Deception and betrayal: Inside the final days of the Assad regime

Damascus: As rebels advanced toward the Syrian capital of Damascus on December 7, the staff in the hilltop Presidential Palace prepared for a speech they hoped would lead to a peaceful end to the 13-year civil war.

Aides to President Bashar Assad were brainstorming messaging ideas. A film crew had set up cameras and lights nearby. Syria's state-run television station was ready to broadcast the finished product: an address by Assad announcing a plan to share power with members of the political opposition, according to three people who were involved in the preparation.

Working from the palace, Assad, who had wielded fear and force to maintain his authoritarian rule over Syria for more than two decades, had betrayed no sense of alarm to his staff, according to a palace insider whose office was near the president's.

The capital's defenses had been bolstered, Assad's aides were told, including by the powerful 4th Armored Division of the Syrian army, led by the president's brother Maher Assad, the insider said.

They had all been deceived.

After dusk, the president slipped out of the capital, flying covertly to a Russian military base in northern Syria and then on a Russian jet to Moscow, according to six Middle Eastern government and security officials.

Maher Assad fled separately that evening with other senior military officers across the desert to Iraq, according to two Iraqi officials. His current location remains unknown.

Bashar Assad left his country so secretively that some of his aides remained in the palace hours after he had left, waiting for a speech that never came, the insider said. After midnight, word came that the president was gone, and they fled in a panic, leaving the palace gates wide open for the rebels who would storm in a few hours later.

Assad's fall brought to a sudden end his family's 50-year authoritarian grip on Syria, causing jubilation among his victims and enemies, scrambling the strategic map of the Middle East and setting Syria off on a new, uncertain trajectory.

During his final days in power, Assad pleaded for foreign military help from Russia, Iran and Iraq to no avail as his military's own intelligence service documented his forces' collapse in real time, according to secret reports reviewed by The New York Times.

Diplomats from a half-dozen countries sought ways to push him from power peacefully in order to spare the ancient city of Damascus a bloody battle for control, according to four regional officials involved in the talks. One proposal, an official said, was that he pass power to his military chief, effectively submitting to a coup.

The account of Assad's fall, much of which has not been previously reported, is based on interviews with Syrian, Iranian, Iraqi and Turkish officials; Damascus-based diplomats; as well as associates of Assad and rebels who participated in his ouster. Many of them spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing diplomatic protocols or fear of retribution from remnants of the former regime -- or from the rebels who toppled it.

Now rebels guard the Presidential Palace. Assad's home has been picked clean by looters. And Syrians who remained loyal to him through years of civil war fume that he left without a word, abandoning them to their fates.

"For your own personal safety, you sacrificed all your people?" said the palace insider, who barely escaped before the rebels arrived.

Hiding from Syria's new masters far from Damascus, he was still struggling to come to grips with Assad's sudden flight.

"It is a betrayal that I cannot believe," he said.

'Life Was Normal'

In late November, when rebels from Syria's northwest launched an offensive aimed at pushing back Assad's forces, the president was a continent away for a joyous family occasion. His elder son, Hafez Assad, was defending his doctoral dissertation at Moscow State University.

Gathered in a cavernous, wood-paneled auditorium on a hill overlooking the Russian capital were Bashar Assad's wife, Asma Assad, and two of Hafez's grandparents.

The 98-page dissertation -- "Arithmetic Questions of Polynomials in Algebraic Number Fields" -- was unlikely to attract a wide readership. But it bore a unique dedication: "To the martyrs of the Syrian Arab Army, without whose selfless sacrifices none of us would exist."

Bashar Assad was in Moscow, too, though he did not attend the defense. Back at home, the army his son had lauded as heroic was crumbling before the rebel advance.

For 13 years, Assad had been fighting a brutal civil war against armed groups seeking his ouster. The conflict had ravaged the country, killing more than a half-million people and creating millions of refugees. Iran and its ally, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, had supported his troops, and Russia sent fighter jets whose air raids devastated rebel communities.

Around 2020, the war appeared to settle into a stalemate. Syria's economy was trashed, and much of its territory was out of Assad's hands. Still, he remained in power and was working of late to shed his status as an international pariah.

"Life was normal, and everyone was looking to the future," recalled the palace insider, who worked down the hall from Assad for many years.

On Nov. 30, a rebel coalition led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamic group with roots in al-Qaida, seized the northern city of Aleppo, Syria, a major economic hub, shocking people across the Middle East. Assad rushed back to Damascus and found his staff uneasy, the palace insider recalled, although no one thought the capital was vulnerable.

Aware that his army had been ground down by years of battle, Assad sought help from the foreign powers that had helped him before.

In Tehran, Iran, senior commanders in Iran's Revolutionary Guard held emergency meetings to explore ways to aid Assad, according to three Iranian officials, including two members of the Revolutionary Guard. Two days after Aleppo fell, Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, traveled there, publicly reinforcing that Damascus was stable. Television cameras filmed him posing for photographs with families on the street and eating at a popular shawarma restaurant with his Syrian counterpart. He vowed to the Iranian news media that Iran would stand with Assad to the end.

Iran's options were limited.

Throughout the Syrian war, Iran had provided great military aid to help Assad, sending its own commanders and fighters from the Revolutionary Guard, as well as commandos from Hezbollah and fighters from many other countries. But Hezbollah had just emerged from its own war, with Israel, badly battered. Israel had killed or wounded thousands of its fighters, destroyed many of its munitions and killed most of its top leaders. Israel had also threatened Iranian aircraft going to Syria and any mobilization of ground forces there, leaving Iran no practical way to support Assad.

Araghchi told state media that he found Assad confused and angry that his army had failed to hold Aleppo, saying that the Syrian president "did not have an accurate read of the situation." Assad told him in private, according to two Iranian officials, that his generals had described his forces' withdrawal as a tactical move to shore up the defense of Damascus.

Assad's other key champion was President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Russia maintained a military base in northern Syria and a naval base on the Mediterranean coast in Tartus that allowed Putin to project power far from Moscow.

Putin came to Assad's rescue during the Syrian War in 2015, the Russian military overwhelming the rebels. He tried to broker a reconciliation between Assad and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who had long supported the rebels, but the effort never progressed.

In the first days of the rebels' advance after Aleppo fell, Assad felt a sudden chill in his relationship with Putin, the palace insider and a Turkish official said: The Russian leader stopped taking his calls.

'No Plan to Fight'

After taking Aleppo, the rebels continued south and seized the Assad stronghold of Hama, Syria, in another sudden shock to the regime.

The rebels' swift march revealed the deep rot inside Assad's army. Economic distress and punishing sanctions had hollowed out Syria's currency, reducing soldiers' salaries to less than $30 per month. So many had been killed that the army relied heavily on conscripts, who were poorly fed and equipped with outdated gear.

The rebels, too, mostly carried light arms. But they had one great advantage, drones, which they used to strike command centers, scattering regime soldiers. Syrian military intelligence reports, which were reviewed by the Times, described relentless drone attacks across the country that Assad's forces had no way to counter. Many of the drones took off from a field in rebel-held Idlib province in the northwest, next to a warehouse that housed at least 200 of them, one report read.

In Tehran, military commanders told the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that the rebels were advancing too fast for Iran to help, according to according to four Iranian officials.

Shocked, Khamenei sent a senior adviser, Ali Larijani, on a secret trip to Damascus to tell Assad to buy time by promising political overhauls and a new government that would include members of the opposition, according to four Iranian officials. Larijani also discussed the topic of defection, raising the possibility of Tehran or Moscow.

Realizing that Russia would not save him and that Iran could not, Assad sent his foreign minister to Baghdad. He told the Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, that Assad's fall would endanger Iraq, according to three regional officials with knowledge of the talks. He pleaded for Iraqi military support, but the country's top leaders -- the prime minister, the president and the speaker of parliament -- all refused.

In public, Iranian officials called for a diplomatic solution. But officials in Tehran had concluded that Assad would not survive, according to six Iranian officials, and Iran began quietly withdrawing its diplomatic and military staff from Damascus.

"They told us that the rebels will arrive in Damascus by Saturday and there is no plan to fight," read an internal Revolutionary Guard memo viewed by the Times. "The people of Syria and the army are not up for another war. It's over."

'No One Knew Anything'

Panic gripped Damascus as the sun rose on Dec. 7. Overnight, the rebels had advanced toward Homs, Syria's third-largest city and the last major urban center standing between the rebels and the capital.

Residents rushed to stores to stock up on food in case street battles trapped them at home. Others fueled up their cars and fled the city.

Inside the army, it was becoming clear that Assad's forces were failing, according to dozens of military intelligence reports on Dec. 6 and 7, which were reviewed by the Times.

The forces were overwhelmed, they said. Rebels disguised in army uniforms were approaching Homs in cars adorned with portraits of Assad, and other armed groups had seized army checkpoints in Daraa, south of Damascus. One memo said that soldiers had left behind armored vehicles and weapons that the rebels had claimed.

"They are planning to control the entire southern region and then head to the capital," another report said. "This will happen within a few hours."

The sense of alarm had not reached the Presidential Palace, the insider recalled. Assad and his staff were in their offices, trying to manage a crisis whose gravity they did not comprehend.

"People were still drawing up scenarios," he said, "and the idea of Damascus falling was not suggested by anyone."

Palace staff spent the day waiting for the speech that Assad was supposed to record, hoping that it would somehow stop the rebel advance.

"There were lots of people in the palace who said that it was time for him to appear, to support the army, to reassure people," the insider said.

But the filming kept getting postponed without explanation. By dusk, the staff was no longer sure where Assad was, the insider said.

On the other side of the Middle East, in Doha, Qatar, many of the region's power brokers had gathered to try to find a way to stop the situation in Syria from escalating further. Many of the countries represented hated Assad but had come to accept that he had survived the war, and they did not trust that the rebels could hold Syria together.

Among the assembled officials, from five Arab countries plus Turkey, Russia and Iran, there were many who had concluded that it was too late for Assad, according to three officials from different countries who attended.

That evening, the rebels entered Homs, exacerbating fears that Damascus was next.

"After Homs fell, everything got very tense, and no one knew anything -- not in the palace or outside the palace," the insider said.

'Burn Everything'

While Assad had his pick of palaces to use for official business, he lived with his wife and three children in a four-story modernist villa surrounded by palm trees and fountains in the upscale Damascus neighborhood of al-Maliki.

After he was gone, his neighbors said that living near him had been a nuisance. Soldiers blocked access to the street and interrogated visitors, they said. Installing a new satellite dish or air conditioner required complicated dealings with the intelligence service.

But at least Assad and his family were quiet -- which is why the neighbors jumped when they heard his guards screaming hours before dawn on Dec. 8.

"'Guys, flee, flee! They're coming!'" one neighbor recalled them yelling. "'May God curse him. He left us!'"

Chaos also gripped an air force intelligence branch elsewhere in the city, according to a soldier who gave only his first name, Mohammed, for fear of retribution from the rebels. As the rebels approached, orders came to defend the capital, he said. But on their phones, the soldiers saw images of their comrades elsewhere taking off their uniforms and running away.

After night fell, their orders changed.

"Burn everything: documents, files and hard disks," Mohammed recalled being told. "At this moment, I and my colleagues all felt that the regime was falling."

He, too, changed into civilian clothes and walked out of the base, he said.

Inside the palace, the hours ticked by as Assad's aides waited for the speech, the insider recalled.

"The idea that he had fled never came to mind," he said.

After midnight, they received a call telling them that the president had escaped, he said. Then the head of security for the area called to say that the guards were gone and that he was leaving, too.

Terror set in, the insider said, and he ran to his car, finding the palace empty and its gates open. He rushed into hiding, he said, concluding as he drove that there had never actually been a plan for a speech. It had, he believed, been a ploy to distract Assad's staff while the president sneaked away.

"He tricked us," the insider said. "Does he still have any popularity among his people? No. To the contrary. He betrayed us."

North of Damascus, Bilal Shahadi, 26, was among thousands of prisoners held in the Saydnaya prison, a lockup so brutal that Amnesty International called it a "human slaughterhouse."

During his two years there, Shahadi's days began with guards shouting, "Animals, come!" so that the inmates would call out their prisoner numbers one by one -- a grim roll call to see if anyone had died overnight.

Before dawn on Dec. 8, he awoke to jostling in his crowded cell and the sounds of voices outside yelling, "God is great!"

He made his way to the door and, to his surprise, pushed it open and walked out.

A prison guard, he said, had opened one cell and fled, leaving the keys behind. The first prisoners to get out unlocked the other cells.

Shahadi tore through the prison. In a guards' office, he said, he found a poster of Assad, which he set on fire with a cigarette lighter. He set off on foot with thousands of others, cheering and crying as they walked home.

"It was a dream," he recalled. "All of it felt like a dream."