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The Day ‘Black September’ Shook the Olympic Village in Munich

One of the attackers is seen at the Israeli team’s headquarters in the Olympic Village. (Getty Images)
One of the attackers is seen at the Israeli team’s headquarters in the Olympic Village. (Getty Images)
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The Day ‘Black September’ Shook the Olympic Village in Munich

One of the attackers is seen at the Israeli team’s headquarters in the Olympic Village. (Getty Images)
One of the attackers is seen at the Israeli team’s headquarters in the Olympic Village. (Getty Images)

Yehya al-Sinwar was ten years old when the Black September Palestinian organization carried out its hostage taking of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Nearly a billion people watched the Munich Massacre unfold on television as German police and Palestinian fighters traded fire during the operation. The events of September 1972 could be compared to the al-Aqsa Flood Operation that sparked Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023.

Then Israeli Prime Minister Gold Meir refused the kidnappers’ demand to be flown to Egypt with the hostages. The German government ambushed the kidnappers, but its lack of experience led to the massacre that has since become the subject of countless movies, documentaries and books.

After some initial hesitation, Meir yielded to the pressure of several of her ministers and agreed to Operation Wrath of God that would go after and assassinate nearly everyone involved in the Munich attack.

Paris, which is hosting the Olympic Games this summer, is bound to be worried that such a global event would attract terrorists, especially groups inspired by al-Qaeda, and ISIS.

My profession would have it that I met two of the men who took part in planning and carrying out the Munich attack. The first is Salah Khalaf, also known as Abu Iyad, who was a member of the executive committee of the Fatah movement and the second in command after Yasser Arafat. The second was Mohammed Daoud Oudeh, or Abu Daoud, a member of Fatah’s Revolutionary Council.

Abu Daoud speaks to Asharq Al-Awsat Editor-in-Chief Ghassan Charbel. (Asharq Al-Awsat)

Arafat and Abbas

More than half a century since the attack, the Israeli Mossad managed to kill the majority of those involved except its three masterminds: Abu Iyad, his aide Fakhri al-Omari (Abu Mohammed) and Abu Daoud.

Abu Iyad and al-Omari were eventually assassinated but by Palestinian, Sabry al-Banna, or Abu Nidal, the founder of Fatah’s Revolutionary Council. Abu Daoud was also wounded in al-Banna's attack.

In Tunis, Abu Daoud told me that al-Omari came up with the Munich attack during a meeting between him and Abu Iyad. Arafat was aware that the hostage taking would take place in Munich and that the Israelis would be swapped with Palestinians held in Israeli jails, recalled Abu Daoud. Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu Mazen, Fatah’s financial officer was tasked with providing the funds for the operation.

Abu Iyad stressed to me that the operation got out of hand because of Meir’s hardline position and the recklessness of the German government. He said the kidnappers had strict orders not to kill the hostages or open fire except when extremely necessary in self-defense. Abu Daoud confirmed the orders.

Weapons smuggled in undergarments

Abu Iyad personally oversaw the smuggling of weapons that would be used in the operation. He was accompanied by a Lebanese lady, Juliet, who had concealed the weapons in her luggage that was carrying her undergarments. When German customs sought to search the luggage for anything suspicious, they were embarrassed to find the underwear and quickly closed the luggage without searching it thoroughly.

Abu Daoud was tasked with storing the luggage at the train station and changing their locations daily to avoid suspicion until the day of the operation.

German security agencies were never alerted to the traveler who moved between Munich hotels using an Iraqi passport. The man was Abu Daoud and he was tasked with scouting the Olympic Village.

Black September

The Black September organization was born in wake of the battles that erupted between the Jordanian army and Palestinian groups in September 1970. The fighting ended the following year with the Palestinians’ defeat. Black September was formed out of desire for revenge against the Jordanian regime and to wage an open confrontation with Israel.

The defeat and ouster from Jordan were a major blow to the Palestinians who believed the country was the best position to confront Israel. Black September would be used to settle several scores. On November 28, 1971, it assassinated Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi al-Tal as he entered the Sheraton Hotel in Cairo. The incident is still the subject of heated debate to this day with some speculation that al-Tal was actually killed by a sniper on a nearby building, not the Palestinian group.

Egypt released the suspects without trial, raising doubts in Jordan that Cairo may have been involved in the attack or at least turned a blind eye to its planning. Abu Iyad agreed to discuss several issues with me, except al-Tal's assassination given how sensitive it still is.

Several setbacks

In 1972 the Palestinians were dejected. They had suffered a blow in Jordan and Palestinian factions in southern Lebanon lacked the weapons to confront Israeli attacks and incursions. The Palestinian leaders were worried that the factions would succumb to despair.

Over the spring, ideas started floating around to carry out an operation that would attract the world’s attention to the situation of the Palestinians and prove to the people in the camps that the resistance is capable of harming Israel.

Over the summer, Abu Iyad became even more invested in the idea of a major attack, especially with the summer Olympics around the corner. He asked that Abu Daoud visit Bulgaria to obtain weapons equipped with silencers “because we will need them in Europe.” The goal was to deal blows to Mossad agents in Europe.

Earlier that year, Palestinian authorities had sent a letter to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) asking that Palestinian athletes be allowed to compete at the Games, but they received no reply. A second letter was also left without a reply.

The Palestinians were dealt a new blow with the assassination of journalist Ghassan Kanafani in Beirut. He was also the editor of the al-Hadaf magazine, the mouthpiece of the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Meeting at a Rome cafe

Abu Iyad, al-Omari and Abu Daoud met soon after the assassination. Al-Omari proposed launching attacks against Israeli embassies and consulates, but Abu Iyad said that would put the resistance in a confrontation with the countries hosting those missions.

The three would meet again later at a cafe in Rome. Abu Iyad angrily said the IOC was continuing to ignore the Palestinian athletes. Al-Omari replied: “Since they are insisting on ignoring us, then why don’t we try to infiltrate the Olympic Village to kidnap Israeli athletes?” Abu Iyad thought he was crazy. Abu Daoud also noted that the majority of Israeli have received military training so overpowering them would be a challenge.

Abu Iyad went quiet as he mulled over the idea. “We could take hostage the Israelis and demand the release of several of our prisoners from Israel. It’s not a bad idea,” he remarked. He turned to Abu Daoud to say: “Munich is on your way to Bulgaria.”

So, the planning for the Munich operation got underway. Abu Daoud asked Abu Iyad to speak to Abu Mazen about securing funds for the operation.

Abu Daoud couldn't persuade the Bulgarians to hand him weapons, who demanded that they communicate with an official authority, such as the Palestine Liberation Organization or Fatah. Abu Iyad intervened, but the Bulgarians then demanded that the weapons head to the Middle East, not Europe.

Abu Daoud lies wounded after an assassination attempt in Warsaw in 1981. (Getty Images)

Scouting visits

Meanwhile, Abu Daoud was trying to scout the Olympic Village. He met a Palestinian woman who spoke some German and he pretended to be a Brazilian who wanted to get inside the village to meet some friends. The German guard sympathized with him and allowed them inside. Abu Daoud would return again with the executor team, Youssef Nazal and Mohammed Mosalha.

In the village, Abu Daoud approached a woman who happened to be Israeli, and he asked her if he could point her in the direction of where the Israeli team was staying. He told her that he was interested in Israel and wanted to learn more about the country and relay that information back to his family in Brazil.

Abu Daoud, Nazal and Mosalha, all pretending to be Brazilians, scouted the area where they will carry out the operation. The planning took weeks of meetings, training and trips between Athens, Madrid, Sofia, Geneva, Beirut and Libya’s Tripoli. The biggest hurdle they needed to overcome was how to smuggle the weapons to Munich.

Lebanese ‘wife’

Abu Iyad instructed Abu Daoud to wait for him at Frankfurt airport on August 24, 1972. Abu Iyad arrived with a Lebanese lady, Juliet, who was pretending to be his wife. At customs, the German officer ordered Abu Iyad to open his luggage, which was carrying the weapons, for inspection.

Abu Daoud became more nervous. But Abu Iyad, with some feigned annoyance, opened the luggage and began taking out his “wife’s” undergarments, which embarrassed the officer, who quickly allowed the luggage through without further inspection. Abu Daoud and Abu Iyad then took a taxi to their hotel.

Abu Iyad transported the weapons to Germany with the help of his Lebanese “wife”. (Getty Images)

Finishing touches

The remaining members of the executor team flew in from Tripoli. They stayed at three hotels and were provided with tracksuits, as well as bandages and biscuits should the hostage-taking take some time.

The Olympic Games opened on August 26 and the planners waited for the games to get underway and for security to become somewhat lax before they could carry out the attack.

Abu Daoud said a meeting was held in Beirut ahead of the operation to ensure that the attack would not be seen as an act of revenge, but rather as a political message and that blood would not be shed except during extreme moments.

The plans were now complete: The attackers would enter from the fence surrounding the Village and head to building 31 where the Israeli team was staying. They would try to take as many Israelis as possible hostage. Mosalha was tasked with carrying out the negotiations. He would hand over a list of over 200 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

The hostages would then be flown to a Middle Eastern country, preferably Egypt, which would demand that a prisoner swap be held with Israel, added Abu Daoud.

German security forces try to enter the location where the hostages are held in the Olympic Village. (Getty Images)

Night of the operation

Abu Daoud gave the order to carry out the attack on September 4. The attackers, dressed in tracksuits and concealing their weapons in their bags, met by the village fence. As they were about the climb over, they heard a raucous that turned out to be American athletes who had been staying out late drinking. They were sneaking into the village. Abu Daoud recalled that the athletes helped the attackers over the fence not knowing that they were intruders.

Abu Daoud returned to the hotel and waited for news of the attack to make it on the news. Abu Daoud said that had the operation been a failure, the team would meet again at the train station. The operation was set to begin at 4:30 in the morning and by 8:00 news of the attack had made it to the media, captivating the world.

The kidnappers’ helicopter is destroyed during the gunfight at a military airport near Munich. (Getty Images)

Meir’s government refused to negotiate with the kidnappers. The German government ambushed the attackers as they made their way to the airport ahead of being flown to Egypt. The ensuing gunfight left five of the kidnappers, nine hostages and a German policeman dead. Two Israeli athletes were killed in the initial raid of where they were staying.

‘Wrath of God’

Soon after, Meir’s government agreed to operation “Wrath of God” that led to the assassination of several Palestinian officials and diplomats – some of whom had nothing to do with the Munich operation. Israel succeeded in killing several of its targets except for the masterminds.

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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."