How Assad fell

The astonishing and abrupt fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus is a moment of historic importance for the Middle East, in which the shifting of tectonic plates can be plainly felt. But which plates in particular? And what are the immediate implications?

Firstly, it is important just to contemplate the dimensions of what has just taken place. The Assad regime’s beginning is usually dated to 1970.  In that year Hafez Assad, father of the now deposed Bashar, launched a coup to topple his former ally, Salah Jadid, and proclaimed himself president. His family then ruled Syria, uninterruptedly, until this week. But it’s worth remembering that the Ba’ath party, through which both Assad and his predecessor emerged, had ruled Syria since 1963. So the fall of Bashar represents the end of sixty-one years of uninterrupted rule in Syria of this party.  

The Assads of course long since emptied the structures and institutions of this party of any real role or content. Theirs was a family regime. The more meaningful broader foundation on which they rested was the support and cooptation of the Alawi community, from which the family hailed. The fall of the Assads represents the end of Alawi ascendancy in Syria, and the return of the domination of Syria’s Sunni Arab majority, from which the uprising emerged.  

The end, when it came, was brief. A lightning dash by the Sunni Islamist Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) militia, down the spine of cities which fell like dominos in an astonishing ten days. First Aleppo, then Hama, Homs and finally Damascus. All with minimal resistance from the regime’s forces. 

But while few if any Syria watchers predicted the speed with which the regime would fall, the decrepit and rotten nature of the Syrian government’s institutions under Bashar al-Assad had been apparent for some time. 

Assad had survived the civil war launched against him in the period 2012-20 not because of the strength of his own forces, but because of the power and loyalty of his allies. Specifically, Russia and Iran stepped in to save him during those years. Within a year of the launch of the uprising, Bashar was on the ropes. The decision in 2013 of Iran to deploy its proxy militias from Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan plugged the gap in loyal manpower that would almost certainly have led to Assad’s downfall at that time. His army was large on paper. But it consisted mainly of conscripted Sunni Arab Syrians. Much of it therefore couldn’t be relied upon for use against an insurgency raised from among those communities.  

The Iran-supported militias, Hezbollah among them, were able to stem the rebel tide. Then in late 2015, Russian aircraft were deployed for the first time over the skies of Syria. They successfully stopped a rebel advance toward the western coast under way at that time, which would have threatened the Russian airbase at Khmemim, and the naval facilities at Tartus and Latakia.  

Thanks to these interventions, the regime was able to roll up rebel areas of control over the following three years. By 2019, only one zone of insurgent control remained, in the north west. This area proved impervious to the regime’s ambitions, because of the presence of Turkish forces in the area, and the guarantee they offered.  

As it now turns out, the Turkish president’s decision not to entirely abandon the remnants of the insurgency was a historic choice. It made possible the quiet incubation of HTS military strength in the subsequent years, and its eruption southwards this year.   

Reporting in Syria in those years, I observed the feebleness of Assad’s forces up close, and took careful note of it. On the ground in Damascus in 2017, I saw the helplessness of the local police force when faced with the antics of armed Russians on the streets of Syria’s supposed capital, and the crucial role played by Iran-created militias in carrying out daily security tasks there. Damascus didn’t look like the capital of a regime that had successfully defeated an insurgency. Rather, it looked like a city under foreign occupation, with the empty shell of a local regime maintained for convenience’s sake.  

In 2019, in the Tal Tamr area in Syria’s north east, my colleagues and I similarly observed close up and with astonishment the decrepit state of Assad’s line infantry battalions sent to help defend against an expected Turkish push southwards at that time. In the positions we visited, the troops lacked basic provisions and medical supplies, and begged for these from neighboring Kurdish units.  

So it was plain that Assad continued to “rule” because of Iran and Russia. Which raises of course, the question: why didn’t they help him this time? Why haven’t we just witnessed a repeat of 2013, and 2015, in which Iranian proxy manpower and Russian aircraft intervene to stop the insurgent march southward?

The crucial difference between those years and what has just transpired is that none of the forces which had saved Assad in the past were able to help this time.  

Russia is committed to the strategic quagmire of its war in Ukraine, which is consuming thousands of lives every month. There was nothing to spare for the long standing client on the Mediterranean.  

Iran, meanwhile, is reeling from a serious of blows inflicted by Israel in the course of the last two months. Most significantly, Israel’s crippling of Hezbollah left Tehran bereft of its most powerful proxy instrument. Jerusalem’s counter attack on Iran itself on October 26 left Tehran without air defense and unable to continue or escalate the direct confrontation with Israel. Recent events in Iraq have revealed that Iran’s client militias too were keen to avoid any possible clash with Israel, following an oblique Israeli threat of possible direct retribution for the militias’ not very effectual efforts to launch drones and missiles at the Jewish state.  

The upshot was that Iran’s proxy militia system, which mobilized and saved Assad in 2013, was unavailable a decade letter.  

Without any help from his friends, Assad’s hollow regime rapidly dissolved.  Its demise is testimony to the determination of the Sunni Islamist insurgents, HTS’s Abu Mohammed al-Jolani chief among them, and their backers in Ankara. But the absence of Assad’s allies, reflecting the current weakness and vulnerability of Iran, is the single most significant factor behind the dramatic events of recent days.