken into his home, ransacked furniture and ogled his collection of luxury cars.

Like other toppled Russian proxies, he now faces an uncertain future, having outlived his utility for both Russia and Iran. In Syria, young men were riding a statue of him as a sleigh through the streets.

Additional reporting: Chris Cook and John Paul Rathbone in London

Cartography by Steven Bernard