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."
