Bashar al-Assad faces the top: Syria rebels attain fringe of Damascus as Russia and Iran abandon him and ‘hundreds of his troopers desert’

Syrian rebels have reached the outskirts of Damascus in a lightning push to the capital amid their renewed offensive to topple the Assad regime.

Government forces withdrew as rebel groups encroached on the suburbs of Damascus, wrestling for control after more than a week of intensified fighting.

Syrians still in the nominally government-controlled territory of Jaramana seized the opportunity to pull down a statue of Assad’s father as the regime faces collapse.

Rebel troops to the north made a lunge towards the strategic city of Homs, just days after they proclaimed a major victory in the taking of the city of Hama on Thursday.

The staggering assault, helped in part by Assad’s allies distractions in other conflicts, has seen HTS and other groups make the fastest battlefield advance by either side since the civil war began almost 13 years ago.

As Assad allegedly resumed duties in the capital, support for the president appeared to dry up.

Charles Lister, director of the Syria and countering terrorism and extremism programs at the Middle East Institute, told Bloomberg that Assad’s future has ‘never looked more fragile’ as the opposition encroaches on Homs and allied support withers.

Russia does not seem ‘able or perhaps even willing’ to save Assad, he assessed.

While capturing Homs could close the land route between the government and Tartus, home to Russia’s only Mediterranean port, Russia appears not to be in a position to help Assad regain ground with focus and resources directed to Ukraine.

‘Russia doesn’t have a plan to save Assad and doesn’t see one emerging as long as the Syrian president’s army continues to abandon its positions,’ a source ‘close to the Kremlin’ told Bloomberg.

Iran, likewise, has been hesitant, or unable, to funnel its support to Syria. On Friday, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said he would would only help Assad ‘to the extent necessary’, but previously promised to ‘consider’ sending troops.

The capture of Hama has given the rebel forces, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), control of a strategic central city they never managed to seize before.

Homs is the next target for the rebels, deemed crucial for Assad’s hopes of staying in power.

‘Assad now cannot afford to lose anything else. The big battle is the one coming against Homs. If Homs falls, we are talking of a potential change of regime,’ Jihad Yazigi, editor of the Syria Report newsletter, told Reuters.

It follows a staggering effort to seize Aleppo, the main northern city in Syria, last week as part of a blitz offensive beginning on November 27.

The collapse of Syrian government control in the north has sharply illustrated a shift in the balance of power since Lebanon’s Hezbollah group, a lynchpin of Assad’s forces, suffered catastrophic losses in its war with Israel.

While Hezbollah has reportedly sent 2,000 fighters to Syria, per a source close to the Iran-backed proxy group today, Assad’s backing from allies continues to wither.

Rebel forces were just 12 miles (20km) from Damascus by 11am GMT on Saturday, posing an imminent threat to the capital, according to a war monitor and rebels.

The Syrian army reportedly withdrew its forces from all towns about 10km from the capital, a monitor reported soon after.

Video shared on social media by reporters claimed to show regime forces routing on foot from the town of Zakiah, a mere 16 miles from Damascus.

President Bashar al-Assad has reportedly returned to the capital to continue carrying out duties, officials said today following reports he had left.

Meanwhile, Syrians in Jaramana – a suburb of the capital – tore down a statue of Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, as some waved the flag of the Druze.

The suburb is still nominally controlled by the Assad regime at the time of writing, and it did not appear to be militant rebel groups (who are still several miles from Jaramana and Damascus – pulling down the statue, contrary to other reports. 

Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP that local rebel fighters now also controlled all of Daraa province. 

Rebel commander Hassan Abdel Ghani, with the Islamist-led alliance that launched the offensive in the country’s northwest, said ‘we are now less than 20 km from the southern gate of the capital Damascus’. 

‘The advance towards the capital continues,’ he added.

The Syrian government was also forced to evacuate from its positions in Quneitrea, near the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.

The Syrian Democratic Forces, the main ally of the US against the regime, meanwhile seized key areas in Deir ez Zor and Raqqa on December 6, making it harder for Iran to move forces in to help Assad or resupply Iranian-backed forces like Hezbollah. 

Israel’s military now assesses that the rebels pose a direct threat to Assad’s rule. 

While a weakened Assad regime plays to Israel’s interests, there remains debate around sending troops in – amid an ongoing conflict with Hamas in Gaza and clashes with Iran – and anxiety around helping Sunni jihadists once aligned with al-Qaeda.

Pro-government forces have been backed by intense Russian airstrikes, but rebels continue to push through Assad’s lines.

Since Russia does not share a land border with Syria, it also depends on Turkey’s goodwill to allow warships to pass through the Bosporus.

While Turkey and Russia were able to work together to broker a truce in May 2020, Turkish forces have backed opposition groups in an effort to displace ISIS.

For Russia, Syria represents a strategic stronghold key to its efforts to project power in the Middle East. 

The loss of influence would be ‘devastating’ for Russia, Nicole Grajewski, fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the Wall Street Journal.

‘To see Russian planes leave Syria as rebel forces move onward towards their air bases, and their assets in Damascus fall, this would be so devastating for the Russian image of itself,’ she said. 

‘It would be akin to a Saigon moment for them,’ she added.

Ukrainian intelligence has assessed that Russian forces have ‘suffered significant losses, with some units of the aggressor state surrounded’.

‘Hundreds of Moscow troops are listed as missing in Syria,’ it reported.

Rebel groups were rumoured to have received operational training from Ukrainian special forces, learning from tactics developed during the war in Ukraine, the Kyiv Post reported. 

Assad relied heavily on Russian and Iranian backing during the most intense years of the conflict, helping him to claw back most territory and Syria’s biggest cities before front lines froze in 2020.

But Russia has been focused on the war in Ukraine since 2022, and many in the top leadership of Hezbollah, the most powerful Iran-aligned force, were killed by Israel over the past two months. 

Iran, meanwhile, has seen its proxies across the region degraded by Israeli airstrikes.

And Syrian troops are exhausted and hollowed out by 13 years of war and economic crises, with little will left to fight.

‘The coming days and weeks will be critical in determining whether the rebel offensive poses an existential threat to the Assad regime or whether the regime manages to regain its footing and push back on recent rebel gains,’ said Mona Yacoubian, an analyst with the United States Institute for Peace, as reported the Associated Press.

‘While weakened and distracted, Assad’s allies are unlikely to simply cave to the rebels’ offensive,’ she wrote in an analysis.

Abu Mohammed al-Golani (AKA Abu Mohammad al-Julani), the main insurgent commander, has vowed to protect Syria’s religious minorities as HTS makes gains.

In public remarks clearly intended to soften his image and reassure foreign countries, Golani has also emphasised his split years ago with Al Qaeda and Islamic State, and said he has always opposed attacks outside Syria.

HTS and the other rebel groups are trying to consolidate their rule in Aleppo, bringing it under the administration of the so-called Salvation Government they established in their northwestern enclave.

The Institute for the Study of War assessed ‘support to the Assad regime will almost certainly fail to stop the opposition offensive at this time unless ground forces are deployed rapidly and in larger numbers’.