Assad’s last hours in Syria: deceit, hopelessness, and escape

When Bashar al-Assad’s rule came to an end, he told virtually no one about his intentions to leave Syria. According to over a dozen persons with knowledge of the events, aides, authorities, and even family members were either misled or kept in the dark.

Assad told a group of roughly 30 army and security chiefs at the defense ministry on Saturday that Russian military assistance was on its way and asked ground forces to wait, hours before he fled for Moscow, according to a commander who spoke about the briefing and asked to remain anonymous.

And the civilian employees didn’t know either.

When Assad ended work on Saturday, he informed his presidential office manager he was heading home, but instead he went to the airport, according to an adviser close to him.

Additionally, he called Buthaina Shaaban, his media adviser, and requested that she visit his house in order to write a speech for him, according to the aide. There was nobody there when she got there.

Not even a final stand was made by Assad. The executive director of the regional think tank Arab Reform Initiative, Nadim Houri, stated, “He didn’t even organize his own troops.” “He let his supporters face their own fate.”

Assad has been granted political shelter in Moscow, but Reuters was unable to get in touch with him there. According to interviews with 14 individuals who were aware of his last days and hours in office, the leader looked for outside assistance to prolong his 24-year rule before using cunning and deceit to plan his departure from Syria early on Sunday morning.

In order to freely discuss delicate topics, the majority of the sources—which include senior Iranian officials, regional diplomats, security sources, and aides in the previous president’s inner circle—asked that their names be kept anonymous.

Three advisers said Assad never even told his younger brother, Maher, head of the Army’s elite 4th Armored Division, of his departure plan. One of the people claimed that Maher took a chopper to Russia and subsequently to Iraq.

As Damascus fell to the rebels, Assad’s maternal cousins, Ehab and Eyad Makhlouf, were also left behind, a Syrian aide and Lebanese security official said. They said that Ehab was shot dead and Eyad was injured when the two attempted to escape to Lebanon by automobile but were ambushed by rebels en route. The fatality was not formally confirmed, and Reuters was unable to independently corroborate the incident.

According to two regional diplomats, Assad himself flew out of Damascus as rebels overran the capital on Sunday, December 8, flying under the radar with the transponder turned off. With the spectacular departure, the 13-year civil war came to an abrupt end and his 24 years of leadership and his family’s 50 years of unchallenged authority came to an end.

To get to Moscow, he took a plane to Russia’s Hmeimim airfield in the Syrian coastal city of Latakia.

According to a senior regional official and three former close aides, Assad’s personal family, including his wife Asma and their three children, were already in the Russian capital, waiting for him.

Rebels and locals who flocked to the presidential complex after Assad’s escape captured footage of his house, which was shared on social media and suggests he fled quickly. The footage shows prepared food left on the stove and a number of personal items left behind, including family photo albums.

Iran and Russia: No military rescue

Neither Russia, whose intervention in 2015 had helped Assad win the civil war, nor Iran, his other steadfast friend, would provide a military rescue.

The Syrian leader had been made aware of this in the days before his departure, when he looked for assistance from a variety of sources in a last-ditch effort to maintain his position of authority and ensure his safety, according to the individuals Reuters spoke with.

When Assad traveled to Moscow on November 28, a day after Syrian rebel forces stormed the northern province of Aleppo and swept the nation, his calls for military action were ignored by the Kremlin, which refused to step in, according to three regional officials.

According to Hadi al-Bahra, the leader of Syria’s major opposition overseas, Assad failed to communicate the situation’s reality to his domestic advisers, according to a regional official and a source close to Assad.

“He told his commanders and associates after his Moscow trip that military support was coming,” Bahra stated. “He was telling them lies. He got an unfavorable message from Moscow.

On Wednesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that although Russia had previously worked hard to assist stabilize Syria, the situation in Ukraine was now its top concern.

Abbas Araqchi, the Iranian Foreign Minister, met with Assad in Damascus on December 2, four days after that trip. By then, Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, had fallen to the Islamist insurgents of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), who were advancing south as government forces broke down.

A senior Iranian diplomat told Reuters that Assad was clearly upset during the discussion and acknowledged that his army was too weak to put up a strong fight.

But according to two senior Iranian officials, Assad never asked Tehran to send troops to Syria, even though he knew that Israel could use any such deployment as an excuse to attack Iranian forces in Syria or possibly Iran.

For this piece, the Russian and Kremlin foreign ministries declined to comment, while the Iranian foreign ministry did not immediately respond.

Assad faces its own decline.

The dynastic rule of Assad’s family, which began in 1971, came to an end when he decided to depart the nation after exhausted all other choices and accepting that his downfall was inevitable.

When rebels took control of Aleppo and Homs and were moving toward Damascus, three people close to Assad said he first intended to seek safety in the United Arab Emirates.

They said the Emiratis rejected him because they were afraid of public criticism for supporting a person who was under U.S. and European sanctions for allegedly deploying chemical weapons in an insurgency crackdown—charges that Assad has denied are false.

A request for response from the UAE government was not immediately answered.

A Russian diplomatic source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that although Moscow was not eager to intervene militarily, it was also not ready to give up on Assad.

At the Doha forum in Qatar on Saturday and Sunday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov led the diplomatic push to ensure Assad’s safety, urging Turkey and Qatar to use their ties to HTS to ensure Assad’s safe return to Russia, according to two regional sources.

Lavrov did “whatever he could” to keep Assad safe, according to one Western security source.

According to three of the sources, Qatar and Turkey arranged with HTS to help Assad leave, even though both nations have officially claimed to have no relationship with the group, which the U.S. and the U.N. have classified as a terrorist organization.

According to three of the sources, Moscow also worked with its neighbors to prevent someone from intercepting or attacking a Russian aircraft that was departing Syrian airspace with Assad on board.

Questions concerning Assad’s departure were not immediately answered by Qatar’s foreign ministry, and Reuters was unable to get in touch with HTS for comment. An spokesperson from the Turkish government denied that Russia had asked to utilize Turkish airspace for Assad’s aircraft, but he did not answer whether Ankara collaborated with HTS to make the escape possible.

Mohammed Jalali, Assad’s former prime minister, claimed to have called his former president at 10.30 p.m. on Saturday.

“In our last call, I told him how difficult the situation was and that there was huge displacement (of people) from Homs toward Latakia … that there was panic and horror in the streets,” he said on Al Arabiya TV, which is owned by

He said, “We’ll see tomorrow,” Jalali continued. “‘Tomorrow, tomorrow’, was the last thing he told me.”

Jalali claimed that as Sunday morning broke, he attempted to contact Assad once more but received no answer.