A few hours before the fall of Damascus, on December 8, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled without warning members of his family or his closest collaborators, several senior Syrian officials revealed to AFP.
• Also read: Syria: new Israeli strikes on military sites, according to an NGO
• Also read: In the ruins of the Assad regime, millions of captagon pills discovered
• Also read: Syria: former head of Damascus prison indicted for torture in the United States
He even called his press advisor on Saturday evening to ask her to prepare a speech for him, before taking a plane from Damascus airport to the Russian base at Hmeimim (west).
“He left without warning […] his close collaborators. From the Russian base, a plane took him to Moscow,” says an advisor who requested anonymity for security reasons.
“His brother Maher,” who commanded the army’s feared fourth brigade, “learned about it by chance while he was with his soldiers defending Damascus. He decides to take a helicopter to flee, it seems, towards Baghdad,” he adds.
Senior officials and other sources gave AFP the account of the final hours of the president who ruled Syria with an iron fist for 24 years.
Ship without captain
When Islamist-dominated rebels launched their offensive in northern Syria on Wednesday, November 27, Bashar al-Assad was in Moscow, where his wife Asma was being treated for cancer.
He did not appear at the defense of his son Hafez’s doctoral thesis two days later, although the whole family attended, according to a presidential official who requested anonymity.
On Saturday November 30, when he returned from Moscow, Aleppo, the large northern city, had already fallen.
A few days later, the rebellion seized the cities of Hama and Homs in the center, before taking Damascus a week later.
“This Saturday [7 décembre]Assad did not meet us. We knew he was there, but we did not have a meeting with him,” said a senior official at the presidential palace who requested anonymity for security reasons.
“We were at the palace, we had no explanation and it caused a lot of confusion at the management level and even on the ground,” he explains.
“Since the fall of Aleppo, we haven’t met him, which was very strange,” he said. In the middle of the week, he brought together the heads of the intelligence services to reassure them.
But in fact, there was no longer a captain on board. “The fall of Aleppo shocked us,” relates this senior official.
Then it’s the turn of Hama, a key town in the center. “Thursday, I spoke at 11:30 a.m. with soldiers from Hama who assured me that the city was locked and that even a mouse would not be able to get through,” a colonel told AFP on condition of anonymity.
“Two hours later, they received orders not to fight and to redeploy to Homs, further south. The soldiers […] are distraught and change their clothes, throw away their weapons and try to return home. Who gave the order? We don’t know,” he adds.
In Homs, the governor assures a journalist that he asked the army to resist, but it was in vain: no one will defend the city.
A speech constantly postponed
Saturday morning, the idea of a speech by Assad was raised. “We started installing the equipment. Everything was ready,” said the official.
“Later, we were surprised to learn that the speech was postponed, perhaps until Sunday morning.”
All senior officials were unaware that at that time, the Syrian army had started burning its archives, according to him.
Saturday at 9 p.m. (6 p.m. GMT), “the president calls his political advisor Bouthaina Chaabane to ask her to prepare a speech for him and present it to the political committee which is to meet on Sunday morning,” another senior official told AFP.
“At 10 p.m., she calls him back, but he no longer answers the phone,” adds this close collaborator of Assad.
In the evening, presidential media director Kamel Sakr told journalists: “The president will make a statement very soon,” then stopped answering the phone, as did Interior Minister Mohammed al-Rahmoun.
The senior official claims to have stayed in the office until 2:30 a.m. “We were ready to receive a statement or message from Assad at any time. We would never have imagined such a scenario. We didn’t even know if the president was still in the palace,” he says.
Around midnight, he is informed that the president will need a cameraman for an event scheduled for the morning.
“It reassured us that he was still there […]“, he said.
But around 2 a.m., an intelligence officer called him to tell him that everyone had left the premises.
“I was shocked. There were only two of us left in the office. The palace was almost empty, and we were in great confusion,” he said.
At 2:30 a.m., he leaves the palace. “When we arrived at Umayyad Square, there were lots of soldiers on the run, looking for transportation.”
“There were thousands of them, coming from the security complex, the Ministry of Defense and other security branches. We learned that their superiors had ordered them to flee,” he says.
“The scene was frightening: tens of thousands of cars were leaving Damascus, while even more people were walking on the road. At that moment, I understood that everything was lost and that Damascus had fallen.”
