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

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.

In Syria's third city Homs, members of ousted president Bashar al-Assad's Alawite community say they are terrified as new authorities comb their districts for "remnants of the regime", arresting hundreds.

In central Homs, the marketplace buzzes with people buying fruit and vegetables from vendors in bombed-out buildings riddled with bullet holes.

But at the entrance to areas where the city's Alawite minority lives, armed men in fatigues have set up roadblocks and checkpoints.

People in one such neighborhood, speaking anonymously to AFP for fear of reprisals, said young men had been taken away, including soldiers and conscripts who had surrendered their weapons as instructed by the new led authorities.

Two of them said armed men stationed at one checkpoint, since dismantled after complaints, had been questioning people about the religious sect.

"We have been living in fear," said a resident of the Alawite-majority Zahra district.

"At first, they spoke of isolated incidents. But there is nothing isolated about so many of them."

- 'Majority are civilians' -

Since opposition factions led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group seized power on December 8, Syria's new leadership has repeatedly sought to reassure minorities they will not be harmed.

But Alawites fear a backlash against their sect, long associated with the Assads.

The new authorities deny wrongdoing, saying they are after former Assad forces.

Shihadi Mayhoub, a former lawmaker from Homs, said he had been documenting alleged violations in Zahra.

"So far, I have about 600 names of arrested people" in Zahra, out of more than 1,380 in the whole of Homs city, he told AFP.

Among those detained are "retired brigadiers, colonels who settled their affairs in dedicated centers, lieutenants and majors".

But "the majority are civilians and conscripted soldiers," he said.

In the district of Al-Sabil, a group of officers were beaten in front of their wives, he added.

Authorities in Homs have been responsive to residents' pleas and promised to release the detained soon, Mayhoub said, adding groups allied to the new rulers were behind the violations.

Another man in Zahra told AFP he had not heard from his son, a soldier, since he was arrested at a checkpoint in the neighboring province of Hama last week.

- 'Anger' -

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor says at least 1,800 people, overwhelmingly Alawites, have been detained in Homs city and the wider province.

Across Syria, violence against Alawites has surged, with the Britain-based Observatory recording at least 150 killings, mostly in Homs and Hama provinces.

Early in the civil war, sparked by a crackdown on democracy protests in 2011, Homs was dubbed the "capital of the revolution" by activists who dreamt of a Syria free from Assad's rule.

The crackdown was especially brutal in Homs, home to a sizeable Alawite minority, as districts were besieged and fighting ravaged its historical center, where the bloodiest sectarian violence occurred.

Today, videos circulating online show gunmen rounding up men in Homs. AFP could not verify all the videos but spoke to Mahmud Abu Ali, an HTS member from Homs who filmed himself ordering the men.

He said the people in the video were accused of belonging to pro-Assad militias who "committed massacres" in Homs during the war.

"I wanted to relieve the anger I felt on behalf of all those people killed," the 21-year-old said, adding the dead included his parents and siblings.

- 'Tired of war' -

Abu Yusuf, an HTS official involved in security sweeps, said forces had found three weapons depots and "dozens of wanted people".

Authorities said the five-day operation ended Monday, but Abu Yusuf said searches were ongoing as districts "have still not been completely cleansed of regime remnants".

"We want security and safety for all: Sunnis, Alawites, Christians, everyone," he said, denying reports of violations.

Homs lay in ruins for years after the former regime retook full control.

In Baba Amr neighborhood, an opposition bastion retaken in 2012, buildings have collapsed from bombardment or bear bullet marks, with debris still clogging streets.

After fleeing to Lebanon more than a decade ago, Fayez al-Jammal, 46, returned this week with his wife and seven children to a devastated home without doors, furniture or windows.

He pointed to the ruined buildings where neighbors were killed or disappeared, but said revenge was far from his mind.

"We are tired of war and humiliation. We just want everyone to be able to live their lives," he said.

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