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Abed Rabbo: Arafat Was Mischievous with Gaddafi…Syrian Military Had Inherited Animosity Towards Him

Yasser Arafat (R), chairman of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) shown in file picture dated September 1, 1989. (AFP)
Yasser Arafat (R), chairman of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) shown in file picture dated September 1, 1989. (AFP)
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Abed Rabbo: Arafat Was Mischievous with Gaddafi…Syrian Military Had Inherited Animosity Towards Him

Yasser Arafat (R), chairman of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) shown in file picture dated September 1, 1989. (AFP)
Yasser Arafat (R), chairman of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) shown in file picture dated September 1, 1989. (AFP)

What is happening in the Gaza Strip is closely related to Israel’s ongoing injustice, mainly the insistence of Israel’s successive governments on avoiding peace obligations. This injustice exacerbated after the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Agreement on September 13, 1993.
Arafat hoped the Oslo agreement to be a first step to the establishment of a Palestinian state on some parts of the land, but Benjamin Netanyahu built his policy on assassinating the agreement. The Oslo Accord is related to what preceded it, mainly the wars of capitals and the complex relationships between the PLO and some prominent Arab countries.
This dialogue with Yasser Abed Rabbo, former Secretary-General of the executive committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), is meant to shed light on some events that some born after Oslo did not have the opportunity to experience. Here is the third and final episode:
Asked how Arafat dealt with the 9/11 attacks and about President George Bush’s refusal to shake hands with Arafat at the United Nations headquarters after that.
Abed Rabbo recalled: “It was the result of what the Americans saw as test after test for Yasser Arafat.” For them, Arafat “failed the test in terms of condemning the actions carried out by Hamas and other factions targeting civilians, and because he did not do enough to prevent those actions, and that Yasser Arafat was also complicit to some extent. Their evidence of this is the ‘Karen A’ ship and others.”
“A new situation was created after Bush’s famous statement that the “Palestinian people deserve better than this Palestinian leadership, which is involved in terrorism”... This statement created a situation in which we have actually moved to the stage of complete rupture with the US administration, and complete hostility to the person of Arafat and towards the authority as a whole under his leadership.”
Thorny Relation with Hafez Assad
Relations were not friendly or normal between Yasser Arafat and Hafez Assad.
Yasser Abed Rabbo went to Damascus on a mission after the Syrian military intervention in Lebanon in 1976 where he met Assad.
He was asked: What did Assad tell you? Abed Rabbo replied: “There was a military clash in Sidon (southern Lebanon), and also some clashes and skirmishes in the Sawfar region (Mount Lebanon) and elsewhere. The situation became tense and an armed confrontation erupted between us and them (the Syrians), so the leadership in Beirut decided not to engage in the clash at this stage.”
"I believe that several countries, including the Gulf states particularly Saudi Arabia, stepped in to stop the conflict and contain the situation. The Syrians therefore agreed to receive our delegation to meet President Assad. I went there with Faoruk al-Qaddoumi. He was the Foreign Minister, and he is of course the head of the delegation. We met with President Assad”.
Abed Rabbo added that Assad was frowning and looked angry when he first entered the room. “He immediately surprised us and said: “What are you doing?...You cut off the heads of the Syrians who entered Sidon and played football with them in the streets.””
Abed Rabbo noted that he made sure to explain to Assad that the situation was a serious misunderstanding, and that no Syrian soldiers were hurt.
“...It was a miserable military failure”, Abed Rabbo told Assad “Is it reasonable for us to take Syrian prisoners?
“I confronted (Assad’s words) and said to him: Mr. President, how are these words possible? Firstly, it is shameful for anyone to use the term prisoners. Syrian soldiers are not prisoners. There was a mistake made by a commander and he found himself (lost) in Sidon. The militia members in Sidon saw tanks that they did not know for whom they belonged. A confrontation erupted but fortunately no one was injured by the gunfire. The forty soldiers are well and there were no beheadings. He (Assad) replied: By God, these are the reports I received. Are they writing false reports for me?
I said: Please make sure. There was no one injured... Let them send someone to get them back. We don’t know to whom we shall send them”.
Arafat Not a Fan of Expanding the War in Lebanon
On accusations that Arafat incited Kamal Jumblatt to take the war to the Mountain area, Abed Rabbo said: “Honestly, never. I believe that Kamal Jumblatt wanted the Palestinian resistance with all its forces to expand the front to the Mountain... He requested Fatah's participation in the process.”
But “Fatah did not participate, and if it did, it did so in a symbolic way...I am confident that it was not his (Arafat) plan to go to the mountain or turn to Bikfaya from the side of Dhour El-Shwair, as others had expected.”
Abed Rabbo added that “no one could ever go to the Mountain area and Aley” except with the consent of the socialist party.
Cruelty against Arafat is Inherent in Syria
Asked if Chief of staff of the Syrian Army General Hikmat al-Shehabi was very harsh to Arafat, Abed Rabbo said: “It seemed inherited among the leadership of the Syrian army. Mustafa Tlas did not like Yasser Arafat. Sometimes in some of his speeches he was extremely obscene and insulted him with vulgar and cheap insults. Hikmat Al-Shehabi could not stand the name Arafat at all. He was open about it to us.”
Asked about Sabri al-Banna (Abou Nidal), Abed Rabbo said: “He is extremely narcissistic, proud of himself and highly suspicious...he is quick to accuse... he doesn’t make you feel comfortable. At other times it is as if he had a real split personality, you find him calm and sociable.
“Abou Nidal immersed himself deeply in Palestinian blood, mainly during the Syrian-Palestinian rapprochement after the October war, and the emergence of the peace project and the PLO's Ten Point Program. It was the first seed of accepting the notion of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
This was a warning bell for the Iraqis. They started working against the PLO and Fatah. They resorted to assassinations. They assassinated the ambassador in Kuwait and in Paris and in many other places”.
Gaddafi and Arafat’s Charisma
Asked whether an understanding was difficult between Arafat and Gaddafi, Abed Rabbo said: “It was difficult and easy. Gaddafi used to welcome Arafat warmly and friendly...Yasser Arafat dared to speak harshly to him, and even reprimanded him.
Gaddafi used to accept that because “Abou Ammar” considered himself not only older in age but also older in terms of his revolutionary history.
Abou Ammar did not give Gaddafi much importance because he was stingy in supporting Fatah and the PLO.
Arafat was charismatic. He had real charisma that some could not bear. Hafez Assad could not bear it. Ahmed Hasan Bakr could not stand Arafat. Saddam, maybe, felt himself at no competition with anyone because he had the conviction that since his young age he was above all humanity. Gaddafi was also jealous... He had to deal with Arafat with respect.”
Gaza Was Sacred for Arafat
Abed Rabbo met Arafat for the first time during The Battle of Karameh in 1968 in Jordan. It was the battle that gave legitimacy to Fatah and Arafat.
Asked if he misses Arafat today, Abed Rabbo said everyone who knew Arafat misses him and misses his role today.
“He would not have allowed all the circumstances that led to the latest aggression on Gaza,” Abed Rabbo said, adding that if Arafat was still alive he would not have allowed that division between the ranks of the PLO or Hamas’ diversion from the rest of the factions.
“It was not possible for this division to occur within the Palestinian movement and for Hamas to separate from the rest of the factions and the PLO, or for Gaza’s separation from the West Bank.
Gaza was sacred to Yasser Arafat. It was not possible for him to leave Gaza even if Hamas carried out a hundred coups”, he stated.
Abed Rabbo was asked how he left Jordan after the bloody 1970 events, he said: “I left in 1971. We remained in hiding in Amman after it came under the control of the Jordanian army. We then moved to live in the forests in Jerash and Ajloun where all the resistance forces gathered and (were subjected to shelling).
The meeting of the Palestine National Council was held in July or August. We, Abou Jihad (Khalil al-Wazir) and I, were asked to leave for Cairo to attend the meeting. We left under Arab protection and the forests of Jerash and Ajloun were swept after we left”.

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Four Iranian Narratives on the Collapse of the ‘Resistance’ in Syria  

Iran's General Qassem Soleimani makes a phone call near the historic Citadel of Aleppo, winter 2016. (Fars)
Iran's General Qassem Soleimani makes a phone call near the historic Citadel of Aleppo, winter 2016. (Fars)
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Four Iranian Narratives on the Collapse of the ‘Resistance’ in Syria  

Iran's General Qassem Soleimani makes a phone call near the historic Citadel of Aleppo, winter 2016. (Fars)
Iran's General Qassem Soleimani makes a phone call near the historic Citadel of Aleppo, winter 2016. (Fars)

One hundred and ninety-two days separated the last meeting between Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Syria’s ousted President Bashar al-Assad in Tehran from the moment the Syrian regime fell to the opposition in December 2024.

That interval was no footnote in the Syrian war. It became a sharp mirror inside Tehran, reflecting the magnitude of the wager Iran’s leadership had placed on Assad, and the limits of its ability to anticipate the trajectory of the conflict and shifts in the regional balance of power.

At that meeting, Khamenei laid out the essence of his “Syrian doctrine” amid changing realities across the “Axis of Resistance.” Syria, he argued, was no ordinary state but one with a “special place” because its identity, in his view, stemmed from its role in this axis.

Since “resistance is Syria’s defining identity and must be preserved,” he addressed Assad not as a political ally but as a partner in that identity. He praised Assad for once saying that “the cost of resistance is lower than the cost of compromise” and that “whenever we retreat, the other side advances.” Thus, Khamenei reaffirmed his full - if belated – gamble on the regime’s survival, even as signs of collapse were unmistakable on the ground.

Less than seven months later, the regime would fall. Assad’s collapse would yield several Iranian narratives: the Supreme Leader’s, the Revolutionary Guard’s, the diplomatic narrative, and a fourth voiced from within the system itself, one that raised blunt questions about the price of Iran’s Syrian gamble.

Khamenei’s narrative

In his first speech after Assad’s fall, Khamenei offered a hard-edged explanation: the event, he said, was the product of a “joint American-Zionist plot,” aided by neighboring states. He spoke of factors that he claimed prevented Iran from providing the necessary support, including Israeli and US strikes inside Syria and the closure of air and land corridors to Iranian supplies.

He concluded that the decisive flaw lay within Syria itself, where the “spirit of resistance” had eroded in state institutions.

He stressed that the regime’s fall did not mean the fall of the idea of “resistance,” predicting that “patriotic Syrian youth” would one day revive it in a new form.

This narrative rejects the notion of strategic defeat: for Khamenei, what happened is not the end of the struggle, but a harsh phase in a longer one.

Revolutionary Guard’s narrative

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) adopted a language closer to national security logic than pure ideology, though it drew from the same lexicon. In 2013, cleric Mehdi Taeb, head of the IRGC’s Ammar Headquarters think tank, framed the equation starkly: “Syria is our 35th province... If the enemy attacks Syria or Khuzestan, our priority is to keep Syria.”

With that shocking sentence, Syria was elevated to the level of Iranian strategic geography, sometimes above parts of Iran itself.

Late General Qassem Soleimani, then commander of the Quds Force, became the chief architect of this approach: confronting threats abroad by building multinational militia networks and using the “protection of shrines” as a mobilizing slogan that fused ideology with national security calculations.

A month after Assad’s fall, at a memorial for Soleimani, Khamenei reaffirmed this school of thought, linking the defense of shrines in Damascus and Iraq to the defense of “Iran as a sanctuary,” aiming to bind various fronts into a single cross-border security-sectarian struggle.

After the Syrian regime’s collapse, this narrative preserved its core: success or failure is not defined by who sits in Damascus, but by whether the IRGC’s influence networks remain intact and whether Iran still has access to Syrian depth.

Full withdrawal would amount, in this logic, to admitting that the “35th province” had slipped from the map, so the IRGC will continue to search for any possible foothold.

Diplomatic narrative

Iran’s diplomatic apparatus sought to tell a softer story. Weeks before the fall, Khamenei dispatched his adviser Ali Larijani to Damascus and Beirut with reassuring messages for Assad and other allies, publicly asserting that events in Syria and Lebanon “directly concern Iran’s national security.”

Days later, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi visited Damascus just six days before the collapse, even posing with shawarma in a downtown restaurant to signal “normalcy” and dismiss talk of impending downfall as “psychological warfare.”

It was the peak of the gap between diplomatic messaging and a disintegrating reality.

Afterward, the Foreign Ministry adopted a defensive formula: Iran had “responded to the request of an allied government”, but “cannot decide on behalf of peoples.” Thus, responsibility was shifted toward Syrian internal failures and the external “conspiracy” often invoked by Khamenei.

This narrative treats Syria as one file among many, not an existential arena as seen by the IRGC and the Leader.

‘Open account’ narrative

The fourth narrative emerged, unexpectedly, from within the establishment itself. For the first time, semi-public acknowledgments surfaced that the economic return on Iran’s Syrian adventure was nearly nil and that the political-security “investment” had resulted in something resembling a net loss.

In 2020, former member of the Iranian parliamentary national security and foreign policy committee, Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh revealed that Tehran had spent “$20-30 billion” in Syria, insisting: “This is the people’s money and must be recovered.”

Five years later, he returned with a more bitter charge: Syria’s debts to Iran were effectively settled through “land without oil, cow farms without cows, and empty promises.”

This view is no outlier. Over a decade, Iranian protest slogans increasingly linked “Gaza, Lebanon, Syria” with bread, fuel, and economic hardship at home.

With Assad gone, critics more easily argue that Iran spent tens of billions and paid a human cost among its fighters and proxies, only to end up with almost no influence in Damascus.

For decision-makers, this narrative becomes domestic pressure against any large-scale return to Syria.

Four scenarios for Tehran

Taken together, these narratives reveal a deep contradiction: the IRGC and Khamenei refuse to concede that Iran “lost Syria,” treating the episode as one phase in a longer struggle. Meanwhile, the diplomatic and economic narratives acknowledge, implicitly, that the previous intervention model is no longer sustainable.

Four broad scenarios emerge. The first is a return through proxies, closest to the IRGC’s logic: Iran would rebuild influence from the ground up through militias - old or newly recruited - to pressure any future authority in Damascus.

The second is regional repositioning without Syria, in which Iran shifts resources to arenas where it still holds leverage, including Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Gaza, while limiting its role in Syria to preventing hostile entrenchment.

The third is a “gray” re-entry: a gradual, negotiated, non-confrontational return through localized deals or modest economic and security projects, allowing Tehran to claim continued presence without the cost of backing a single ruler.

The fourth is institutionalizing the loss: Iran accepts Syria’s departure from its strategic depth, but repackages the outcome within a narrative of “conspiracy and steadfastness,” using it to tighten internal control while maintaining symbolic presence through shrine rhetoric and minimal diplomacy.

Across all scenarios, one fact remains. Syria, which was once described as more vital than Khuzestan and the “distinct identity of resistance”, is no longer what it was before December 8, 2024 when the regime collapsed.

Tehran can invoke time, the IRGC can search for openings, diplomats can polish their statements, and critics can lament “land without oil.” But one question looms over every debate in Iran: Can Tehran afford a second Syrian-sized gamble after emerging from the first still trying to convince itself that the “resistance factor” remains standing, even as its Syrian pillar has broken?

Features

A Year After Assad’s Fall, Families of Missing Detainees Languish without Answers 

Amina Beqai holds a photo of her husband, who went missing after he was arrested by security forces under the rule of ousted President Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, November 23, 2025. (Reuters)
Amina Beqai holds a photo of her husband, who went missing after he was arrested by security forces under the rule of ousted President Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, November 23, 2025. (Reuters)
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A Year After Assad’s Fall, Families of Missing Detainees Languish without Answers 

Amina Beqai holds a photo of her husband, who went missing after he was arrested by security forces under the rule of ousted President Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, November 23, 2025. (Reuters)
Amina Beqai holds a photo of her husband, who went missing after he was arrested by security forces under the rule of ousted President Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, November 23, 2025. (Reuters)

A year after dictator Bashar al-Assad's ouster in Syria, little has changed in Amina Beqai's desperate quest. She types her missing husband's name yet again into an internet search box, hoping for answers to a 13-year-old question. In vain.

Beqai has nowhere else to turn.

A National Commission for Missing Persons established in May has been gathering evidence of enforced disappearances under Assad, but has yet to offer families any clues on the estimated 150,000 people who vanished in his notorious prisons.

They include Beqai's husband Mahmoud, arrested by Syria's security forces at their home near Damascus on April 17, 2012, and her brother Ahmed, detained in August that year.

Assad's overthrow initially stirred hope that prison records could tell families if, when and how their loved ones died. Mass graves dug by Assad's forces across Syria could be exhumed. Victims could be properly buried.

None of that has transpired.

"It's been a year. They didn't do anything ... Is it thinkable that they didn't even get the documents for these men? Showing us the truth is what we want," Beqai told Reuters.

FADING HOPES

As opposition fighters swept through Syrian towns last year on the way to capturing Damascus, they rushed first to the jails, flinging doors open to free thousands of bewildered prisoners.

On December 8, 2024, hours after Assad fled to Russia, the fighters freed dozens of prisoners from Sednaya, dubbed "the human slaughterhouse" by Amnesty International for the industrial-scale torture and executions undertaken there.

The emerging detainees did not include Beqai's loved ones.

"When the prisons were open, and they didn't come back – that was the shock. That was when the hope ended, it really died," Beqai said. But she demands to know how, when and where her husband and brother may have died.

With no updates from the national commission, Beqai said she had become "obsessed" with her online hunt, scouring pictures of dead detainees and scans of prison documents published by Syrian news outlets who entered jails and security branches after Assad's fall.

"All there is left to do is sit and search," she said.

Such documents have revealed crucial information.

Sarah al-Khattab last saw her husband heading into a police station in Syria's south on February 9, 2019 to reconcile with Assad's government after years holed up with insurgents.

She has had no news of him since.

A spreadsheet of dead Sednaya prisoners seen by Reuters after Assad's fall included his name, Ali Mohsen al-Baridi, dating his death as October 22, 2019 from "stopped pulse and breathing" with orders that the body not be given to his family.

Reuters passed its finding to the Syrian Justice and Accountability Center, an advocacy group working with families of the missing, who informed Khattab.

COMMISSION SEEKS HELP, OVERSIGHT

The national commission was established by new President Ahmed al-Sharaa. The commission's media adviser, Zeina Shahla, told Reuters its mandate includes any missing Syrian, no matter the circumstances.

"When it comes to the pain of the families, maybe we really are being slow. But this file needs progress to come carefully, in a way that is scientific and systemic and not rushed," she said.

Next year, the commission hopes to launch a database of all the missing using documents from prisons and other locations. Exhuming mass graves requires more technical expertise and probably won't happen until 2027, Shahla said.

The commission has met with Syrian advocacy groups and some families. In November, it signed a cooperation agreement with the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Commission on Missing Persons, which have global expertise on the issue.

Syria's commission hopes that will lead to more training for its personnel and access to equipment in short supply in Syria, including DNA testing labs for exhumed remains.

"We welcome any kind of cooperation and support we can receive, as long as the issue remains under (our commission's) authority,” Shahla said.

RELATIVES, ACTIVISTS DEMAND BETTER

The government's approach has upset organizations who developed expertise on enforced disappearances while in exile during the Assad era, six rights groups told Reuters.

Many were excited to apply that knowledge on the ground with Assad gone, but say the government's centralized approach has excluded them, slowed progress and left families in limbo.

"When you have as many as a quarter of a million people missing, you can't do that. You break up the work," said Ahmad Helmi, a Syrian activist who leads Ta'afi, an initiative focused on missing detainees and prison survivors.

Activists also accuse the commission of "monopolizing" detention-related documents.

In September, Syrian authorities briefly detained Amer Matar, an activist who founded a virtual museum to preserve detainees' experiences, accusing him of illegally accessing official documents for personal purposes.

In November, the commission urged families not to believe any detention-related documents shared on unofficial online platforms, like the ones Beqai has been searching, and threatened legal action against those outlets.

"The commission wants to monopolize the file, but it lacks the tools, the competence and the transparency. It demands the trust of families but delivers no results," Matar said.

Shahla said the commission is "the central, official body authorized to reveal the fate" of missing people and that families needed one place to go to for accurate answers.

Agnes Callamard, head of Amnesty International, said the commission should issue regular updates about its progress and consider granting financial aid to relatives of missing people.

"The most important thing ... the national commission can do at the moment is ensuring that families feel they are being heard and being supported," she told Reuters.

As Syria marks a year since Assad's downfall, many people remain exhausted by the same burden that plagued them under his rule: the lack of closure.

Alia Darraji last saw her son Yazan on November 1, 2014, as he left home to meet friends near Damascus. He never returned.

In the last year, the elderly woman has spent time in "truth tents" - sit-ins demanding information on disappeared Syrians that were unthinkable under Assad. While solidarity has helped, it hasn't given her what her heart aches for.

"We were hoping to find their bodies, to bury them, or to find out where they are," Darraji said.

Features

‘It’s All Over’: How Iran Abandoned Assad to His Fate Days Before Fall

Iran was a staunch backer of Bashar al-Assad but quickly withdrew its forces once as opposition forces took over Syria. (AFP)
Iran was a staunch backer of Bashar al-Assad but quickly withdrew its forces once as opposition forces took over Syria. (AFP)
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‘It’s All Over’: How Iran Abandoned Assad to His Fate Days Before Fall

Iran was a staunch backer of Bashar al-Assad but quickly withdrew its forces once as opposition forces took over Syria. (AFP)
Iran was a staunch backer of Bashar al-Assad but quickly withdrew its forces once as opposition forces took over Syria. (AFP)

As city after city fell to a lightning opposition offensive in Syria last December, Iranian forces and diplomats supporting Bashar al-Assad saw the writing on the wall, abandoning the longtime ruler days before his ousting, sources told AFP.

During Syria's civil war, which erupted in 2011 following the government's brutal repression of pro-democracy protests, Iran was one of Damascus's biggest backers, sending Assad military advisers and forces from its Revolutionary Guards.

Iranian and allied regional fighters -- mainly from Lebanon's Hezbollah, but also from Iraq and Afghanistan -- had held key locations and helped prop up Assad, only to melt away in the face of opposition forces' headlong rush towards the capital.

Syrian officers and soldiers served under the Iranian Guards, whose influence grew during the conflict as Assad's power waned.

A former Syrian officer assigned to one of the Guards' security headquarters in Damascus said that on December 5 last year, his Iranian superior summoned him to an operations center in the Mazzeh district the following day to discuss an "important matter".

The former officer, requesting anonymity due to fears for his safety, said his superior, known as Hajj Abu Ibrahim, made a bombshell announcement to around 20 Syrian officers and soldiers gathered for the meeting.

"From today, there will be no more Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Syria. We're leaving," they were told.

"It's all over. From today, we are no longer responsible for you."

He said they were ordered to burn or otherwise destroy sensitive documents and remove hard drives from computers.

- Border bottleneck -

The announcement came as the opposition forces were making huge gains, but it still took the Syrian soldiers by surprise, he said.

"We knew things hadn't been going well, but not to that extent."

They received one month's salary in advance and went home.

Two days later the opposition forces captured Damascus without a fight after Assad fled to Russia.

Two Syrian employees of Iran's consulate in Damascus, requesting anonymity for security reasons, also described a hasty Iranian exit.

The consulate was empty by the evening of December 5 as Iranian diplomats scarpered across the border to Beirut, they told AFP.

Several Syrian employees "who held Iranian nationality left with them, accompanied by senior Revolutionary Guards officers", according to one of the former employees.

At Jdeidet Yabus, Syria's main border crossing with Lebanon, taxi drivers and former staff reported a massive bottleneck on December 5 and 6, with an eight-hour wait to clear the frontier.

Both of the former consulate employees said the Iranians told their Syrian personnel to stay home and paid them three months' salary.

The embassy, consulate and all Iranian security positions were deserted by the morning of December 6, they said.

- Russian base -

During the war, forces under Iranian command were concentrated in sensitive areas inside Damascus and its suburbs, particularly the Sayyida Zeinab area, home to an important Shiite shrine, and around Damascus airport, as well as near the Lebanese and Iraqi borders.

Parts of the northern city of Aleppo and locations elsewhere in the province were also major staging areas for personnel and fighters.

At a site that used to be a key military base for Iranian forces south of Aleppo, Colonel Mohammad Dibo said that when the city fell early in the opposition campaign, "Iran stopped fighting".

Iranian forces "had to withdraw suddenly after the quick collapse" of Assad's military, said Dibo, who took part in the opposition offensive and now serves in Syria's new army.

On the heavily damaged walls of the abandoned base, an AFP journalist saw Iranian and Hezbollah slogans, and a painting of a sword tearing through an Israeli flag.

Tehran's foe Israel had launched hundreds of strikes on Syria over the course of the war, mainly saying it was targeting Assad's army and Iran-backed groups.

The former Syrian army officer who requested anonymity said that on December 5, a senior Iranian military official known as Hajj Jawad and several Iranian soldiers and officers were evacuated to Russia's Hmeimim base on the Mediterranean coast, then flown back to Tehran.

At the abandoned site near Aleppo, Dibo said that after the city's fall, "some 4,000 Iranian military personnel were evacuated via Russia's Hmeimim base" where they had taken refuge.

Others fled overland through Iraq or Lebanon, he said.

Their exit was so rushed that "when we entered their bases" in Aleppo province, "we found passports and identity documents belonging to Iranian officers who didn't even have time to retrieve them."