'It's all over': How Iran deserted Assad to his fate days before fall

During Syria's civil war, which erupted in 2011, Tehran was one of Damascus's biggest backers, sending Bashar Al Assad military advisers and forces from its Revolutionary Guards

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An abandoned military base, once considered to be the largest Iranian military base in Syria, on the southern outskirts of Aleppo, in the Jabal Azzan area on December 5, 2023.

(AFP)

As city after city fell to a lightning rebel offensive in Syria last December, Iranian forces and diplomats supporting Bashar Al Assad saw the writing on the wall, abandoning the longtime ruler days before his ousting, sources told AFP.

During Syria's civil war, which erupted in 2011 following the government's brutal repression of pro-democracy protests, Iran was one of Damascus’s biggest backers, sending Assad military advisers and forces from its Revolutionary Guards.

Iranian and allied regional fighters — mainly from Lebanon’s Hezbollah, but also from Iraq and Afghanistan — had held key locations and helped prop up Assad, only to melt away in the face of Islamist-led forces’ headlong rush towards the capital.

Syrian officers and soldiers served under the Iranian Guards, whose influence grew during the conflict as Assad’s power waned.

A former Syrian officer assigned to one of the Guards’ security headquarters in Damascus said that on December 5 last year, his Iranian superior summoned him to an operations centre in the Mazzeh district the following day to discuss an "important matter".