Russia pushed Assad to flee Syria after concluding he'd lost war

Henry Meyer, Bloomberg News on Dec 11, 2024

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With Syrian opposition forces advancing rapidly toward the capital, Damascus, President Bashar al-Assad’s fate lay in Russia’s hands as his army melted away.

Still haunted by video of the mob killing and mutilation of Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi in that country’s civil war in 2011, the Kremlin moved to save its ally even as it concluded that it could do nothing to prop up Assad’s regime any longer.

President Vladimir Putin is demanding to know why Russia’s intelligence service didn’t spot the growing threat to Assad’s rule until it was too late, said a person close to the Kremlin with knowledge of the situation.

Russia persuaded Assad that he would lose the fight against armed groups led by the former al-Qaeda offshoot HTS and offered him and his family safe passage if he left immediately, according to three people with knowledge of the situation, asking not to be identified because the matter is sensitive.

Russian intelligence agents organized the escape, flying Assad out via its air base in Syria, two people said. The aircraft’s transponder was turned off to avoid being tracked, one of them said.

The intervention to carry the Syrian dictator and his family into exile ended the Assad dynasty’s more than half a century rule, after Bashar succeeded his father Hafez who was president from 1971 until his death in 2000. Within hours of Assad’s departure, the militants swept unopposed into Damascus and claimed victory in the Syrian conflict that had raged for nearly 14 years.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Putin hasn’t spoken publicly, so far, about the collapse of the Assad regime.

“This was damage control,” said Ruslan Pukhov, head of the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a defense and security think-tank. He said it was “very logical” for Russia to tell Assad to give up as it wanted to avoid a bloodbath in which he met the same fate as Qaddafi or Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who was hanged in 2006 following a trial.

With Russia fearful for the future of its two key military bases in Syria — a naval port in Tartus and the airfield at Khmeimim — the Kremlin is putting a brave face on the outcome after officials were caught by surprise at the speed of events unfolding on the ground.

Russian media are pushing a message that Assad was to blame for his defeat, while Moscow kept its word by not abandoning him and should now focus on maintaining its strategic interests in Syria and the wider Middle East.

Russia had bombed opposition fighters initially, in an attempt to push them back and bolster Assad’s forces. But with the Syrian army offering little resistance as rebels seized the city of Hama within days of capturing Aleppo, Russia concluded it couldn’t protect the regime as the opposition bore down on the strategic city of Homs, one of the people said.

The Foreign Ministry in Moscow on Sunday announced that Assad had stepped down and left his country, adding that Russia was in contact with “all Syrian opposition groups.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held talks on the Syrian crisis with his Iranian and Turkish counterparts in the Qatari capital, Doha, on Saturday.

Iran, like Russia, was a close supporter of Assad. The two countries came to his defense in 2015, when Putin dispatched Russia’s military to Syria to help Assad push back rebels who were surrounding Damascus. Turkey backed the insurgents who finally succeeded in ousting the longtime Syrian ruler.