Assad’s Final Hours in Syria: Deception, Despair and Flight

A man walks on a poster of Bashar al-Assad, after Syrian opposition fighters announced that they have ousted Assad, in downtown Damascus, Syria December 10, 2024. (Reuters)
A man walks on a poster of Bashar al-Assad, after Syrian opposition fighters announced that they have ousted Assad, in downtown Damascus, Syria December 10, 2024. (Reuters)
TT
20

Assad’s Final Hours in Syria: Deception, Despair and Flight

A man walks on a poster of Bashar al-Assad, after Syrian opposition fighters announced that they have ousted Assad, in downtown Damascus, Syria December 10, 2024. (Reuters)
A man walks on a poster of Bashar al-Assad, after Syrian opposition fighters announced that they have ousted Assad, in downtown Damascus, Syria December 10, 2024. (Reuters)

Bashar al-Assad confided in almost no one about his plans to flee Syria as his reign collapsed. Instead, aides, officials and even relatives were deceived or kept in the dark, more than a dozen people with knowledge of the events told Reuters.

Hours before he escaped for Moscow, Assad assured a meeting of about 30 army and security chiefs at the defense ministry on Saturday that Russian military support was on its way and urged ground forces to hold out, according to a commander who was present and requested anonymity to speak about the briefing.

Civilian staff were none the wiser, too.

Assad told his presidential office manager on Saturday when he finished work that he was going home but instead headed to the airport, according to an aide in his inner circle.

He also called his media adviser, Buthaina Shaaban, and asked her to come to his home to write him a speech, the aide said. She arrived to find no one was there.

"Assad didn't even make a last stand. He didn't even rally his own troops," said Nadim Houri, executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative regional think-tank. "He let his supporters face their own fate."

Reuters was unable to contact Assad in Moscow, where he has been granted political asylum. Interviews with 14 people familiar with his final days and hours in power paint a picture of a leader casting around for outside help to extend his 24-year rule before leaning on deception and stealth to plot his exit from Syria in the early hours of Sunday.

Most of the sources, who include aides in the former president's inner circle, regional diplomats and security sources and senior Iranian officials, asked Reuters for their names to be withheld to freely discuss sensitive matters.

Assad didn't even inform his younger brother, Maher, commander of the Army's elite 4th Armored Division, about his exit plan, according to three aides. Maher flew a helicopter to Iraq and then to Russia, one of the people said.

Assad's maternal cousins, Ehab and Eyad Makhlouf, were similarly left behind as Damascus fell to the opposition fighters, according to a Syrian aide and Lebanese security official. The pair tried to flee by car to Lebanon but were ambushed on the way by fighters who shot Ehab dead and wounded Eyad, they said. There was no official confirmation of the death and Reuters was unable to independently verify the incident.

Assad himself fled Damascus by plane on Sunday, Dec. 8, flying under the radar with the aircraft's transponder switched off, two regional diplomats said, escaping the clutches of the opposition storming the capital. The dramatic exit ended his 24 years of rule and his family's half century of unbroken power, and brought the 13-year civil war to an abrupt halt.

He flew to Russia's Hmeimim airbase in the Syrian coastal city of Latakia, and from there on to Moscow.

Assad's immediate family, wife Asma and their three children, were already waiting for him in the Russian capital, according to three former close aides and a senior regional official.

Videos of Assad's home, taken by the opposition and citizens who thronged the presidential complex following his flight and posted on social media, suggest he made a hasty exit, showing cooked food left on the stove and several personal belongings left behind, such as family photo albums.

RUSSIA AND IRAN: NO MILITARY RESCUE

There would be no military rescue from Russia, whose intervention in 2015 had helped turn the tide of the civil war in favor of Assad, or from his other staunch ally Iran.

This had been made clear to the Syrian leader in the days leading up to his exit, when he sought aid from various quarters in a desperate race to cling to power and secure his safety, according to the people interviewed by Reuters.

Assad visited Moscow on Nov. 28, a day after Syrian opposition forces attacked the northern province of Aleppo and lightning drive across the country, but his pleas for military intervention fell on deaf ears in the Kremlin which was unwilling to intervene, three regional diplomats said.

Hadi al-Bahra, the head of Syria's main opposition abroad, said that Assad didn't convey the reality of the situation to aides back home, citing a source within Assad's close circle and a regional official.

"He told his commanders and associates after his Moscow trip that military support was coming," Bahra added. "He was lying to them. The message he received from Moscow was negative."

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Wednesday that Russia had spent a lot of effort in helping stabilize Syria in the past, but its priority now was the conflict in Ukraine.

Four days after that trip, on Dec. 2, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi met with Assad in Damascus. By that time, the opposition from the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group had taken control of Syria's second-largest city Aleppo and were sweeping southwards as government forces crumbled.

Assad was visibly distressed during the meeting, and conceded that his army was too weakened to mount an effective resistance, a senior Iranian diplomat told Reuters.

Assad never requested that Tehran deploy forces in Syria though, according to two senior Iranian officials who said he understood that Israel could use any such intervention as a reason to target Iranian forces in Syria or even Iran itself.

The Kremlin and Russian foreign ministry declined to comment for this article, while the Iranian foreign ministry was not immediately available to comment.

ASSAD CONFRONTS OWN DOWNFALL

After exhausting his options, Assad finally accepted the inevitability of his downfall and resolved to leave the country, ending his family's dynastic rule which dates back to 1971.

Moscow, while unwilling to intervene militarily, was not prepared to abandon Assad, according to a Russian diplomatic source who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, attending the Doha forum in Qatar on Saturday and Sunday, spearheaded the diplomatic effort to secure the safety of Assad, two regional officials said.

One Western security source said that Lavrov did "whatever he could" to secure Assad's safe departure.

Moscow also coordinated with neighboring states to ensure that a Russian plane leaving Syrian airspace with Assad on board would not be intercepted or targeted, three of the sources said.

Assad's last prime minister, Mohammed Jalali, said he spoke to his then-president on the phone on Saturday night at 10.30 pm.

"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 told Al Arabiya TV this week.

"He replied: 'Tomorrow, we will see'," Jalali added. "'Tomorrow, tomorrow', was the last thing he told me."

Jalali said he tried to call Assad again as dawn broke on Sunday, but there was no response.



What Deal Might Emerge from Trump-Putin Summit and Could It Hold?

T-shirts with images of Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump are displayed for sale at a gift shop in central Moscow, Russia, August 12, 2025. (Reuters)
T-shirts with images of Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump are displayed for sale at a gift shop in central Moscow, Russia, August 12, 2025. (Reuters)
TT
20

What Deal Might Emerge from Trump-Putin Summit and Could It Hold?

T-shirts with images of Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump are displayed for sale at a gift shop in central Moscow, Russia, August 12, 2025. (Reuters)
T-shirts with images of Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump are displayed for sale at a gift shop in central Moscow, Russia, August 12, 2025. (Reuters)

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will discuss a possible deal to end the war in Ukraine when they meet on Friday in Alaska for a summit that is also likely to affect wider European security.

European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy plan to speak with Trump on Wednesday amid fears that Washington, hitherto Ukraine's leading arms supplier, may seek to dictate unfavorable peace terms to Kyiv.

WHAT KIND OF DEAL COULD EMERGE FROM SUMMIT?

Trump said last Friday that there would be "some swapping of territories to the betterment of both".

This prompted consternation in Kyiv and European capitals that Russia could be rewarded for 11 years of efforts - the last three in full-blown war - to seize Ukrainian land. It occupies about 19% of Ukraine. Ukraine controls no Russian territory.

"It's a reasonable concern to think that Trump will be bamboozled by Putin and cut a terrible deal at Ukraine’s expense," said Daniel Fried, a former senior US diplomat now with the Atlantic Council think-tank.

But "better outcomes" for Ukraine were possible if Trump and his team "wake up to the fact that Putin is still playing them".

One could entail agreeing an "armistice line" instead of a transfer of territory, with only de facto - not legal - recognition of Russia's current gains.

Any sustainable peace deal would also have to tackle such issues as future security guarantees for Ukraine, its aspirations to join NATO, the restrictions demanded by Moscow on the size of its military, and the future of Western sanctions on Russia.

Trump has not commented on those issues since announcing the summit with Putin, though his administration has said Ukraine cannot join NATO.

Diplomats say there is an outside possibility that Trump might instead strike a unilateral deal with Putin, prioritizing lucrative energy contracts and potential arms control accords. Trump himself has said he might conclude in Alaska that a Ukraine peace deal cannot be done.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the possibility of Trump clinching a unilateral deal with Putin.

WHAT IF UKRAINE OBJECTS TO ANY TRUMP-PUTIN DEAL?

Trump would face strong resistance from Zelenskiy and his European allies if any deal expected Ukraine to cede territory.

Zelenskiy says Ukraine's constitution prohibits such an outcome unless there is a referendum to change it.

Trump could try to coerce Kyiv to accept such a deal by threatening to stop arms supplies and intelligence sharing.

But analysts say there is more chance Ukraine might accept a freezing of battlelines and an unstable, legally non-binding partition.

One European official told Reuters that, even if Trump did renege on recent promises to resume arms supplies to Ukraine, he was likely to continue allowing Europe to buy US weapons on Ukraine's behalf.

"The loss of US intelligence capabilities would be the hardest element to replace. Europe can’t even come close to providing that support," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

HOW MIGHT A DEAL AFFECT TRUMP'S SUPPORT AT HOME?

There would be big political risks in the US for Trump in abandoning Ukraine, said John Herbst, a former US ambassador to Kyiv, now with the Atlantic Council.

This would portray him as "an accomplice in Putin's rape of Ukraine ... I don't think Trump wants to be seen that way, for sure", he said.

Despite his strong political position at home, Trump would also come under fire even from parts of the American right if he were to be seen as caving in to Russia.

"To reward Putin ... would be to send the exact opposite message that we must be sending to dictators, and would-be-dictators, across the globe," Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican lawmaker and former FBI agent, said on X last week.

HOW MIGHT UKRAINE'S EUROPEAN ALLIES RESPOND?

EU member states said on Tuesday that Ukraine must be free to decide its own future and that they were ready to contribute further to security guarantees for Kyiv.

Oana Lungescu, a former NATO spokesperson now with the RUSI think-tank, said European states must move much faster to arm Ukraine, and start EU accession talks in September.

Jana Kobzova, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that "... if an unacceptable deal emerges from Alaska, European capitals will go into yet another diplomatic and charm offensive vis-a-vis Trump".

"European leaders are increasingly aware that the future of Ukraine's security is inseparable from that of the rest of Europe - and they can't let Putin alone decide its future shape and form."