In the last decade, a Lebanese Shiite ex-combatant crossed into Syria with Hezbollah, more – he says today – out of curiosity and solidarity with the militia than to support Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian army in combat. His memory explains a lot about this present in which the regime forces have lost in the blink of an eye (11 days) key cities that took years to take, thanks precisely to the support of allies, such as Hezbollah, Iran and, above all, , Russia, whom no one expects today. The ex-combatant found himself, he remembers, with a kind of Pancho Villa army lacking preparation, means and motivation. The Hezbollah men, he adds, began to position themselves in the second row, for fear that the soldiers would shoot them in the back, by mistake or out of spite. They are the same soldiers who, for the most part, have been surrendering, going over to the enemy, fleeing to Iraq or retreating during the lightning rebel attack that culminated in the early hours of this Sunday with the taking of Damascus, the formal fall of the regime and Bashar El Assad’s escape by plane. Eleven days that have shown that, although Assad means “the lion” in Arabic, his regime was actually a paper tiger: fearsome on the outside, but fragile on the inside. He has fallen just when more voices were calling him the virtual winner of the war, which began in 2011: the Arab leaders who tried to overthrow him at the time had reinstated him in the Arab League with smiles and handshakes and more and more countries, including Europeans, were more concerned about how to get rid of the refugees than about the dark history of massive human rights violations that it has.
The regime was in danger in the first years of the war, until Moscow came to its support in 2015 and the situation turned around. He recovered territory until he gained 70%, including the main cities and the entire coast. In 2019, he tried to take Idlib province with a large-scale air and ground assault, including his best forces. It killed hundreds of civilians and displaced another 300,000, but only captured 1% of the territory.
A year later, Türkiye and Russia (the two most powerful supporters of each side) agreed to a ceasefire. It then became a kind of frozen war. Still with confrontations, but with hardly any changes in the front lines. And with the growing feeling that the only thing missing was for Damascus and Ankara to share the cards in the north (where Turkey has been taking up tongues of land since 2016) and decide the status of the Kurds. Idlib, the last rebel stronghold and where three million people were concentrated (almost two million of them displaced), did not seem at all an existential threat to Assad.
Ankara was then negotiating with Damascus and the return of refugees to Syria was not only addressed in Turkey and Lebanon, the border countries where a xenophobic anti-Syrian discourse has been normalized. Several EU countries, led by Rome, proposed defining “safe zones” in the part controlled by the regime to which they could return. Italy became, in fact, this summer, the most important EU country to reopen the embassy, 12 years after closing it.
Their plans have been blown up in just 11 days because – as in the trompe l’oeil of churches – the last five years of war simulated architecture where there was only paint. Some experts had been defining Syria as a narco-state, due to the funds provided by the Captagona very cheap synthetic drug (to produce and buy) that passed through Jordan (including in drones that hide it inside) until it reached its main market, the Gulf. He had been enriching a few and – along with the non-payment of debts to his bosses – preventing the complete collapse of an economy that had been drowned for years by Western sanctions and by the collapse of the currency and the banking corralito in neighboring Lebanon, where Syrian businessmen used to have their funds.
In the four years of ceasefire, the humanitarian crisis worsened (with 90% of Syrians in poverty, according to the UN). The Executive cut subsidies for food and fuel. And two dynamics occurred in parallel.
In Idlib, and while world attention shifted to other crises, the fundamentalist group Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) combined government tasks with the establishment of a military academy. Rapid deployment units, drone production, night vision training… Its leader, Abu Mohamed al Julani, already assured in May 2023, five months before the Hamas attack on Israel that ended up turning the Middle East upside down, that the “ military preparation had reached its zenith” (“I don’t say this to boost morale, but as a fact,” he added) and he told those present: “There is very little left until we reach Aleppo. I see you sitting there as I see you here today.”
Meanwhile, the three allies that plugged the cracks in Assad’s building have been forced since 2022 to concentrate on conflicts that are more important to them (Russia, in Ukraine; or Hezbollah, with Israel) or are going through, like Iran, a moment of weakness strategic and economic. The Syrian rebels had been preparing their surprise offensive for some time, but they launched it just on the day that a weakened and beheaded Hezbollah was forced to accept a ceasefire on terms beneficial to Israel after almost three months of bombings on Lebanon.
In just 48 hours, the rebels (especially HTS and the Syrian National Army, supported by Turkey) took Aleppo, the country’s second city, which the regime had taken years to reconquer, with a long and cruel siege in between. The Russian bombings in support did not stop the advance. The joke circulated on the country’s social networks that it was not kyiv in the end – as was speculated at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine – that fell in three days, but Aleppo, to the opposing side.
On Thursday, it was the turn of Hama, the fourth city and a symbol: Hafez al-Assad, Bachar’s father, repressed a Sunni revolt led by the Muslim Brotherhood there with blood and fire in 1982. On Saturday, the rebels took Homs, thus cutting communication between Damascus and the Alawite coastal area, where the Assads come from and where Russia has a sea and air base. Early this Sunday morning, they took the capital, where the General Staff has decreed the end of the regime. Assad escaped by plane and his whereabouts are unknown.
All this without hardly any confrontations, confirming “the weakness of a regime” that basically depended on its allies and that the majority of soldiers were not “fighting to defend,” said Joseph Daher by phone, a Swiss-Syrian analyst and professor at the University Institute. European of Florence and author of the essay Syria After the Uprisings, The Political Economy of State Resilience (Syria after the uprisings: the political economy of state resilience). “They have not wanted to lose their lives to a regime that treats them badly, with very low salaries and for which they feel no sympathy. The vast majority have been forcibly recruited.”
In fact, in recent years, when one asked adult Syrian men in Lebanon and Jordan if they were considering returning to their country – once the fighting had subsided and they were viewed with increasing hostility in their host countries ― the answer used to be: “I don’t want to be enlisted for 10 years as soon as I cross the border.”
The salary of the military
The regime’s Armed Forces were demoralized, exhausted after 13 years of civil war and with paltry salaries that were getting less and less. For years, the existence of a black market in which soldiers passed weapons and ammunition to HTS members to feed their families was an open secret. Last Wednesday, already in deep water, Assad decreed a 50% increase in the salary of career military personnel. Too little and too late.
Two images from recent days, which were intended to reassure supporters of the regime, were very revealing of his condition. One was a video of regime troops moving to reinforce the defense of Hama. Many walk, instead of in military vehicles. Another, the appearance of the Syrian Defense Minister, Ali Mahmud Abbas, on state television on Thursday night. Not only for defending – mechanically reading a speech that this Sunday sounds ridiculous – that the forces were “in a good position on the ground” and were simply withdrawing for tactical reasons. Also because of the decadent decor, with four landlines from many years ago.
Syria is today “free of Assad”, as the rebels have claimed when taking the capital. The allies who saved him starting in 2012 have not been able or willing to do so now. Hezbollah already withdrew forces from Syria in October (including senior commanders in charge of the defense of Aleppo, according to the Reuters agency) to confront the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon. Its new leader after the assassination of Hasan Nasrallah by Israel in September, Naim Qasem, assured on Thursday in a speech that they would continue “on the side of Syria to frustrate the objectives of the aggression”, but without giving details and adding: “The most that we can.” Nothing to do with the thousands of combatants that were deployed at the time in defense of the regime when they were just as badly off. Two days later, his elite forces were withdrawing from Homs. Iran was already withdrawing its military personnel and Russia was evacuating its naval base in Tartus, instead of reinforcing it, in a sign that it considered the battle lost. Stopping the rebel advance would have required many foreign boots on the ground that these days have left the country, instead of entering.
