Syrian President Bashar al-Assad flew out of Damascus for an unknown destination on Sunday, as rebels said they had infiltrated the capital with no sign of army deployments.
Syrian army units abandoned their positions on the outskirts of Damascus on Saturday night, fleeing the advance of rebel forces.
The military said it was “reinforcing” defensive lines around the capital, which appeared to have collapsed.
Mohammed al-Rahmoun, the Syrian interior minister, earlier said there was a “very strong security cordon on the outskirts of Damascus and no one can break it”. But the Syrian opposition fighters early on Sunday disproved this, as they reached the capital for the first time since 2018.
The Syrian regime fell back from the cities of Aleppo, Hama and Homs in quick succession since the rebel offensive began less than two weeks ago.
In the civil war of 2011 to 2016, the Assad regime turned the tide against opposition forces with the aid of Russian airstrikes and Hezbollah troops.
Both Moscow and Iran, Hezbollah’s key sponsor, have their attention elsewhere on conflicts elsewhere.
It has left the Syrian army without much support in the face of the lightning rebel offensive led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) group.
Analysts told The Telegraph that low pay and morale as well as little experience were hampering the effectiveness of the army.
“The Syrian army has never been very good – it ruled by fear and terror, bolstered and backed up by Russians since 2015 who provided firepower and direction. Most of the officers were selected because they were close to Assad,” said Hamish de Bretton Gordon, a retired British army colonel and a chemical weapons adviser to NGOs working in Syria and Iraq.
“The commanders… are more focused on smuggling and extortion than on actually creating defensive positions and leading their troops,” said Greg Waters, of the Middle East Institute.
The army has largely avoided heavy combat since a ceasefire was struck with the rebels in 2020 at the start of the pandemic.
“The army’s collapse is a reflection of a more general collapse in Syrian state institutions,” said Jihad Yazigi, editor-in-chief of the Syria Report.
“There is a deep sense in regime areas that things are not only not improving, but that there are no prospects of things getting better,” he added.
Stephen Cook, a Middle East expert at the Council of Foreign Relations, told The Telegraph that the bulk of the Syrian army was made up of conscripts who “did not want to be there”.
“Only the elite units like the Republican Guard could ever be relied upon to fight,” he added. “That’s why Assad brought in Hezbollah.”
Mr Cook described president Bashar al-Assad’s army as a “Soviet-style” military that has huge problems with supply and logistics.
Syria has also become a major producer and supplier of drugs in recent years, which has led to state institutions like the army effectively becoming nodes of an organised crime network.
With his soldiers retreating on all fronts Assad this week announced that he would raise their salaries by 50 per cent, a move that experts suggest was a knee-jerk attempt to address longstanding morale issues.
“The fact that the security forces melted away is a bit of a surprise, but it’s not a huge surprise, to be honest,” added Natasha Hall, a senior fellow of the CSIS Middle East Program.
“They didn’t have the sort of morale to stand up against something like this.
“We forget that they’ve also lost a lot of people throughout this war, we forget that, you know, [Assad’s] Alawite sect has been impoverished in the mountains for many, many decades.
“It’s not as if they have won a great deal from this regime. It is that the Assad regime has used the sectarian narrative to make them believe that this is an existential issue for them.”
Good preparation, tactics and skilful use of propaganda on the part of the rebels also appears to have put the Syrian army into a state of shock. HTS has officers, special forces units, drone forces and night-time commandos.
“The rebels fighting today are a very different force to those the regime fought before. They are better equipped and disciplined … I assume Turkey had a strong hand in this. They have the most to gain,” said Mr Waters.
Large numbers of army deserters have laid down their arms and surrendered to the rebels, with a long queue forming in Idlib after they were offered amnesty.
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