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ISTANBUL — Rebels were barreling toward the Syrian capital, but the president's men were in no mood for the battle.
For more than a week they had watched city after town fall to the rebellion. By Saturday, the insurgents were threatening Homs, a strategic fire wall of Bashar al-Assad's government. Iyad Ahmed, a 22-year-old soldier who said he was paid the equivalent of about $2 a month, was stationed on the city's outskirts.
"We didn't want to fight," he said.
He was spared the decision. At 10 p.m. Dec. 7, his commander ordered Ahmed and his colleagues to withdraw. "I dropped my weapon and fled," he said. He shed his uniform in the street.
Damascus, the capital, fell to the rebels that night.
The collapse of Assad's government came more quickly than the rebels had dreamed, the pillars of state power crumbling at the first real push in years from a determined and well-organized opposition force.
The circumstances that conspired to bring down Syria's old, ossified order were both serendipitous and part of a larger global realignment. Assad's main military allies - Russia and Iran - abandoned him, distracted by their own troubles and disillusioned by the president's inability to rally his own forces to the fight. His opponents, led by Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a powerful Islamist rebel faction, and other groups backed by Turkey, mounted an unusually unified and formidable attack.
And Assad's grip on power was more tenuous than anyone, even the president himself, seemed to realize.
This account of Syria's rebellion is based on more than a dozen interviews with rebel fighters and commanders, Western and Turkish officials, Syrian opposition figures and regional diplomats, as well as Assad family members and confidants. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters or out of concern for their safety.
Assad's sudden ouster sparked scenes of jubilation across Syria, anguished searches for the tens of thousands of people his government killed or disappeared, and trepidation about the country's new rulers as they stepped off battlefields and into hastily vacated palaces. A geopolitical balance in the Middle East was upended, leaving Iran and Russia coping with the loss of a strategic ally and other powers such as Turkey and Israel seizing on Syria's tumult in search of gains.
For Assad's victims, it came far too late, a quarter century after he inherited power from his father and nearly 14 years after a revolt against his rule. The 2011 uprising threatened to topple one of the region's most repressive governments, but peaceful protests were met with brutality, unleashing a bloody civil war. As the conflict dragged on and Syria was torn apart, Assad only appeared to grow more secure. But the ground was shifting beneath him.
"Everything played into this," said Omer Ozkizilcik, a Turkey-based Syria expert at the Atlantic Council, describing the events that prompted the rebels to act, including Russia's preoccupation with Ukraine, Israel's war in Lebanon and the interregnum in the United States, before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. "The opportunity that was given has been taken."
Until he fled, Assad was assuring relatives that the capital was safe. "Damascus is strong, Damascus is sealed," he told them, according to a family member. Even the rebels were shocked at their own success: The offensive had the modest aim of recapturing Aleppo, an HTS member said. When the city fell easily, they set their sights farther south, the unthinkable suddenly possible.
On a battlefield gone quiet between Aleppo and Hama last week, Abdel Kader Ramadan, a 20-year-old fighter, said government troops they encountered quickly scattered after the rebels attacked them with drones. Freshly dug earthen berms - a line of defense for the government forces - appeared barely used.
"In the end," he said, "our belief was strong, and theirs was weak."
• The plan
Five years earlier, it was the rebels who had been in disarray. A fierce government offensive in Syria's opposition-held Idlib province in 2020 killed hundreds of civilians, displaced half a million people and wrested away control of strategic areas, including a major highway. A ceasefire brokered in May 2020 by Russia and Turkey, a supporter of Syria's opposition as well as rebel factions, gave HTS time to regroup.
The leader of the organization was Ahmad al-Sharaa, a veteran jihadist who once fought U.S. troops in Iraq and was known until recently by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. He was the founder of Jabhat al-Nusra, an affiliate of al-Qaeda and a predecessor to HTS that had a reputation for fearsome fighting, against the Syrian government as well as other rebel groups, as well as for atrocities.
Since renouncing his affiliation with al-Qaeda nearly a decade ago, Sharaa and HTS focused on building up governance in Idlib: an attempt to rebrand, shed its global terrorist designations and consolidate local control. By assembling an administration, running courts and providing services, the group aimed to win public confidence and diversify revenue streams in its small but strategically located northern fief.
The money flowed from HTS's control of an important border crossing with Turkey, tax collection, donations from businessmen as well as a monopoly on the fuel-supply market, analysts said - providing the funds for the next fight, even as some of the measures, including levies on farmers, sparked protests.
For at least four years, HTS was also quietly planning a counterattack that would "change the balance of power on the ground," said Mousa Alasaad, a member of HTS.
HTS focused on its "military sector," said Aaron Y. Zelin, a researcher who has spent years studying the group. It created a military college in 2021 and worked to "integrate all the rebel groups affiliated with HTS - through mergers, forcible takeovers, anything in between," he said. Sharaa leaned on the "respect" he had gained over the years from leaders within HTS and other rebel factions, Zelin said.
Under one command, the groups acted with more discipline, Zelin said. Military units were specialized, focusing on artillery or drones, for example. Over the last few years, the rebels conducted raids against government forces, killing soldiers and seizing weapons. "Part of that was practice for the offensive," Zelin said.
The preparation was "at all levels," said Alasaad, mentioning weapons production and the unification of rebel factions.
Earlier this year, HTS presented the plan for the offensive to Turkey, Alasaad said. Ankara approved the plan in principle, he said, but did not give it the go-ahead.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, looking to balance his government's myriad interests in Syria - including sending home millions of Syrian refugees who were facing growing hostility in Turkey - in June raised the possibility of restoring diplomatic relations with Assad, severed since soon after 2011 Syrian uprising. "It was a not a small step," the Turkish official said. But nothing came of the outreach.
By October, the planned offensive had become an open secret. Many rebel fighters were first told about it that month, and were spoiling for it, said Mahmoud al-Ahmed, a 21-year-old field medic with HTS. "We wanted to liberate the land and reach Damascus," he said.
HTS wanted the operation to commence "on the first day of Israel's invasion of Lebanon," Alasaad said, when HTS assumed that Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group that had supported Assad, would "withdraw its fighters from the fronts in northern Syria."
But as Israel moved troops into southern Lebanon at the beginning of October, he said, Hezbollah fighters stayed put in Syria for at least a week. Preparation for the offensive continued, largely overshadowed by the war next door.
"The barrels are pointed at Aleppo," blared an Oct. 11 headline in a pro-government Turkish newspaper. Ozkizilcik, from the Atlantic Council, said the offensive was by then so "widely known in Syria" that Assad's government and its Russian allies "heavily increased their air campaign" in Idlib.
Alasaad said that Turkey "tried to prevent the battle and threatened HTS," using its considerable leverage, including the ability to close border crossings with northern Syria - a lifeline for civilians as well as a major source of revenue for HTS.
A Turkish official denied any threat over the border crossings and downplayed the idea that Turkey had encouraged the rebel offensive, saying that it tried "until the last minute to keep the de-escalation zone in Idlib."
But "it would be very naive to expect a country that is so involved not to follow what is happening in Syria," said Mehmet Sahin, a Turkish lawmaker from Erdogan's ruling party, citing the refugees, Ankara's cross-border military operations against Kurdish fighters and the presence of Turkish troops there.
A turning point came after a Nov. 11 meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan, between Iran, Turkey and Russia. In a warning aimed at the Syrian government and its Russian partner, Turkey made clear that the status quo in the country - with no movement toward a political solution after more than 13 years of civil war - was untenable, the Turkish official said.
Turkey "warned the regime and their supporters, if they continued to attack civilians and civilian infrastructure in Idlib, they should expect a strong backlash from the rebels," the Turkish official said. After Astana, Turkey gave the green light to the Syrian rebels to push forward, Alasaad said.
The rebels, meanwhile, had kept an eye on Lebanon. On Nov. 26, Hezbollah and Israel agreed to a ceasefire.
HTS decided to move at dawn the next day, Alasaad said, worried that "Hezbollah's fighters would return to Syria and join the Assad regime in its battles."
• Foreign support collapses
Assad had leaned on foreign allies since the early days of the civil war. Hezbollah sent fighters as early as 2012, and they were joined in the years that followed by Shiite militiamen - from Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere - as the conflict acquired the features of a global proxy war.
Aid flowed to rebel groups from the Persian Gulf and the United States. Foreign jihadists joined al-Nusra and other Sunni militant groups.
As the rebels began to seriously challenge Assad, Russia intervened, using overwhelming airpower to help the government claw back Aleppo and other territory it had lost.
When the new rebel charge began last month, Moscow signaled it was continuing its support for Syria. By the second day of the offensive, Russian warplanes were bombing rebel positions, claiming to have killed "at least 400 militants." After the insurgents breached Aleppo, the Kremlin condemned the offensive as an attack on Syrian sovereignty and expressed hope that "the Syrian authorities will bring order to the area and restore constitutional order."
But behind the scenes, Russia was in contact with Turkey and seeking information on HTS's plans as its fighters moved south, a Western security official said. The official added that the Turks, in turn, used the conversations to drive home a pair of key points: Supporting Assad was probably futile in the long term and bombing HTS was only turning Syria's future leaders against Moscow.
Russia's foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment. But Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan appeared to confirm the admonitions in an interview earlier this month. "We told the Russians not to bomb civilian residents, not to cause further massacres and displacement," Fidan told Turkish broadcaster NTV.
"We stated very clearly: the man they have been investing in is not a man to invest in," he said. "The conditions in the region are no longer what they used to be."
Two days before Assad fled, some of his Arab allies still appeared convinced that he could stay in power. They anxiously called Turkey, some floating concessions that the Syrian leader could make to the rebels to halt their advance, the Turkish official said. By the next day, he said, they realized that Assad "was a goner," postponing an Arab League meeting that had been scheduled to discuss the situation.
Still, a sense of denial persisted. Hours before Assad fled Syria, the Qatari prime minister left a gala dinner early to attend a meeting with the foreign ministers of Russia, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq. The conversation in that meeting, on the sidelines of a conference in Doha, was focused on "how we can avoid bloodshed," said a regional diplomat briefed on the discussions. "No one was discussing Assad's departure."
A joint statement released after the meeting stressed "the need to stop military operations in preparation for launching a comprehensive political process."
Iran, Assad's other key foreign backer, also tried to save him, officials have said. The commander in chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami, said Iranian intelligence was aware of a planned offensive months before it was launched, and that the Syrian government refused to act on the information.
"Our brothers were able to find the axis of their attack using intelligence techniques, and they conveyed them to the political and military levels in Syria," he said in remarks published last week in Iranian state-run media. But he said Assad and his backers lacked "the will" for "war and perseverance."
By the time Tehran tried to move additional resources into Syria, "all our ways of transport" were blocked, Salami added. Once Hama fell to rebel forces, Iran changed course, deciding it was no longer possible to prop up the president, according to regional diplomats.
Iran may have felt little urgency to save Assad. He had infuriated Tehran in recent months by attempting to roll back Iranian influence in his country: an effort to appease Persian Gulf countries that had promised, in turn, to try to lift U.S. sanctions on Syria, the Assad family member said. When Assad finally asked Tehran to step up military support, it was too late, the family member said.
Tehran delivered the order to begin evacuating its troops and diplomats from Syria on Dec. 6, fearful that Damascus could quickly collapse and leave Iranian personnel "trapped," one diplomat said.
Russia, Syria and Iran expected that Erdogan would order a pause in the offensive after the rebels seized Aleppo, in order for negotiations to take place, said the Assad family member and a Russian diplomatic official. But there was no pause. Erdogan "surprised them," the official said. "
"May this march in Syria continue," the Turkish leader said on Dec. 6.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an annual speech Thursday, said Syrian and allied Iranian forces fled Aleppo and elsewhere, with a few exceptions, "without a fight." Iran - which had once sought Russia's help in shuttling its fighters to Syria - now asked for help withdrawing them, he said: "We took 4,000 Iranian fighters to Tehran."
Iran, having lost its most pivotal Middle Eastern ally and its supply routes to Hezbollah in Lebanon, has tried to save face. "I proudly tell you all that the last ones who left the resistance line in Syria were the children of the IRGC," Salami said.
But, he added, "strategies must change according to the circumstances."
• The battle
As the rebels set off from different parts of Syria, the factions "agreed on an operational plan," said a former U.S. official. "All sent all their guys."
The coalition of groups, led by HTS and its 14 brigades, included virtually "every" rebel group, Ozkizilcik said, including the Turkish-backed fighters organized under the banner of the Syrian National Army.
Militants said they faced little resistance as they pushed from the north, with the fiercest battle on the first defensive line outside of Aleppo. "We lost our best fighters in the first stage," said HTS commander Abu Abdulrahman, using his nom de guerre.
But "after the first line, the regime forces started to retreat," he said, adding that he was surprised at the speed of the advance. "All the other areas fell quickly and easily," he said. "The regime forces just fled."
With the city of Aleppo and the surrounding province now under their control, Alasaad said the rebels began to engage in "high coordination with the members of the Assad army" to encourage them to defect. This included using locally made drones to drop leaflets over government units, he said, with phone numbers that soldiers could use to communicate their surrender to the rebels.
Russian airstrikes - at least those targeting the rebels - seemed to recede after Aleppo, said Abu Ziad, a fighter who was posted last week outside the Russian-operated Hmeimim air base in Latakia. "After we took over Aleppo, we continued smoothly," he said.
There was resistance from Assad's forces at the Zayn al-Abidin mountain outside of Hama, the site of an important Shiite Muslim shrine. When Washington Post reporters visited last week, the mountain was filled with destroyed army vehicles, abandoned military positions and other detritus of retreat. Rebel fighters told reporters who visited this week that 40 to 50 bodies had been recovered from the area. Other young men in military fatigues still lay where they had been killed.
The area is a "first line of defense" for mountains home to hundreds of thousands of Alawites, the minority sect Assad along belongs to, his family member said. Some officers there had refused directives to lay down their arms - leaving the army in confusion about orders to cede ground without a fight, the relative said.
But the mountain fell and the city of Hama soon followed. It was a strategic and symbolic breakthrough for the insurgents, in a city where Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, carried out a massacre in 1982 to put down an Islamist rebellion.
The rebels kept pushing south, toward Homs, Syria's third-largest city and a gateway to the capital and the coast.
As the rebels advanced - led by hard-line Islamists whom the Syrian government had long labeled "terrorists" - they tried to calm public fears about their intentions. In places such as Aleppo, local fighters were placed at the forefront of the attacking force.
"The revolutionaries are the sons of Syria that our people in Aleppo know," said Ahmed al-Dalati, the deputy head of Ahrar al-Sham, an Islamist faction that participated in the offensive. "The regime displaced them from their homes and they returned to them victorious."
The insurgents also reached out to tribal and religious leaders in different parts of the country, including Sheikh Issa Bahloul, an Alawite leader.
"Your position is protected and so is your group," Alasaad assured Bahloul in a call on the day Assad fled, according to a recording. "Send my greetings to all our brothers. We are with you. This poor sect, for 40 years, suffered more than others," Bahloul replied.
The rebels had known that the Syrian army was "exhausted," but did not anticipate the speed of its collapse, Dalati said. Documents seized by the rebels after Assad's fall provide a glimpse into the malaise that had gripped state forces. Thick files marked "military martyrs" sat on the shelf in the office of the chief of staff in Damascus, now in the hands of HTS rebels. Prison records reviewed by The Post show that Assad's jails were full of military deserters.
"When we arrived in Homs we were surprised that the regime had fled and left for Damascus," Abu Abdulrahman said.
In Damascus, Assad's forces were in disarray.
A 22-year-old police officer who worked in a suburb of Damascus said that orders came for him and his colleagues to hold fast in their headquarters. But then there were new orders: to flee.
The officers were not waiting for instructions. They had ditched their uniforms and changed into civilian clothes. "We were already at our homes," the officer said. "It was clear what was about to happen."
In the end, it was rebel forces from the south that first entered the city.
• The end
It is unclear exactly when Assad knew that his rule was doomed. Just 48 hours before Damascus fell, senior officials in the capital and members of the president's inner circle were behaving as if they saw no threat to Assad's seat of power.
"Aleppo had fallen. Homs was about to fall. But there was utmost confidence that nothing was going to happen" in Damascus, said an individual who arrived in the city on Dec. 6 and regularly served as a back channel between Assad and Western and Arab governments.
The individual said that in the days leading up to the Syrian government's collapse he had spoken with members of Assad's inner circle, including a member of the president's immediate family, part of a contingent of family members who had gathered in Moscow on Dec. 2 to attend the graduation of one of Assad's sons from a Russian school.
Everything was "business as usual," the individual said. "Everyone thought there was some kind of strategic deal being carved out by Turkey and Russia" and "people were still confident that the Russians and Iranians would come to their aid."
Even in Damascus, the individual said his reaction was that "everything is calm here."
As the walls closed in, Assad was still assuring some of his close family members that his regime would hold on, according to the relative, including two of his adult nieces who were with him in his sprawling four-floor residence in the al-Maliki neighborhood of the capital.
Assad's bags were already packed. "He didn't even tell them," the relative said of Assad's conversation with his nieces.
Assad's younger brother, Maher al-Assad, the commander of the Syrian army's elite 4th Armored Division, tasked with protecting the capital, was incensed when he discovered that the chief of the general staff had given orders for the military to withdraw, according to the relative and a second family member. Maher's whereabouts are still unknown.
Maher had believed earlier withdrawals were made to prepare for a battle for the capital, the family member said, but then heard that soldiers had been given orders to lay down arms. "His first reaction was: ‘Do not obey the orders,'" the relative said. "The answer was: ‘It's too late, we already did.'"
The second-in-command of Maher's 4th Division was found shot dead in his office when rebels arrived - a possible sign of turmoil within the ranks of the military over the withdrawals.
Assad gave no indication to many of his staff and family members he was fleeing, leaving them without time to organize escape routes. Bashar's nieces were with their bodyguard when they discovered he'd left. The bodyguard was "the one that managed to find a way to discreetly get them out of the country," said the relative.
Many of the president's staff also had no idea that he was escaping. The head of palace security, a general whom Assad had kept out of retirement, was oblivious to the president's departure until after it had happened, only finding out when soldiers arrived and told him they were laying down their arms.
"He said I haven't received an order to withdraw, and I will not leave the president alone," the first relative said. But Assad was already gone.
The general was still at the property when rebel forces from the south arrived in Damascus, and was taken for questioning. His family still doesn't know his whereabouts.
Assad's own wife and children were already in Moscow, where they have been living for months, according to relatives.
"Everyone," the second relative said, "feels he betrayed them."
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