After years of suffering from a series of “Fridays of Anger”, the Syrians, relieved, celebrated in unison the “Friday of Victory”: they were finally done with the al-Assad era. The multiple offensives by the rebels and HTS got the better of the butcher of Damascus, who had in fact organized his escape just after the fall of Aleppo. Fourteen senior Syrian officials say.
A week after the fall of their dictator, the Syrians are breathing down their necks. After 13 years of fighting against the regime, they succeeded in driving out the Assad clan, in power for 54 years in the country. And this end of reign happened discreetly for Bashar al-Assad. Since he did not fail to lie to all his teams to start a new life in Russia as a political refugee, with his family, as reported by AFP correspondents in Damascus.
He understood that his end was inevitable from the fall of Aleppo, the economic capital and second city of Syria, on Saturday November 30, 2024. While he is in Russia with his three children to accompany his wife being treated for cancer in Moscow , he hurried back alone to, it seemed, regain control of the situation. Except that. Does he understand there that it is too late and that there is no way out for him, or does he simply come to gather things and clean up among the traces he will leave? Bashar al-Assad understands in any case that he must flee quickly so as not to suffer the same fate as his fallen counterparts.
The captain left the ship
“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 feared fourth brigade of the army and who piloted the captaon traffic, “learns about it by chance while he is with his soldiers defending Damascus. He decides to take a helicopter to flee to Baghdad before reaching Moscow,” he adds. “Since the fall of Aleppo, we have not met him, which was very strange,” says a senior official, who also testified anonymously. In the middle of the week, he brought together the heads of the intelligence services to reassure them. “The fall of Aleppo shocked us,” confides the president’s former aide.
During the last hours before the fall of Damascus, at the presidential palace, incomprehension and confusion invaded those most loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “We were at the palace, we had no explanation and it caused a lot of confusion at management level and even on the ground,” explains a close collaborator. Because all his directives indicate that he is present, but all his actions testify to his absence. “This Saturday (December 7), Assad did not meet with us. We knew he was there, but we didn’t have a meeting with him,” he says. He did not appear at the defense of his son Hafez's doctoral thesis two days later, although the whole family attended, according to the same official.
“The soldiers were ordered not to fight. Who gave the order? We don’t know”
After Aleppo, other strategic Syrian cities found themselves in the spotlight: Hama and Homs. “Thursday, I spoke at 11:30 a.m. with soldiers from Hama who assured me that the town was locked and that even a mouse would not be able to get through,” said an anonymous colonel. “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.
Bashar al-Assad even called his press advisor Bouthaina Chaabane on Saturday December 7 at 6 p.m. local time to ask her to prepare a speech for him. “We started installing the equipment. Everything was ready,” said the official. This close collaborator of Bashar al-Assad says that Bouthaina Chaabane tried to call the president back an hour later, “but he no longer answers the phone.” “Later, we were surprised to learn that the speech was postponed, perhaps until Sunday morning.” What they don't know is that the president is making this request as he is about to take a plane from Damascus airport to the Russian base at Hmeimim in western Syria. All the senior officials were also unaware that at that time, the Syrian army had, for its part, begun to burn its archives, according to him.
Assad's former prime minister, Mohammed Jalali, told Saudi television channel Al Arabiya that he spoke to him on the phone at 10:30 p.m. Saturday evening: “During our last call, I told him how difficult the situation was and that 'there was a massive movement (of people) from Homs to Latakia… that there was panic and horror in the streets.' “He told me: 'Tomorrow, we'll see,'” Jalali added. “'Tomorrow, tomorrow' was the last thing he said to me.” So he tried to contact him again on Sunday at dawn, without success.
The ruse of the “planned but postponed” speech
Who was in the know? Who noticed the dictator's absence? In the evening, presidential media director Kamel Sakr assured journalists that a speech by Bashar al-Assad was planned, before giving no further news. Just like Interior Minister Mohammed al-Rahmoun. “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 it 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 left the palace: “When we arrived at Umayyad Square, there were lots of soldiers fleeing, looking for a means of transport.” “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.” “Assad did not even make a last stand. He didn't even mobilize his own troops,” said Nadim Houri, executive director of the regional think tank Arab Reform Initiative, “he left his supporters to face their own destiny.”
Worse, the doctor lied to his last devoted supporters, making them believe, during a meeting of around thirty army and security chiefs at the Ministry of Defense, that Russian military support was on the way. , as in 2015.
