The government of President Bashar Assad of Syria, which had kept rebel forces at bay for more than a decade with Iranian and Russian military support, collapsed with astonishing speed Sunday morning after an advance by opposition forces on the capital, Damascus.
An authoritarian leader who had gassed his own people during a 13-year civil war, Assad fled the country as rebel forces closed in on Damascus.
On Sunday evening, Russian state media outlets and two Iranian officials said he had arrived in Russia, where state media outlets reported that Assad and his family had been granted political asylum. The New York Times could not immediately independently confirm that Assad was in Russia, which along with Iran had helped keep him in power.
The rebel offensive had lasted less than two weeks.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said Assad had “decided to leave the presidential post and depart the country” after talks with other “parties to the conflict.” He had given instructions to transfer power peacefully, the ministry said.
There was no comment from Assad. His prime minister, Mohammed Ghazi Jalali, stayed behind and said he was ready to cooperate with the rebels. The opposition forces swept into Damascus with little apparent resistance from the Syrian military, seizing control of government buildings and the state broadcaster.
For years, the Syrian civil war — which had erupted in tandem with the anti-government Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 and continued with horrific violence until 2017 — remained unresolved, but relatively stagnant.
Then, in October 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, and the subsequent war upended the regional chess board of the Middle East. Syrian rebels struck at a moment of weakness for Assad’s main allies: Iran, Russia and Hezbollah, the militant group based in Lebanon and backed by Iran.
Iran’s power has been curtailed by its conflict with Israel. Hezbollah, Iran’s main proxy force in the region, whose fighters had also played a key role in propping up Assad, has been battered by the war with Israel as well, with its top leaders killed. In Europe, the invasion of Ukraine has sapped Russia’s military of men, munitions and other resources.
Waiting in the wings was Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist group once linked to al-Qaida. It later joined a coalition with more moderate partners but is still classified as a terrorist organization by the United States and others. The group maintained its authoritarian rule over Idlib province in the northwest for half a decade, taxing residents to run its operations but following Islamic precepts to respect minority groups.
About a year ago, it began preparing for a sweeping offensive south toward Damascus. The coalition, which analysts said received covert support from Turkey, established a military training academy in the north, churning out disciplined, highly motivated officers and soldiers, the analysts said.
“The revolution has transitioned from chaos and randomness to a state of order,” Abu Mohammed al-Golani, commander of the rebel units, said last week in a television interview.
Golani’s coalition launched its lightning offensive on Nov. 27, first taking Syria’s largest city, Aleppo. The rebels went on to seize the city of Hama, which had never fallen during the civil war, and then Homs, a strategic city about 100 miles from the capital.
Another group of insurgents from south of Damascus were actually the first to enter the capital. At times the rebels seemed as surprised by their success as the rest of the world.
On the other side, Syrian government forces had done little to rejuvenate themselves. “They had low morale, no training, no weapons, no chain of command and a lot of corruption,” said Ibrahim Hamidi, the Syrian editor-in-chief of Al Majalla, an online current events magazine based in London.
Syrian government forces, without troops from Hezbollah and Iran to back them and with relatively little support from Russian airstrikes, collapsed in disarray. Even the 4th Armored Division and the Republican Guards, the elite forces stationed around Damascus to in theory make it coup-proof, seemed to evaporate.
“We have seen the hollowing out of the Syrian state,” said Mona Yacoubian, head of the Middle East and North Africa Center at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia had built his strategy of making Moscow a player again in the Middle East around his support for Assad, even as the Kremlin grew weary of his refusal to engage with Turkey, not to mention the opposition, to settle the conflict. “It is a humiliation for Putin,” Hamidi said.
Amid the many conflicts of the Middle East, the United States had long had an ambivalent relationship toward the situation in Syria, wary of pushing for a regime change that would bring what Obama administration officials used to call the “catastrophic success” of a jihadi government in Damascus.
There are about 900 U.S. soldiers in Syria, deployed in the northeast to back up a Kurdish militia there that had fought against the Islamic State militant group. Donald Trump had moved to withdraw them during his previous presidency, describing the country as “death and sand.” Now president-elect, he has repeated that the U.S. should not get involved in Syria now.
It is not clear what kind of government will emerge in Syria, given the disparate coalition that brought down Assad, whose father first took over in a coup in 1970.
Whatever the outcome, said Robert Ford, the U.S. ambassador to Syria from 2011-14, it is imperative for Washington “to decide once and for all what is their primary objective in Syria.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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