On November 27, when the rebels emerged from their Idlib enclave in north-western Syria, President Bashar Assad was on a visit to Moscow. The sudden disintegration of his army was even more amazing than the swift disintegration of Nuri al-Maliki’s Iraqi army in Mosul in June 2014.
In Iraq, a whole well-equipped army division fled, after having seen a few hundred ISIS fighters mounted on pick-up trucks. A couple of weeks later the revolutionaries were already besieging Baghdad from north, west and south. There are some similarities between the two cases, but there is also one big difference that explains why the Iraqi government managed to push ISIS back and Assad’s men failed.
Russian and Syrian soldiers during a rehearsal for a military parade at Hmeimim airbase, Latakia, Syria - May 2016
The main difference is that Assad’s army was based on a command consisting almost entirely of a small sectarian minority – the Alawites, while the soldiers belonged mostly to the Sunni majority. Once the State military buckled, the Alawite could not recruit local militias, except in the narrow Alawite stretch on the Syrian shore. In Iraq, however, the state could rapidly recruit many local militias in Baghdad and all over the vast Shi’i south. Badly trained as they were, they were ready to fight for their lives: the Sunni ISIS made it amply clear that, to them, a good Shi’i was a dead Shi’i. In Syria, by contrast, the Sunni majority was not ready to support the Alawite regime. Once the state military disintegrated the popular support for the revolutionaries carried them all the way to Damascus.
In Iraq of 2011 the military was not only well-equipped, but it was also reasonably well-trained by the American Army. However, between the American evacuation of Iraq in 2011 and ISIS assault on Mosul in mid-2014, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki corrupted his military. Soldiers joined only for the salary. Training was practically non-existent. Unit commanders declared full presence while around one third of the soldiers never showed up or never existed. Their salaries went into the bank accounts of their commanders. Command posts were sold for the highest Shi’i bidder. As a result, most of the commanders were inexperienced. In 2011 the most experienced commanders were Sunnis, but they were filtered out by Maliki’s system. Not surprisingly, discipline and morale were extremely low.
Between the American evacuation of Iraq in 2011 and ISIS assault on Mosul in mid-2014, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki corrupted his military.
The Syrian army consisted theoretically of five corps. In reality, though, only two were of any value, the Fifth Corps and the Republican Guard. The Fifth Corps was fully under Russian command. The Russians had even to add much to the government’s meagre and dwindling salaries. The Republican Guard included a ridiculous number of 123 battalions, but the only effective force there was the Fourth Armored Division, headed by Bashar Assad’s brother, Mahir. This division was fully controlled by the Iranians.
For several years the Syrian army had no chief of staff. Therefore coordination between its various parts was weak at best. On the eve of the December revolt there was a chief of staff, but the Fifth Corps and the Fourth Armored Division behaved as if they belonged to two different militaries.
Another problem was that more than 80% of the 152 top commanders of all the Syrian armed forces (corps, divisional, brigade commanders and so on) were Alawites. The Alawite sect represents no more than 12% of Syria’s population. This meant that the top commanders could not possibly be the best men for the job. They were chosen mainly for their loyalty. Furthermore, the result was a deep emotional gap between them and their Sunni-majority conscripts. This situation, of Alawites commanding Sunnis, had existed in Syria since the late 1960s. However, Bashar drove it to an extreme.
Hafez al-Assad never hesitated to appoint good Sunni or Christian or Druze commanders. Thus, for example, in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, Minister of Defense General Mustafa Tlass was a Sunni, and the Chief of Staff was a Christian. There were many Sunni and some Druze and Christian divisional, brigade, and battalion commanders. As a result, the Syrian military functioned well in the war. Their defeat came because the Israeli armor reserves (including my own brigade) arrived much faster than the Syrian (and Israeli) planners believed possible, the professional level of Israel’s tank crews was somewhat better, and the Israeli Air Force ruled the skies (yet the Syrian and Egyptian ground-to-air missiles taxed it almost to the limit). The Syrian military gave Israel a very good fight. So good, in fact, that on the second day of the war Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan felt that Israel was close to extinction.
After he lost the battle against the revolutionaries in late 2015 and was saved only by the Russians, Bashar Assad drove his father’s sectarian preference for Alawites in the military command to a dangerous extreme. And yet, his army’s collapse in early December 2024 was a great surprise to him, to his military commanders, to Israeli Military Intelligence, to the Iranians and Russians, and to the revolutionaries themselves. The inept Alawite command, the low training level, the low salaries in an economy with rampant inflation came on top of other bad service conditions. For example, since 2020, when the Caesar Act (US sanctions) started to bite, one loaf of bread had to suffice for three soldiers for a day, no rice and cheese were available, and a soldier tasted chicken only twice a month, often not even that. Living conditions in the military positions facing Israel were appalling, which could have been the case elsewhere too. Corruption from the top seeped to the level of the military kitchen bosses. Not surprisingly, desertion was rampant.
All this was well known. In 2015 it became clear that, not only that Assad’s army was no longer able to fight an external enemy, but it also couldn’t even fight the Syrian revolt. Indeed, since 2015, despite the Russian and Iranian presence, Israel conducted regular attacks against Hezbollah and Iranian targets in Syria with near-impunity. Yet, the impression in Israel was that, thanks to Russia and Iran, the regime can protect itself. Bashar wasted the opportunity given him by his allies.
Once the regime’s military machine disintegrated, the popular Sunni majority’s disdain for the Alawite-hegemonic regime did the rest.
Where, then, was the surprise? When it comes to Assad’s army’s vulnerability, the most difficult components to gauge were, first, the significance of the general feeling in Syria, including in the Alawite community, that the Assad regime was running the country downhill. Secondly, and more specifically in the armed forces, difficult to gauge was the significance of the sense of neglect and the chasm between Sunni soldiers and Alawite commanders. Finally, the coup de grace was the incredible lack of emergency support from Hezbollah, Russia and Iran. Russia was busy in Ukraine, but it still had a few jet fighters and helicopter gunships in Khmeimim, on the Syrian coast. Hezbollah suffered a few thousand casualties in its war with Israel, but for an army of no less than 30,000 – possibly 40,000 – fighters, this is not a debilitating blow. True, they did not abandon Assad altogether: they quickly sent forces to al-Qusayr on the Lebanese border, and even to Homs, in Syria’s western center. Yet, those were limited forces. When they realized that the Iraqi and other militias were not coming and that the state army was crumbling they immediately withdrew home.
When compared to 2011, Hezbollah’s limited action must be ascribed to the demise of most of their military and civilian leadership in the war with Israel, and to the hesitation of General Qaani, the commander of the Iranian Quds Force, in charge of Syria and Lebanon.
The Afghan Iran-controlled Liwa al-Fatemiyoun militia, and the Pakistani Liwa al-Zainebiyoun militia numbered at least 20,000 fighters. What happened to them? Their absence may explain why the Syrian troops, even the Alawites, gave up, and why no one in Syria or outside of it could envisage the regime’s collapse. The Iranians and Russians were there, on the ground, everywhere, but did not see it happen. Israel was watching the Syrian army like a hawk. Russia and Iran were probably listening to what the Syrian intelligence had to say. What they did not realize was that the Syrian intelligence system was blind and deaf. This is somewhat reminiscent of the American reliance on SAVAK information in the last days of the Shah of Iran. In early December 2024 Tehran fell into the same trap of relying on the regime’s intelligence. Today the sounds of recriminations from Tehran are heard in my home in Haifa, Israel. Israel’s intelligence was probably preoccupied with Hamas, the hostages, Iran, and Hezbollah. Even more strangely, no one was looking at the rebels’ enclave of Idlib and what Turkey was doing there.
Assad escaped from Damascus and flew to Khmeimim, the Russian airbase in Syria. The Russians then exfiltrated him to Moscow. When Maher Assad – commander of the feared, pro-Iranian 4th Division learned that his big brother fled, he took a helicopter to Iraq. You cannot hide such a feat. All other officers melted away and Damascus was defenseless. This demonstrates the crucial importance of command commitment.
Once the regime’s military machine disintegrated, the popular Sunni majority’s disdain for the Alawite-hegemonic regime did the rest. This was most surprising in the case of the Republican Guard, whose main responsibility was guarding Damascus and the regime. This, too, is reminiscent of what happened in Baghdad in 2003, when the American forces approached it from the south. Most of the divisions of Saddam’s Republican Guard were far from the capital city and fought well. Yet, the Special Republican Guard, in charge of Baghdad and consisting mostly of Tikriti personnel, Saddam’s hometown recruits, vanished into thin air. In both cases, when even the true loyalists realized that all was lost, they donned civilian attire and went home. On the Israeli-Syrian border, all the Syrian military positions were abandoned. All over Syria, the missile and navy bases and military airports were deserted. Assad’s army voted with its legs. Within 72 hours Israel turned the abandoned hardware into ashes.
