Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled rebels on a plane to Moscow on Sunday, and now the story of his escape has been leaked to the public.
While his soldiers retreated and changed into civilian clothes, al-Assad’s fate was in the hands of Russian agents. Vladimir Putin decided to save his ally when he concluded that he could do nothing more to support Assad’s regime.
At a critical moment, Russia managed to convince Assad that he was losing the fight against armed groups led by the former al-Qaeda affiliate (HTS) and offered him and his family safe passage if he left Syria immediately.
Russian intelligence then organized the escape and brought Assad out via its air base in Syria. According to a Kremlin insider, the plane’s transponder was turned off to avoid tracking.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Putin has also not yet commented on the fall of Assad’s regime. According to insiders, he is still trying to figure out why Russian intelligence failed to spot the growing threat to Assad’s rule at the time.
“This was damage control. It makes perfect sense that the Russians told Assad to back down because they wanted to avoid a bloodbath in which he would suffer the same fate as Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein, who was hanged in 2006 after a trial,” said Ruslan Pukhov, head of the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a defense and security think tank.
Russian officials have been surprised by the speed of the turn of events in Syria, even as they try to maintain a cool head. They also fear for the future of their two key military bases in Syria – the naval port of Tartus and the airfield at Khmeimim.
Russian state media insists that Assad is to blame for the defeat, that Moscow has kept its word by not giving up on him, and that it should now focus on maintaining its strategic interests in Syria and the wider Middle East.
Russia initially bombed opposition forces in an attempt to push them back, but with the Syrian army putting up little resistance as rebels seized the city of Hama days after seizing Aleppo, the Kremlin concluded it could not protect the regime as the rebels stormed the strategic city of Homs, one of the sources told Bloomberg.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held talks on the Syrian crisis with his Iranian and Turkish counterparts in Doha the day before Assad fled. Iran, like Russia, has been a close ally of Assad, and the two countries came to his defense in 2015 when Putin sent Russian troops to Syria to help Assad push back rebels who had surrounded Damascus.
Turkey, on the other hand, supported the rebels who finally succeeded in overthrowing the long-time Syrian dictator, which is why many analysts say that this country is perhaps the biggest winner in this development of the situation, N1 writes.
