Bashar al-Assad told almost no one about his plans to flee Syria after the fall of his regime. Instead, associates, officials and even relatives were deceived or kept in the dark, more than a dozen people with knowledge of the events told Reuters.
Hours before fleeing to Moscow, Assad assured a meeting of about 30 army and security chiefs at the Defense Ministry on Saturday that Russian military support was on the way and urged ground forces to stay, according to a commander who was there. and had requested anonymity. To speak about the briefing.
The civilian staff was also none the wiser.
Assad told the manager of his presidential office on Saturday that he was going home when he finished work but instead headed to the airport, according to a close aide.
He also called his media adviser Buthaina Shaaban and asked her to come to his house to write the speech, the aide said. When she reached there she found that there was no one there.
“Assad hasn’t even made a final stand. He hasn’t even mobilized his troops,” said Nadim Houri, executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative regional think-tank. “He let his supporters face their fate.”
Reuters was unable to contact Assad in Moscow, where he has been granted political asylum. Interviews with 14 people familiar with his final days and hours in power paint a picture of a leader who sought to extend his 24-year rule before resorting to deception and manipulation to plot his exit from Syria on Sunday morning. Keeps looking for outside help.
Most of the sources, including close aides to the former president, regional diplomatic and security sources, and senior Iranian officials, asked to remain anonymous in order to freely discuss sensitive matters.
According to three aides, Assad did not even inform his younger brother, Maher, commander of the army’s elite 4th Armored Division, about his exit plan. Maher flew a helicopter to Iraq and then to Russia, one of the people said.
Assad’s cousins, Ehab and Iyad Makhlouf, were similarly left behind as Damascus fell to rebels, according to a Syrian ally and Lebanese security official. He said the couple tried to flee to Lebanon by car, but rebels ambushed them along the way, shooting Ehab dead and Iyad wounded. There has been no official confirmation of the death and Reuters is unable to independently confirm the incident.
Assad fled Damascus by plane on Sunday, December 8, and escaped the clutches of rebels attacking the capital by flying under the radar by turning off the plane’s transponder, two regional diplomats said. The dramatic exit ended his 24-year rule and his family’s half-century of unbroken power, and brought a 13-year civil war to an abrupt end.
They flew to Russia’s Hmeimim airbase in the Syrian coastal city of Latakia and from there to Moscow.
Assad’s immediate family, including wife Asma and their three children, were already waiting for him in the Russian capital, according to three former close aides and a senior regional official.
Videos from Assad’s home, taken by rebels and civilians who gathered at the presidential compound after his flight and posted on social media, show that he quickly escaped, including what remained on the stove. Cooked food and many personal items, such as family photo albums, were visible. ,
Russia and Iran: no military defense
There will be no military defense from Russia, whose intervention in 2015 helped turn the tide of the civil war in favor of Assad or his other staunch ally, Iran.
According to people interviewed by Reuters, this was clear to the Syrian leader in the days leading up to his exit, when he sought help from various quarters in a desperate race to hold on to power and ensure his security.
Assad visited Moscow on November 28, a day after Syrian rebel forces attacked the northern province of Aleppo and struck down power across the country, but his appeals for military intervention fell on deaf ears in the Kremlin, three regional diplomats said. , who was unwilling to intervene. ,
Hadi al-Bahra, head of Syria’s main opposition abroad, cited a source close to Assad and a regional official as saying that Assad did not tell his domestic allies the reality of the situation.
“He told his commanders and aides after his visit to Moscow that military support is coming,” Bahra said. “He was lying to them. The message he got from Moscow was negative.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Wednesday that Russia had made great efforts in the past to help stabilize Syria but that its priority now was the conflict in Ukraine.
Four days after that visit, on 2 December, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi met with Assad in Damascus. By then, rebels from the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamist group had taken control of Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, and were moving south as government forces collapsed.
A senior Iranian diplomat told Reuters that Assad appeared distressed during the meeting and acknowledged that his forces were too weak to put up effective resistance.
However, Assad never requested that Tehran deploy troops to Syria, according to two senior Iranian officials, who said he understood that Israel would use any such intervention to destroy Iranian forces in Syria or even Iran. Can do to target.
The Kremlin and the Russian Foreign Ministry declined to comment for this article, while the Iranian Foreign Ministry was not immediately available for comment.
Assad faces his downfall
After exhausting his options, Assad finally accepted the inevitability of his fall and resolved to leave the country, ending his family’s dynastic rule, which had lasted since 1971.
Three members of Assad’s inner circle said he initially wanted to seek refuge in the United Arab Emirates, as rebels had captured Aleppo and Homs and were moving towards Damascus.
He said he was rebuked by the Emiratis, who feared international backlash for harboring a man subject to US and European sanctions for allegedly using chemical weapons in a crackdown on rebels, allegations that Assad has rejected. It has been dismissed as fabricated.
The UAE government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Yet Moscow, while unwilling to intervene militarily, was not ready to abandon Assad, according to a Russian diplomatic source who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov led the diplomatic effort to ensure Assad’s security, attending the Doha Forum in Qatar on Saturday and Sunday, which called on Turkey and Qatar to address their ties with HTS, two regional officials said. To take advantage, so that Assad can be safely driven out of Russia. ,
A Western security source said Lavrov did “everything he could” to ensure Assad’s safe departure.
Qatar and Turkey arranged with HTS to facilitate Assad’s exit, three sources said, despite both countries’ official claims that they had no contact with HTS, which the US and UN classify as a terrorist organization. Named as.
Three sources said Moscow had also coordinated with neighboring states to ensure that a Russian plane leaving Syrian airspace with links to Assad would not be intercepted or targeted.
Qatar’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to questions about Assad’s exit, while Reuters was unable to reach HTS for comment. A Turkish government official said there was no Russian request to use Turkish airspace for Assad’s flight, although he did not say whether Ankara had worked with HTS to facilitate the escape.
Assad’s last prime minister, Mohammed Jalali, said he spoke to his then-president on the phone at 10.30pm on Saturday.
“In our last call, I told them how difficult the situation was and that there was a massive displacement (of people) from Homs to Latakia… that there was panic and terror in the streets,” he told Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV. ” This week.
“He replied: ‘Tomorrow, we will see’,” Jalali said. “‘Tomorrow, tomorrow’, was the last thing he said to me.”
Jalali said that as soon as Sunday morning he tried to call Assad again, but there was no answer.
