Explained: What led to Bashar al-Assad's downfall in Syria?

Opposition rebels in Syria took advantage of an opportunity to weaken the hold of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after 13 years of civil war.

Launched just two weeks ago, the operation caught nearly everyone off guard with its rapid success in capturing Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo .

Five decades of Assad family dominance came to an end on Sunday as the rebel alliance arrived in Damascus in just over a week.

The success of the lightning advance was primarily because Syria’s army was worn out and demotivated; his key allies , Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, were badly weakened by the war with Israel; and Russia, his other major military backer, was disinterested and distracted.

Here’s a detailed look at some reasons for Assad’s sudden downfall .

Vulnerable times

Assad was weakest when the rebels attacked.

His military supporters, Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, were sidetracked by battles elsewhere and could not muster the type of decisive force that had sustained him for years. Syria’s feeble military could not hold back. A regime source told Reuters that corruption and looting had left tanks and planes without fuel.

The unnamed source claimed that army morale had drastically declined during the previous two years.

The HTS-led coalition was more coherent and powerful than any other rebel group during the conflict, “and a lot of that is Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani’s doing,” according to Aron Lund, a fellow at Century International, a think tank with a focus on the region. However, he claimed that the decisive element was the regime’s weakness.

“After they lost Aleppo like that, regime forces never recovered and the more the rebels advanced, the weaker Assad’s army got,” he told Reuters.

The speed of the opposition advances — the seizure of Hama on December 5 and the fall of Homs on or around Sunday — surpassed expectations.

“There was a window of opportunity but no one expected the regime to crumble this fast. Everyone expected some fight,” said Bassam Al-Kuwatli, president of the Syrian Liberal Party, a small opposition group, who is based outside Syria.

Weak military

Assad’s army is essentially a hollow shell in a conflict that has destroyed the nation’s industries, infrastructure, and economy and claimed almost half a million lives. According to experts, the military lost over half of its 300,000-strong force in the early years of the conflict due to a combination of casualties, defections, and draft evasion.

Following the rebels’ November 27 attack, the army in certain regions offered little to no resistance, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor headquartered in Britain. It stated that troops were frequently leaving their stations all around the nation.

“Since 2011, Syria’s army has faced attrition in manpower, equipment and morale,” David Rigoulet-Roze of the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs told AFP.

He told AFP that many young men had avoided conscription and that underpaid soldiers had reportedly looted resources to live.

Syria’s economy is in ruins, therefore even though Assad announced a 50 per cent pay increase for career soldiers on Wednesday, their salaries are essentially useless.

Turkey’s support

According to Reuters sources, a member of the Syrian opposition and a diplomat in the region, the rebels could not proceed without first alerting Turkey, which has been a major supporter of the Syrian opposition since the beginning of the conflict.

Although it views the alliance’s principal faction, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), as a terrorist group, Turkey maintains forces in northwest Syria and offers assistance to some of the rebels that were planning to participate, such as the Syrian National Army (SNA).

A significant rebel push has long been opposed by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan’s administration, which in 2020 reached a deal with Russia to defuse the conflict in northwest Syria out of concern that it might result in a fresh influx of refugees across its border.

But earlier this year, the sources claimed, the rebels felt that Ankara’s position toward Assad had become stronger after he rejected Erdogan’s repeated attempts to facilitate a political resolution to the military impasse that has left Syria split between the regime and a patchwork of rebel groups with various foreign supporters.

Following the failure of Ankara’s attempts to engage Assad, the Syrian opposition source said that the rebels had provided Turkey with specifics of the plans.

The message was: “That other path hasn’t worked for years - so try ours. You don’t have to do anything, just don’t intervene.”

Speaking in Doha on Sunday, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan stated that Turkey “knew something was coming” after Erdogan’s attempts to engage with Assad in recent months failed.

Nuh Yilmaz, Turkey’s deputy foreign minister, stated at a West Asian affairs conference in Bahrain on Sunday that Ankara was not responsible for the offensive and did not provide its approval, citing instability as a reason.

The HTS “does not receive orders or direction from us (and) does not coordinate its operations with us either,” a Turkish official told Reuters in response to questions regarding Turkey’s knowledge of conflict preparations.

“Turkey is the biggest outside winner here. Erdogan turned out to be on the right — or at least winning — side of history here because his proxies in Syria won the day,” said Birol Baskan, a Turkey-based political scientist and former non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute.

Abandoned by allies

Russia and Iran, two major allies, have supported Assad with significant military, political, and diplomatic assistance.

They assisted him in regaining lost territory during the 2011 conflict’s repression of anti-government demonstrations, and Russia’s air power participation in 2015 turned the tide of the war on Assad’s side.

However, Russia’s airstrikes this time failed to stop the Islamist-led rebels from capturing large areas of territory, including the key cities of Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and eventually Damascus, during last month’s rebel advance, which coincided with Russia’s ongoing military operation in Ukraine.

Assad’s other key ally Iran has historically sponsored pro-government armed groups in Syria and given military advisors to the country’s military.

However, since the war in Gaza broke out and Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon began fighting, Iran and its allies have suffered setbacks in fighting with Israel.

Nick Heras, an analyst at the New Lines Institute, told AFP before rebels took Damascus that “ultimately, the Assad government’s ability to survive will depend on the extent to which Iran and Russia see Assad as useful to their strategies in the region.”

“If either or both of those allies decide they can advance their interests without Assad, then his days in power are numbered,” he added.

Hezbollah weakened

Since 2013, Hezbollah, a militant group from Lebanon, has publicly supported Damascus on the ground by deploying thousands of fighters across the border to support the army.

However, following more than a year of fighting in Lebanon, the rebels began the assault last month on the same day that Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire.

Without giving an exact number, a Hezbollah source told AFP that hundreds of the group’s militants had been killed in the war with Israel.

Hezbollah’s leadership was also severely damaged by the conflict; Israeli airstrikes killed Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s longtime leader, his projected successor, and several other key leaders.

Another Hezbollah-affiliated source claimed on Sunday that the organization was withdrawing its troops from the Homs region close to the border and the capital’s outskirts.

Assad’s downfall, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu , was “a direct result of the blows we have inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah, Assad’s main supporters.”

With inputs from agencies