
In complete secrecy and without saying a word, Bashar al-Assad kept his people in the dark about his plans to leave Syria as his regime collapsed, following the rebel advance and the occupation of Damascus. His aides, officials and relatives were thinking of entirely different things and were preparing the "line of defense" after discussions with him.
Reuters news agency spoke to people close to the former Syrian dictator. He was selling what was happening in the country as a "fairy tale" to everyone.
Last Saturday, just hours before he left for Moscow, Assad held a meeting with about 30 military and security chiefs at the defense ministry where he was told that Russian military support was on its way to Syria and urged ground forces to be patient, a commander who was present at the meeting confirmed.
After the meeting, Assad informed his presidential office manager that he was going home, but instead he headed to the airport. The detail was revealed by an adviser in his inner circle. He had also called his communications adviser and asked him to come to his house to write a speech for him. But when he got there, he found no one there.
He made no attempt to resist.
“Assad didn’t even resist, not even for the last time. He didn’t even rally his troops,” said Nadeem Khoury, executive director of the regional think tank the Arab Reform Initiative. “He left his supporters to face their doom,” he added. Reuters was unable to reach Assad in Moscow, where he has been granted political asylum, to confirm or deny the allegations against him.
What people with knowledge of his movements have revealed about the final days and hours of his rule paints a picture of a leader seeking outside help to extend his 24-year rule, before unraveling the secrecy and deceit of his associates (from aides in his inner circle to regional diplomats and senior Iranian officials) to plan his departure from Syria in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Neither his brother nor his cousins ??knew anything.
Assad did not even inform his younger brother Maher, commander of the army's elite 4th Armored Division, of his plan to flee. Three of the latter's aides confirmed this. Only then did Maher fly by helicopter to Iraq and then to Russia, one of the sources said. Assad's maternal cousins, Ehab and Eyad Makhlouf, were in Damascus when he fell to the rebels, according to a Syrian aide and a Lebanese security official.
The two tried to escape in a car to Lebanon, but were ambushed by insurgents who opened fire on them. It is said that Ahab was killed and Eyad was wounded, but there is no further information on their health.
Assad himself fled Damascus by plane on Sunday, December 8, flying below radar with the plane's transponder turned off, two regional diplomats said, escaping the clutches of rebels who were attacking the capital.
The dramatic escape ended his 24-year reign and his family's half-century of uninterrupted power. It also ended Syria's 13-year civil war. The Syrian dictator first went to the Russian Khmeimim air base in the coastal city of Lattakia and from there flew to Moscow.
His wife Asma and their three children were already waiting for him in the Russian capital, according to three former close aides and a senior regional official. Videos from Assad's home, taken and released by rebels and civilians who flocked to the presidential compound after he left, show him making a hasty escape, leaving behind cooked food and some personal belongings, including family photo albums.
"No" from Russia and Iran
Earlier, Assad himself had made it clear that there would be no military intervention from Russia, whose intervention in 2015 had helped turn the tide of the civil war in his favor. He also received a rebuff from his other staunch ally, Iran.
Assad had visited Moscow on November 28, a day after Syrian rebel forces attacked the northern province of Aleppo and spread like wildfire across the country, but his pleas for military assistance fell on deaf ears in the Kremlin, which was unwilling to intervene, three regional diplomats told Reuters.
Hadi al-Bahra, the head of Syria’s main opposition group abroad, says Assad was not telling his aides the real situation, citing a source close to the dictator and a regional official. “He told his commanders and associates after his trip to Moscow that Russian military support was coming. He lied to them. The message he received from Moscow was negative,” Bahra says.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Wednesday that Russia had made many efforts to help stabilize Syria in the past, but its priority now was the conflict in Ukraine. Four days after that trip, on December 2, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met with Assad in Damascus.
By that point, the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) had taken control of Syria's second-largest city, Aleppo, and was expanding south as government forces surrendered. Assad, alarmed and seeing what was coming, acknowledged during the meeting that his army was too weakened to mount an effective resistance.
However, he never asked Tehran to deploy its forces in Syria. This was confirmed by two senior Iranian officials to Reuters, who noted that he understood that Israel could use such an intervention as a pretext to strike Iranian forces in Syria or even Iran itself.
The moment he accepted the end
After exhausting all his options, Assad finally accepted the inevitable and decided to flee the country, ending his family's dynastic rule that dates back to 1971. Three members of his inner circle said he initially wanted to seek refuge in the United Arab Emirates after rebels captured Aleppo and Homs and were advancing on Damascus.
But Emirati officials dismissed any such thoughts from the start, fearing an international backlash for harboring a figure under sanctions by the US and Europe over the alleged use of chemical weapons in a strike on rebels, accusations that Assad has denied as fabricated.
Moscow, for its part, while reluctant to intervene militarily, was not ready to abandon Assad, according to a Russian diplomatic source who spoke on condition of anonymity. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who attended the Doha Forum in Qatar on Saturday and Sunday, pulled the diplomatic strings on Assad’s security, vowing that Turkey and Qatar would use their ties to the rebels to guarantee his safe passage to Russia, two regional officials said.
A Western security source said Lavrov did “everything he could” to ensure Assad’s safe departure. Qatar and Turkey agreed with the rebels to facilitate Assad’s exit, three of the sources said, despite both countries’ official claims that they had no contact with the rebels.
Moscow also coordinated with neighboring states to ensure that the Russian plane leaving Syrian airspace with Assad would not be intercepted or targeted, the sources said. Qatar's Foreign Ministry did not respond to Reuters questions about Assad's departure from Syria, while the rebels could not be reached for comment.
A Turkish government official said there was no request from Russia to use Turkish airspace for Assad's flight, but did not say whether Ankara worked with rebels to facilitate the escape. Assad's last prime minister, Mohammed Jalali, said he spoke to his president by phone on Saturday night at 10:30 p.m.
"In our last phone conversation, I told him how difficult the situation was and that there was a large movement (of people) from Homs to Lattakia... that there was panic and terror in the streets," he told Saudi channel Al Arabiya TV.
"He replied: 'We'll see tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.' That was the last thing he said to me," Jalali said, adding that he tried to contact Assad again by phone early Sunday morning, but got no answer.