While we were looking at the rebel advance on Homs, another rebel force seems to have boiled up to successfully invest Damascus from the south.
Syrian rebel groups reported gains in the country’s south on Saturday, capturing swaths of territory including Daraa, the city known as the birthplace of the country’s 2011 uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, and closing in on the capital, Damascus.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the armed Islamist faction that made stunning gains in the north over the past week, said its forces had begun encircling Damascus after sweeping advances by other rebel groups to the south. The group said that its forces had also carried out an operation Saturday within Homs, a strategic choke point between rebel-controlled areas in the north and the capital.
As its grip on the south crumbled, the Syrian cabinet held an emergency meeting to address the attacks by “armed terrorist gangs” on “a number of cities and regions.” The Syrian military denied that it had withdrawn from areas of the Damascus countryside but said that its forces in the southwestern cities of Daraa and Sweida had “redeployed” to new positions after rebel fighters had “attacked the army’s checkpoints and military points.”
The Southern Operations Room, a newly announced rebel faction in the south, announced its control of the province of Daraa and vowed to “continue until the liberation of Damascus.” Videos posted online and verified by the Agence France-Presse news agency showed a statue of former president Hafez al-Assad being toppled in the city. The Syrian state news agency SANA said that “the sounds heard in some areas of the southern Damascus countryside are of long-range targeting and shooting at terrorist gatherings in Daraa.”
The faction also said Saturday it had taken control of Quneitra, near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in southwestern Syria. The claim could not immediately be independently confirmed. The Southern Operations Room added that its forces were working to “complete the siege of the capital.”
Sweida, a city in southwestern Syria inhabited by members of the Druze religious minority, was under the control of Druze factions on Saturday morning after the army withdrew, said a 29-year-old local activist who spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons. The relationship of the southern rebels with HTS remains unclear, but their advance has activated and invigorated local opposition groups.
HTS said Saturday that its forces had captured the city of al-Sanamayn, north of Daraa, and were about 12 miles away from the “southern gate” of the Damascus. The group’s forces have also been closing in on Homs. The Syrian military said forces around Homs and rebel-held Hama have been “carrying out intensive artillery and missile fire on terrorist locations and supply lines, achieving direct hits.”
Here’s a snapshot of the overall military situation, with red for Assad-controlled territory and green for that of the rebels:
And here’s a closer view of the Damascus area:
There’s report after report on Liveumap of Assad forces abandoning various posts throughout the city.
With rebels already in the south of the Damascus and another rebel group coming in from the west, the situation looks pretty dire for Assad.
Here’s a SkyNews video of rebels in the Damascus suburbs toppling a state of Bashar Assad’s father, Hafez Assad:
Notice that many participating in the toppling just seem to be ordinary Syrians, and not members of rebel groups.
It looks like Israel’s decapitation of Hezbollah weakened Bashar Assad even more than previously suspected, and Iran’s overreach in supporting so many regional jihadest groups at the same time has left them so dangerously overextended that they will not be able to save their most important regional ally from falling.
This is a fast-moving breaking story, but I’d say there’s a 90+% chance that Assad’s goose is cooked.
Update: Unconfirmed reports that Assad has fled Syria in his private plane and flown to Abu Dhabi. Update 2: Maybe not? “Axios: Israeli security sources report that their intelligence suggests Assad remains in Damascus.”
Update 3: Rebels appear to have taken Homs.
Update 4: Less than a day, and the map has already drastically changed:
Update 5: Israel reportedly hits a Hezbollah column reportedly trying to bugger back to Lebanon.
Update 6: Reuters says that Assad has left Syria.
Update 7: There’s some evidence that Assad’s plane may have been shot down.
Update 8: It appears that Assad has now arrive in Moscow, and that Russia has granted he and his family asylum.
Tags: Abu Dhabi, Bashar Assad, Damascus, Foreign Policy, Hafez Assad, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Hezbollah, Homs, Israel, Jihad, Lebanon, Middle East, Military, Suchomimus, Syria, video
It’s the usual “slowly, then all at once…” sort of affair you encounter in these circumstances. I had it in the back of my head that Assad might only have days left, when we discussed this back right after Thanksgiving. Didn’t have the certainty to say so, however.
I suspect that we’re going to be equally surprised by how the whole thing in Russia eventuates. I suspect that there are a bunch of Russian mid-level types who’re recalibrating Putin’s survival chances, and then trying to work out which way the bodies are going to start bouncing.
When Russia goes, it’ll be quick, ugly, and brutal. This deal with Assad collapsing in Syria is a hell of a lot bigger from Russia’s perspective than it is in ours, and it will have greater effect than the average person in the West would credit. The port and airfields spotted around Syria were critical to Russia’s efforts in Africa; those are now a lot further away, and without intermediate staging bases…? Yeah. It’s one thing to fly equipment, stores, and manpower from where you’ve shipped them to in Syria, and quite another to fly them all the way from Mother Russia. With the added hours on airframes…? Expect to see a lot of Russian transport aircraft start falling out of the sky. Hopefully, not onto nearby civilian neighborhoods, but… Yeah. It will be a thing, don’t you worry.
We may be in the opening stages of the modern equivalent of the Brusilov offensive, in terms of blowback into Russian politics.
“Russian Media,” with all of its credibility, asserts Assad is in Moscow.
Pics or it didn’t happen.
Given the literal shed-loads of Russian troops still left in Syria…? We may see Assad traded back to the people who took Syria over, in return for Russian personnel and/or equipment.
What’ll be just fascinating to observe is what happens with all the Russian warships that were based in Syria. They’re either going to have to go home the long way around, find a safe harbor in the Med, or…? Dunno. Whatever their fate, twon’t be pretty.
Odds are pretty good that most of what was at Tartus was in dire need of significant maintenance, and may not be capable of making the long journey to either Murmansk or St. Petersburg/Kaliningrad. It will be interesting to see what happens if they try for the Baltic option; should it be found that the Chinese ship captained by a Russian was responsible for cutting those cables, I’d say it’s not outside the realm of possibility that a NATO blockade of Russian warships from the Baltic might not be off the table…
Wherever that might lead, aside from utter chaos.
Note to self: Next time I’m a dictator with a sweet setup, a pretty wife, and more money than I could ever use, don’t ruin it by funding a radical religious jihad.
Assad Jr. was always doomed. It was his playboy older brother that was supposed to be the heir to it all, right up until he wrecked his ohsofancy sports car.
Although, that may not have been the accident it was supposed to be… There have always been rumors that he was a.) worse than his daddy, and b.) offed by someone, maybe the Mossad, maybe the Syrian’s own Mukhabarat that didn’t want him taking over. Thus, the current Assad was never “meant” to be the successor; he was an ophthalmologist by training, not “dictator”. His daddy pushed him along, after his brother’s death in 1994.
He obviously lacked a certain talent for the job, but it’s taken this long for him to break it all apart.
All Bashar al-Assad really is would be the latest example for why leadership should not follow strict bloodlines, either in families or in ideologies. I don’t doubt but that the guys he supplanted due to nepotism would have shortly managed the same feat he did, which was to tear Syria apart in the same way that Yugoslavia collapsed after Tito’s death.
When you have a nation that’s built up out of ethnicities and factions that want to kill each other, then you either figure out how to finesse them tolerating each other, or all you’re really doing is delaying the inevitable. Were you to put my ass in charge of something like Yugoslavia during the post-Tito era? LOL… I’d loot the place, and hope I could get my ass out before it all caved in on me. That “fragile coalition” of ethnicities was never, ever going to coalesce into something that would last. Maybe it could have, given a world-bestriding personality like Tito being in charge for a few hundred years, but… Short of that? All I can do is laugh, and laugh hard.
Good God above, look at the mess the Ottomans left behind… Short of periodically massacring everyone that raises their head to give you trouble, you simply cannot build a cohesive nation out of the region that Syria encompasses. It’s brute force, or nothing.
And, brute force never lasts. Even the Ottomans got tired of the BS, and said “F*ck it…”
I wish the Syrians well, but… Their history of poor leadership choices indicates that we’re in for a short period of winnowing, followed by a lengthy period of dictatorship by whichever tyrant winds up running things. That’s the culture, that’s the way to bet…
Bashar al-Assad’s “pretty wife”, Asma Fawaz al-Assad, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia this year. The median survival of a person with AML is 8.5 months, with the 5 year survival being 24%.
This appears to have sapped Bashar al-Assad’s will to challenge al Qaeda.
From reports Assad ran out of money to regularly actually pay his army, top to bottom. As a result many unit commanders allowed troops to go home and try to find work so they could, you know, eat, while those generals continued collecting whatever fraction of pay was sent for those phantom troops, to support their lifestyle.
This supports the rumors that the rapid and surprising recent advance was due to large amounts of Turkish bribe money paid to various Syrian general officers, which in turn explains the reported odd redeployments of several better units down to the empty southern desert to “hunt terrorists”.
Yeah, don’t stop paying your army during a civil war, no matter how “frozen” it appears.
@FM,
That’s 90% of what happened in both Vietnam and Afghanistan; cut off the funding from the sponsoring big brother state, and watch the armies dissolve.
Nice to see it also holds true for the Soviet/Russian-sponsored varieties.
I’d like to point out again that Afghanistan followed the same model pioneered in Vietnam, performed by the same asshole parties in the US government. Play-for-play, almost. Same thing in Syria, but I’m unsure what happened and why the money taps were turned off. Has Russia run out of cash for subsidies…? What does that portend?
I’d like to see a breakdown of just where Syria was getting its cash… Iran? Oil money? Russia? Who was paying, and why did it dry up?