For years, Syrian soldiers have been complaining on Facebook about their bosses. Commanders who took bribes in exchange for leave. Leaders who ordered soldiers to loot. Officers who stole their troops’ food or got drunk on the job.
After 13 years of a grueling civil war that devastated Syria, that corrosion came back to haunt the regime.
Rebels on Sunday swept into the capital, Damascus, as President Bashar al-Assad fled the country his family had ruled for decades.
Multiple factors, including preparation by the main rebel coalition and Mr. al-Assad’s sudden abandonment by his closest allies, contributed to his fall. But the internal deterioration of Mr. al-Assad’s own military meant that when he needed his troops most, many chose to strip off their uniforms and get out of the rebels’ way.
Last month, after the rebels burst out of the country’s northwest and began a lightning march south, a soldier from one embattled unit posted an anonymous plea to his commander in chief.
“The battalion leaders fled and left the troops and officers to their fate,” the soldier wrote, as documented by Gregory Waters, a Syria researcher, in a recent newsletter. The soldier said that he had lost dozens of comrades.
“We had to tell their families that they died because there are traitorous officers whom we cannot hold accountable,” he wrote.
Mr. al-Assad’s fall has sent shock waves across the Middle East, partly because his family had ruled Syria for so long and partly because it appeared for several years that he had effectively won the war with the support of his main backers, Russia, Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
But even as Mr. al-Assad consolidated his control over most of the country and its people, life for most Syrians kept getting worse.
The United States and other countries imposed punishing sanctions, hobbling Syria’s economy, and the value of its currency plummeted, reducing many Syrians who had considered themselves middle-class to poverty.
This cut into the lives of Mr. al-Assad’s staunchest supporters, including military families that had lost relatives defending his government and had expected some reward for their service — what Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, called a “victory dividend.”
“If you win something, you expect something to be better for you after your victory,” he said. “But they won and things got worse.”
Over time, that undermined his military from within.
In his newsletter looking at the long-term decline of the Syrian military, Mr. Waters wrote that a combination of corruption, desertions, failed internal reforms and a dependence on foreign forces had created a personnel shortage that left Mr. al-Assad’s army weak.
To keep Syria’s senior officers from getting killed, for example, Russia had advised the country to keep them away from the front lines, leaving more junior officers to lead soldiers in the field. That practice spread, and when the rebels attacked, “senior leadership seemed nowhere to be found,” Mr. Waters wrote.
As the rebels advanced — first taking Aleppo, Syria’s commercial hub, followed by Hama, another major city — they encountered little resistance, likely because senior officers failed to organize the defenses, and so individual units collapsed, Mr. Waters said.
In their blitz south to Damascus, a trip of about 200 miles, the rebels appear to have done their most significant fighting around the central city of Homs, but it was short-lived.
While Mr. al-Assad’s forces had been weakening, the rebels in northern Syria had been getting organized. The group that led the rebel advance, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, had for years been the de facto government of Idlib Province, which is home to many displaced Syrians and abuts the Turkish border. The group taxed the booming cross-border trade, apparently routing much of its profit into military preparation.
After the fighters began their advance, allied with other rebel groups directly backed by Turkey, their rapid advances created their own momentum.
“Momentum is not about capabilities or the number of soldiers you have on the ground, it is about psychology, and that is where the rebels achieved their greatest effect,” Mr. Hokayem said. “There was no narrative on the other side, no coherence.”
Also key to the rebels’ advance was Mr. al-Assad’s effective abandonment by the foreign forces that had helped him throughout the civil war, said Yezid Sayigh, senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.
Russia had diverted its attention and some of its military assets from Syria to its invasion of Ukraine, so it was in no place to save him. Iran’s economy had been weakened by sanctions and its long-running shadow conflict with Israel had intensified. Hezbollah had lost so many commanders and fighters in its own war with Israel before reaching a cease-fire last month that it, too, had little aid to offer Mr. al-Assad.
That left only his military, as depleted as it was.
“This was not a strong army that was ready to fight anymore and it was clear to them that their president had failed them in one key aspect, which was to secure foreign support,” Mr. Sayigh said. “At that point, morale was just irretrievable, for the rank and file generally and for a fair number of senior officers as well.”
The post Syria’s Army Was Hollowing Out Long Before Rebels’ Advance appeared first on New York Times.
