BEIRUT (AP) — The last time Syrian President Bashar Assad’s felt he was facing an existential threat was a decade ago, during the height of the civil war, when the opposition was advancing on the capital, Damascus and his soldiers retreated from parts of the largest city Alep. At the time, he was bailed out by Russia, his chief international supporter, and Iran. This long-time regional ally together with Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah militia helped Assad’s forces reclaim Aleppo to seize the initiative in the war decisively. They were closing in on the capital, Damascus.
Back then, he was rescued by his chief international backer, Russia, and longtime regional ally Iran, which along with Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah militia helped Assad’s forces retake Aleppo, tipping the war firmly in his favor.
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Now the Syrian leader is virtually alone and may be swept from his throne after ruling for 24 years. A spokesman for the Syrian opposition war monitor said that Assad’s fled the country on a flight from the capital Damascus early Sunday as opposition fighters claimed they had entered this city in a rapidly escalating threat to Assad’s. The insurgency’s shock attacks in the past few days took Aleppo and other large cities of the north-western and southern regions. when his forces lost control over parts of the largest city, Aleppo, his opponents closed in on the capital, Damascus.
Back then, he was rescued by his chief international backer, Russia, and longtime regional ally Iran, which along with Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah militia helped Assad’s forces retake Aleppo, tipping the war firmly in his favor.
Now, the Syrian leader appears to be largely on his own and may face the end of his 24-year rule.
A Syrian opposition war monitor said Assad’s left the country on a flight from Damascus early Sunday as opposition fighters said they entered the capital in a swiftly developing crisis for Assad’s. The insurgency’s shock offensive in recent days quickly captured Aleppo and other key cities across the country’s northwest and in the south.
Russia is busy in Ukraine while Hezbollah, which has supplied thousands of its fighters to bolster Assad’s troops, has been weakened by a year-long confrontation with Israel. But in Iran, its proxies across the region have been weakened by Israeli air raids.
Also, Syrian troops have been starving and weakened by 13 years of war and economic crises, and they have little desire to fight.
As the rebels came nearer to the capital on Saturday a UN envoy demanded an “orderly political transition” and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, could not predict what would happen next.
Flanked by Assad’s troops and with support from Russia and Iran, Syrian Prime Minister Mohammed Ghazi Jalali said on Sunday that his government was willing to ‘‘shake the hand’’ of the opposition and transfer power to a transitional government.
“I am now in my house and have not come out and this is due to belonging to this country,” Jalili said in a video clip. Syrians were urged not to destroy any property – public or private.
Not out of the woods in Assad’s
Until recently, it looked as if Syria’s president had almost got off the hook. He never triumphed really in the long drawn out civil war and a huge swath of the nation was still beyond his purview.
But after 13 years of conflict, it seemed the worst was over and the world was willing to turn a new page. What used to be a cold shoulder from his fellow Arab leaders, Assad’s found them opening doors and extending invitations, lifting the ban on Syria’s membership of the Arab League among others. This year in February Italy also signed the deal to ease relations and open its embassy in Damascus after a decade.
By 2014, some of the largest humanitarian crises in the world ended, and aid organizations and donors in Syria started to focus on spending more on reconstruction than emergency relief, which significantly helped Syrians rebuild basic infrastructure.
Indeed, this would make sense had not the new round of hostilities launched by insurgents on November, 27 caught all major parties aback, both by the scale and tempo of their actions.
It also made neighbors alarmed, as they fear that instabilities such as violence and refugees spreading over their borders and the rising influence of Islamist organizations are a concern for most of the Arab neighboring countries of Syria.
Geopolitical shifts in Assad’s
Sourcing the experts, it was said that a sequence of geopolitical events that started with the Russian attack on Ukraine in February 2022, the fresh war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas that started on October 7, 2023, played a vital role for the opposition to take this best opportunity to attack Assad.
When the rebels moved toward the south this week, there was broad evidence that the government forces were fleeing, did not fight back, and in several cases reportedly surrendered. Otherwise, occasional airstrikes were conducted by the Russian forces. The head of the Hezbollah in Lebanon stated that his organization would remain loyal to Syria, but did not refer to the dispatch of the Shiite fighters again.
“The rebel assault shows the frailty of the regime’s control in Syria,” said Mona Yacoubian analyzing for the United States Institute for Peace.
“The fact that the conflict erupted so rapidly and the way the opposition was able to take over the large city of Aleppo … reveal the simmering processes which lie beneath the smooth surface of the Syrian state and that can turn a quiet conflict into a large scale war in a blink of an eye.”
One expert on Syria for the Century International, a New York-based think tank, and researcher for the Swedish Defense Research Agency noted that those transpiring in Syria are geopolitically disastrous to Russia and Iran.
“They too were surely surprised by what happened, and they have all sorts of resource constraints; Russia’s war in Ukraine and Hezbollah’s losses in Lebanon and Syria.”
Although the conflict lines in the country have remained somewhat stagnated since the year 2020, the economic crises in Syria have tended to escalate in recent past years.
The US sanctions, the banking crisis in neighboring Lebanon, and an earthquake last year ensured that today nearly every Syrian is in dire financial straits.
That has led to a degradation of state institutions and salaries.
This is why if you can’t pay your soldiers a living wage, then maybe you can’t expect them to stay and fight when thousands of Islamists storm their cities, Lund said. “It is just an exhausted, broken and dysfunctional regime” to start with.
As part of their bid to regain control of Aleppo which the government forces displaced in 2016 after a fierce war, the insurgents tried to woo government soldiers and security agencies to switch sides offering them what they refer to as ‘protection cards,’ basically something that would afford them protection from further persecution.
Hassan Abdul-Ghani, the spokesman for the insurgents, said that over two days more than 1,600 soldiers have applied for the cards in Aleppo city.
Hundreds of defectors presented themselves at various city police stations on Thursday to record their details with the insurgents.
Hossam al-Bakr, 33, from Hama working in Damascus before deserting the army four years ago and joining the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo, complained that he came to the center to “settle his position” on the map and get a new ID card.
The handout laminated card given to every defector was called the ‘defection card. From this paper, it identified the name, ID Number, and place of service of each defector. It is issued by “The General Command: Military Operations Room.”
Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and a veteran of Syria, noted that although the rest of the world has long considered the conflict frozen or concluded, the armed opposition has never surrendered and has been preparing for such a possibility for years.
A loose collection of fighting units, fractious, and on occasion at war with each other, spent years training and plotting – for the thrill of the fight to retake ground from Assad.
“The regime has been more exposed over the last year or two than at any time in the course of the war,” Lister said. “And it has gotten used to the idea that if it waits long enough it will be proved right.”