By Maya Gebeily, Suleiman Al-Khalidi, Ahmed Rasheed and Timour Azhari
DAMASCUS/AMMAN/BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Twenty-three-year-old Syrian military conscript Farhan al-Khouli was badly paid and demoralized. His army outpost in scrubland near the rebel-held city of Idlib should have had nine soldiers but it just had three, after some had bribed the commanding officers to escape serving, he said.
And, of the two conscripts with him, one was regarded by his superiors as mentally unfit and not trusted with a gun, Khouli said.
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For years, the Islamist rebels of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) had sat behind the nearby frontline, with Syria’s long civil war frozen. But on Wednesday, Nov. 27, Khouli’s commanding officer – at another post behind the frontlines – called his mobile phone to tell him a rebel convoy was heading his way.
The officer said the unit should stand its ground and fight.
Instead, Khouli put his phone on airplane mode, changed into civilian clothes, dropped his rifle and fled. As he walked along the road back south, other groups of soldiers were abandoning their posts too.
“I looked back and saw everyone walking behind me. When they saw one person flee, everyone started to toss their weapons and run,” he told Reuters this week in Damascus, where he has found work at a horse stable.
In a little less than two weeks, the rebels would sweep into the capital Damascus, toppling former president Bashar al-Assad as his army simply melted away. The rout abruptly ended a 13-year conflict that had killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Reuters spoke to a dozen sources including two Syrian army deserters, three senior Syrian officers, two Iraqi militia commanders working with the Syrian army, a Syrian security source and a source familiar with the thinking of Lebanese group Hezbollah, one of Assad’s main military allies.
The sources, along with intelligence documents Reuters found in an abandoned military office in the capital, painted a detailed picture of how Assad’s once-feared army had been hollowed out by the demoralization of troops, heavy reliance on foreign allies particularly for the command structure, and growing anger across the ranks at rampant corruption.
Most of the sources asked not to be named because they were not authorised to talk to media or feared retribution.
Since the war began in 2011, Assad’s army command had come to depend on allied Iranian and Iran-funded Lebanese and Iraqi forces to provide the best fighting units in Syria, all the senior sources said.
Crucially, much of the Syrian military’s operational command structure was run by Iranian military advisors and their militia allies, they said.
But many of the Iranian military advisers had left this spring after Israeli air strikes on Damascus, and the rest departed last week, said the Iraqi militia commanders, who worked alongside them.
Hezbollah fighters and commanders had already mostly left in October to focus on the escalating war in Lebanon with Israel, the source familiar with Hezbollah thinking said.
The Syrian army’s own central command and control centre no longer functioned well after the Iranian and Hezbollah officers left and the military lacked a defence strategy, particularly for Syria’s second city of Aleppo, a Syrian colonel, two Syrian security sources and a Lebanese security source familiar with the Syrian military said.
By contrast, rebels in the northwest, on paper numerically far weaker than the army, had spent years consolidating under a single operations room that coordinated their groups and units in battle, an International Crisis Group report said after the fall of Aleppo.
Reuters was unable to contact a current representative of the armed forces. Syria’s new most powerful figure, HTS chief Ahmad al-Sharaa told Reuters on Wednesday he would dissolve Syria’s security forces. Iran’s mission to the United Nations, the Iraqi militias and Hezbollah did not respond to requests for comment.
ALEPPO
As Aleppo came under attack in late November, army units were not given a clear plan but were told to work it out for themselves or to fall back to the strategic city of Homs to try to regroup, two Syrian security sources said.
Aleppo fell without a major fight on Nov. 29, just two days after the offensive began, sending shockwaves through the military, three senior Syrian officers said.
What was left on the ground was a Syrian army severely lacking in cohesion, all the sources said, describing multiple units that were undermanned because officers were accepting bribes to let soldiers off duty, or had told soldiers to go home and were collecting their salaries themselves.
In 2020, the army had 130,000 personnel, according to think tank IISS’ Military Balance report, describing it as significantly depleted by the long civil war and transformed into an irregularly structured, militia-style organisation focused on internal security.
In the days ahead of the regime’s collapse on Sunday, the United States had information of broad levels of desertions and military forces changing sides, as well as some elements fleeing to Iraq, a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said.
Reuters could not establish the overall manpower shortage in the military or current force strength.
The Syrian army sources described officers and troops alike as demoralised by pay that was consistently low even after painful military victories earlier in the war and by reports, which Reuters could not verify, that Assad’s close family were growing immensely rich.
On Nov. 28, the General Command of the Army and Armed Forces issued a telegram, ordering all troops to be on full combat readiness, according to a military document found by Reuters at an Air Intelligence office in Damascus.
In a sign the regime was desperate, Syria’s Air Intelligence Directorate, a key agency close to the Assad family, accused its men of “laxity” at checkpoints throughout the country after one was overrun by rebels in the south on Dec. 1, and warned of punishment “without leniency” if they did not fight, the document seen by Reuters shows.
Despite the orders and threats, increasing numbers of soldiers and officers began to desert, all the sources said.
Instead of confronting the rebels, or even unarmed protesters, soldiers were seen by residents of Syrian cities, and in many videos that began circulating online, abandoning their posts, changing into civilian clothes and going home.
Reuters journalists entering Syria on Sunday found army uniforms still strewn across Damascus streets.
OFFICERS
The corruption and poor morale went up through the ranks.
Many midranking officers had been growing increasingly angry in recent years that the army’s sacrifices and successes during the war were not reflected in better pay, conditions and resources, two serving, one recently retired and one defected officer said.
In 2020, Russia and Turkey agreed a deal that froze the frontlines after Assad retook all major cities and the main highway linking Damascus to Aleppo, further partitioning a country also split by Kurdish-controlled areas.
But Syria’s economy continued to reel from U.S. sanctions and reduced foreign aid, said Aron Lund, a fellow at Middle East-focused think tank Century International. Rampant inflation ensued.
“Things just got worse for everyone, except for the oligarchs and elites around Assad. That seems to have been incredibly demoralizing,” Lund said.
While decrees in 2021 roughly doubled military salaries to keep up with inflation that topped 100% that year, buying power rapidly fell anyway as the Syrian pound crashed against the dollar.
Col. Makhlouf Makhlouf, who served in an engineering brigade, said that if anybody complained about corruption they were called in for questioning at a military court – something that had happened to him more than once.
“We were living in a scary society. We were afraid to say a word,” Makhlouf said. He had been stationed in Hama but deserted before the city fell to the rebels on Dec. 5, he said in an interview in Aleppo on Tuesday.
Anger had been building particularly over the past year or so, a serving senior military intelligence officer said, saying there was “growing resentment against Assad,” including among core high-ranking supporters from his Alawite minority community.
YEARS OF DECAY
Khouli’s military experience illustrated the army’s problems – and helps explain his lack of loyalty.
He was drafted for the obligatory 18-month service at age 19, after having paid-off an officer to delay his service for a year.
When his service period expired, he was ordered to remain in the army indefinitely. He deserted but was later picked up by a patrol, put in prison for 52 days and then sent to the remote outpost near Idlib.
He was paid 500,000 Syrian pounds ($40) a month. Army rations were often pillaged before arriving. Sometimes his entire pay went on buying more food, he said.
Comrades with money would pay officers $100, which he lacked, to get out of service, Khouli said. Khouli’s brigade was supposed to have 80 soldiers, but in fact there were only 60, he said.
He described bad treatment from officers, including being assigned heavy manual labour digging earth berms in both very hot and very cold weather and during nights.
Reuters was not able to verify independently the details of his experiences.
One former major described the use of forced conscripts as a “fatal mistake”.
A former army logistics serviceman, Zuhair, 28, said in an interview in Damascus on Tuesday he had seen officers steal and sell electricity generators and fuel. “All they cared about was using their positions to enrich themselves,” he said.
He had fought for Assad for years but he had cousins among the rebels and when they advanced, he cheered, he said. “I don’t know how to describe how happy I am,” he said.
RELIANCE ON ALLIES
To fight back the earlier opposition uprising, which began with protests in 2011, Assad relied on allies. Russia sent jets that bombed rebel positions, Iran sent military advisers and fighters from Hezbollah. Iran-backed militias from Iraq and another group it formed from Afghan Shi’ite fighters also came.
Their fighting skill and well-being contrasted with Syria’s own soldiers. An Iraqi militia commander serving near Aleppo said he knew of a Syrian platoon meant to consist of 30 soldiers that had only eight present.
The militia often invited those soldiers to eat with them out of pity at the poor condition of their rations, the commander said.
Hezbollah and allied militias regarded the regular Syrian forces with little more than contempt, the Iraqi militia commanders and a source familiar with Hezbollah thinking said.
They did not trust them for important operations and often would not fight alongside them, those sources added.
OCT. 7 HAMAS ATTACKS
Iran’s presence in Syria was curtailed in the months following the attack on Israel by Tehran-backed Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, the Iraqi militia commander based near Aleppo and an Iraqi military adviser based in Damascus said.
Israel’s response to Hamas’ incursion included escalating strikes on Iran-linked targets, including in Syria.
On April 1, a strike killed top commanders from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards at a building in an Iranian consular compound in Damascus. Israel has not confirmed or denied responsibility for the strike.
The Iraqi sources both said the number of Revolutionary Guards commanders present in Syria dropped significantly after that. One said Syria’s military operations command became ineffective as a result, a situation exacerbated by the withdrawal of Hezbollah in October.
Russia conducted air strikes on rebels as they advanced on Hama and Homs, both sides said at the time, but unlike in earlier phases of the war there were no effective ground forces able to benefit.
By Saturday, Dec. 7, Russia was calling for a political transition. The Kremlin and Russia foreign ministry declined to comment for this story. Russia, the Kremlin said on Tuesday, had “spent a lot of effort” to help Assad during the civil war but the situation had then deteriorated.
In Aleppo, Syrian forces had relied on Hezbollah to provide operational command, an Alawite Syrian army colonel said. Without Iranian advisers or Hezbollah, the army could not hold onto territory near the city, the colonel, the Iraqi commander and the Iraqi adviser said.
Iraqi militias sent more fighters to Syria last week, but they found all the contact channels to Iranian military advisors had been cut, the Iraqi commander said.
On Friday, after rebels had taken the city of Hama, the Iraqi groups were told to leave, he said.
“The battle for Syria was lost from day one,” the Iraqi military adviser added.
(Reporting by Maya Gebeily and Timour Azhari in Damascus, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman, Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad, Laila Bassam and Tom Perry in Beirut; Writing by Angus McDowall; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)
