How Bashar al-Assad’s regime collapsed

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

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

He was the reviled leader of a fragmented state, but so entrenched that even the Europeans tried – through Jordan – to seek a solution to the Syrian refugee crisis.

If not rehabilitation, it is at least resigned acceptance. More than a decade of civil war has failed to topple Assad, allowing him to retreat somewhat from pariah status.

Now Assad is an asylum seeker in Moscow, a statue of his father in Tartus has been toppled, and rebels are searching embassies in Damascus for any sign of friends who ran his regime.

The weeks-long trail the Islamist-led rebels took to reach the capital is dotted with signs of conflict, from abandoned tanks to piles of military uniforms left behind by fleeing soldiers.

It followed the remnants of a war that had drawn world powers into an uneasy détente: US and Russian troops at opposite ends of the country and a Turkish outpost in the north, while Iran and Israel turned Syria into another theater of their shadow conflict.

The slow fall of the Assad regime offered Isis room to grow; produced a refugee crisis that reshaped Europe; and killed as many as half a million people. Its fall left the strategically key nation divided and facing an uncertain future.

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

As Aleppo fell this time, Iran, a key backer of Assad, showed support: Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi visited on December 1 and 2 to see Assad, wander the upscale Mezzeh neighborhood of Damascus and eat shawarma at the famous Dajajati restaurant. “I wish you were here,” he posted on X.

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

Then Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — the Islamist group leading the insurgency campaign — seized the countryside around Hama, a city of a million people that has held opposition figures in prisons since 1982, when Assad’s father crushed a rebellion there, killing tens of thousands.

Assad doubled the pay of soldiers, local media reported, and Russia launched airstrikes. But the strikes did little to slow HTS’ advance, unlike in Syria’s earlier civil war, when Russian air superiority was crucial in attacking towns held by rebel groups.

That the rebels were able to move so quickly this time was partly the result of two wars: Russia’s in Ukraine, Israel’s with Hezbollah, and Iran’s mediation. Israel’s war in neighboring Lebanon seriously weakened Iran; Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group sent by Iran to support Assad, has been shattered by 14 months of conflict with Israel.

Russia, along with Iran, has publicly pledged support for the regime, but a former Kremlin official told the FT it is also powerless to help Assad: Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has depleted Moscow’s forces and distracted security officials from the threat in Syria.

“If there was no war in Ukraine, there would be no fall of Assad. Or at least the Russians would be willing to do more,” said Hanna Notte, director of the Eurasian Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

Assad’s weakness just as Israel was emerging victorious in a neighboring battle reverberated with the birth of his own ruling dynasty. Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, rose through palace coups to become president shortly after Syria lost the Golan Heights to Israel in the 1967 war.

“This collapse is a direct result of our strong action against Hezbollah and Iran, Assad’s main backers,” boasted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday. “It started a chain reaction.”

To make his point, a few weeks earlier, Netanyahu sent his closest foreign policy aide, Ron Dermer, to Moscow with a message: Tell Assad that if he doesn’t rein in the Iranians, if he allows Hezbollah to regroup in Syria, if he doesn’t close the border with Lebanon for the transfer of weapons and cash, “we’re going after him”.

While the rebels kept pace with Hama, the fall of Damascus itself still seemed unlikely. The ancient city held strong throughout much of the civil war, even as the state itself was close to bankruptcy.

But behind the scenes, the diplomat told the FT, Iranians were beginning to abandon Assad. The elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, diplomats and their families left in large numbers, some to Iraq.

Within two days, the rebels captured 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, the diplomat told the FT. At the start of the offensive, they sent 300 fighters to try to breach the 2019 deconfliction line by attacking Syrian army positions – “and the Syrian army just disappeared,” the diplomat said.

The rebels assumed that Aleppo would be a bigger battle, but they encountered little resistance. Only in Hama did the Syrian army put up a “serious fight, but in the end it only proved how weak the morale of the (regime) forces is,” the diplomat said.

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

Turkish intelligence, which has backed separate rebel factions and helped them hold a wide swath of land south of the Turkish-Syrian border since 2016, has provided significant assistance to the advancing offensive, a person familiar with the matter said.

Turkish surveillance drones mapped military facilities en route to Damascus for their own operational reasons ahead of the rebel offensive, so they could provide a detailed list of combat material stored in some locations, the person said.

Turkey is indeed providing weapons to some rebel factions, which operate under the banner of the Syrian National Army and have been coordinating with HTS on the offensive, the person said, declining to give details. In return, it received assurances that the Islamist rebels, with increasing numbers of members, would refrain from joining forces with the US-backed Kurdish rebels who already hold large swathes of Syrian territory.

Turkey considers these rebels part of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which the EU and the US have declared a terrorist group, although the US considered them a key bulwark in the fight against the Islamic State.

“We advised (the Kurds) that this would be a good time to watch their walls and watch their fences,” the Western official said. This is not “their battle,” he said.

Damascus was ahead. As HTS surged south, laden with weapons left behind by fleeing soldiers and bolstered by public support, other rebel groups moved north from Deraa province, the birthplace of the 2011 civil war.

Regime forces appeared to have disappeared overnight; local war observers suggested they struck a deal with the rebels to leave the highway uncontested in exchange for permission to escape.

The Race for Damascus had echoes similar to that of 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 endured a terrifying night of airstrikes – some of them Israeli, seeking to destroy Iranian infrastructure to prevent it from falling into rebel hands – and incessant gunfire.

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

Assad’s departure was announced not by his office, but by Russia’s foreign ministry, recalling that his downfall was also a rejection of Putin’s 2015 decision to come to the aid of the Syrian.

John Foreman, the former British military attache in Moscow, said it was “only a matter of time” before the Russian air base at Hmeimim and the naval base at Tartus fell. “If they can’t secure the base, then they will have to leave,” he said. At the same time, Russian state media TASS reported, citing a Kremlin source, that the rebels had guaranteed the security of Russian bases and diplomatic facilities in the country.

Without those two bases, it would be more difficult for Russia to counter NATO’s navy or project air power in the Mediterranean and Red Seas, and to bolster its presence in North and sub-Saharan Africa, Foreman added.

Posts on social media appeared to show Russian equipment being withdrawn towards both major bases, while heavy aircraft flew between Russia and Syria. The mammoth An-124 — with a wingspan of 74 meters and capable of carrying large objects — was captured by satellite images on the runway on December 7.

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

A plane – most likely Russian – took off from somewhere in Syria in recent days, carrying the most persecuted man in the country: Assad himself. The 59-year-old spent most of his adult life as the dictator of Syria. In the capital he left behind, robbers broke into his home, ransacked his furniture and looked through his collection of luxury cars.

Like other ousted Russian proxies, he now faces an uncertain future, having outlived his usefulness to both Russia and Iran. In Syria, young men drove his statue like a sleigh through the streets.

Additional reporting: Chris Cook and John Paul Rathbone in London

Cartography by Steven Bernard