Former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad handed over military secrets and extensive details of high-value assets to Israel to guarantee his safe passage out of the country, it has been claimed.
The autocrat, who was deposed earlier this month by rebel forces, allegedly provided the location of weapons stockpiles, missile-launch sites, military bases and other key infrastructure of Syria‘s government forces to Israeli chiefs.
In return, the IDF agreed to ensure his presidential jet would not be threatened as Assad headed to Russia‘s Hmeimim air base near Lakatia. He later fled the country on a Russian military jet as Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) claimed control of Damascus.
Hours after Assad touched down in Moscow, Israel launched a widespread bombing campaign that delivered pinpoint strikes on hundreds of Syrian military targets.
The stunning claims of Assad’s final cowardly act were made today by leading Turkish journalist Abdulkadir Selvi, who claimed in a column for Turkey’s Hurriyet newspaper that a ‘trusted source’ provided details of Assad’s communications with Israel.
It comes a day after the toppled leader made his first statement since seeking refuge in Moscow.
In a lengthy post released via the Syrian presidential Telegram channel, Assad said he was addressing ‘a flood of misinformation and narratives far removed from the truth’.
‘My departure from Syria was neither planned nor during the final hours of the battles, as some claim,’ Assad declared. ‘I remained in Damascus, carrying out my duties until the early hours of Sunday, December 8, 2024.
‘At no point did I consider stepping down or seeking refuge, nor was such a proposal made by any individual or party. The only course of action was to continue fighting against the terrorist onslaught.’
Former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad handed over military secrets and extensive details of high-value assets to Israel to guarantee his safe passage out of the country, it has been claimed
Israeli strikes on Syrian military targets near Tartus
A family stands at the destroyed cemetery in the Syrian town of Jobar in Eastern Ghouta on December 18, 2024
He went on to insist that he was forced to leave Syria when Hmeimim air base came under drone attack, prompting Moscow to order his evacuation.
Assad portrayed himself as a devoted leader and family man who remained ‘alongside his people’ throughout the civil war—even as his forces, allied with Russia, Hezbollah, and Iranian-backed militias, were responsible for thousands of deaths.
‘I have never sought positions for personal gain but have always considered myself a custodian of a national project, supported by the faith of the Syrian people,’ he said.
He concluded by expressing ‘hope that Syria will once again be free and independent.’
Assad’s last-ditch evacuation from Syria saw him board his private jet and head for Russia’s Hmeimim air base on the country’s west coast using a ‘transponder trick’.
Flight-tracking website Flightradar24 showed how the presidential plane believed to be carrying Assad left Damascus airport in the early hours of December 8.
The plane headed towards the Mediterranean Sea before making a U-turn and disappearing from the map, presumably as pilots turned off the transponder that tracks flights and reports their position to air traffic control.
Assad’s jet is said to have landed at the Moscow-controlled airbase, where he was swiftly transferred to a Russian military jet and left his war-torn nation behind, heading for refuge in the Russian capital.
Now, as Assad stews in Moscow, Islamist rebel group HTS is setting about bringing Syria under control, establishing a transition government and working to roll out aid and services to civilians.
Last week, HTS used state television to announce Mohammad al-Bashir – the head of the group’s so-called ‘Salvation Government’ in Syria’s northwest Idlib province – as interim Prime Minister of a transitional cabinet that will remain in place until March 1.
Former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad this week issued his first statement since being deposed by rebel groups and fleeing to Russia
People celebrate the collapse of 61 years of Ba’ath Party rule in Umayyad Square after armed groups opposing the Assad regime took control in Damascus
Workers carry human remains from a newly uncovered mass grave in Izra, in Syria’s southern Daraa province
Body bags lie in a field after a mass grave was discovered on agricultural land in Izra, Daraa province
News of Assad’s alleged interaction with Israeli officials follows an international war crimes prosecutor declaring that evidence emerging from mass grave sites in Syria has exposed a state-run ‘machinery of death’ under the toppled leader.
Speaking after visiting two mass grave sites in the towns of Qutayfah and Najha near Damascus, former US war crimes ambassador at large Stephen Rapp told Reuters: ‘We certainly have more than 100,000 people that were disappeared into and tortured to death in this machine.
‘I don’t have much doubt about those kinds of numbers given what we’ve seen in these mass graves.’
‘We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,’ said Rapp, who led prosecutions at the Rwanda and Sierra Leone war crimes tribunals and is working with Syrian civil society to document war crimes evidence and is helping to prepare for any eventual trials.
‘From the secret police who disappeared people from their streets and homes, to the jailers and interrogators who starved and tortured them to death, to the truck drivers and bulldozer drivers who hid their bodies, thousands of people were working in this system of killing,’ Rapp said.
‘We are talking about a system of state terror, which became a machinery of death.’
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are estimated to have been killed since 2011, when Assad’s crackdown on protests against him spiralled into a full-scale war.
Both Assad and his father Hafez, who preceded him as president and died in 2000, have long been accused by rights groups and governments of widespread extrajudicial killings, including mass executions within the country’s prison system and using chemical weapons against the Syrian people.
Assad had repeatedly denied that his government committed human rights violations and painted his detractors as extremists.
The head of US-based Syrian advocacy organisation the Syrian Emergency Task Force, Mouaz Moustafa, who also visited Qutayfah, 25 miles (40 km) north of Damascus, has estimated at least 100,000 bodies were buried there alone.
Ruined buildings dominate the landscape in Jobar, Syria
An An-124 heavy transport aircraft with its nose cone lifted at the Russian Hmeimim airbase, near Latakia, Syria, last Friday
Destroyed trucks after a Turkish airstrike near Qamishli, north-east of Syria, on December 11
The International Commission on Missing Persons in The Hague separately said it had received data indicating there may be as many as 66, as yet unverified, mass grave sites in Syria.
More than 150,000 people are considered missing, according to international and Syrian organisations, including the United Nations and the Syrian Network for Human Rights, it said.
Commission head Kathryne Bomberger told Reuters its portal for reporting the missing was now ‘exploding’ with new contacts from families.
By comparison, roughly 40,000 people went missing during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
For the families, the search for the truth in Syria could be long and difficult.
A DNA match will require at least three relatives providing DNA reference samples and taking a DNA sample from each one of these skeletal remains found in the graves, Bomberger said.
The commission called for sites to be protected so that evidence was preserved for potential trials, but the mass grave sites were easily accessible on Tuesday.
The United States is engaged with a number of UN bodies to ensure the Syrian people get answers and accountability, the State Department said on Tuesday.
Syrian residents living near Qutayfah, a former military base where one of the sites was located, and a cemetery in Najha used to hide bodies from detention sites described seeing a steady stream of refrigeration trucks delivering bodies which were dumped into long trenches dug with bulldozers.
‘The graves were prepared in an organised manner – the truck would come, unload the cargo it had, and leave. There were security vehicles with them, and no one was allowed to approach, anyone who got close used to go down with them,’ Abb Khalid, who works as a farmer next to Najha cemetery, said.
In Qutayfah, residents declined to speak on camera or use their names for fear of retribution, saying they were not yet sure the area was safe after Assad’s fall.
‘This is the place of horrors,’ one said on Tuesday.
A drone view shows the site of a mass grave from the rule of Bashar al-Assad
Bones are seen at the site of a mass grave from the rule of Bashar al-Assad
Stephen Rapp, head of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, talks with media as people inspect the site of a mass grave from the rule of Bashar al-Assad
Fighters of the ruling Syrian body inspect the site of a mass grave from the rule of Bashar al-Assad
Details of Syria’s mass graves first emerged during German court hearings and US congressional testimony in 2021 and 2023.
A man identified only as ‘the grave digger’ testified repeatedly as a witness about his work at the Najha and Qutayfah sites during the German trial of Syrian government officials.
While working in cemeteries around Damascus at the end of 2011, two intelligence officers showed up at his office and ordered him and his colleagues to transport and bury corpses.
He testified that he rode in a van adorned with pictures of Assad and drove to the sites several times a week between 2011 and 2018, followed by large refrigeration trucks filled with bodies.
The trucks carried several hundred corpses from Tishreen, Mezzeh and Harasta military hospitals to Najha and Qutayfah, he said in the trial.
Deep trenches were already dug and the gravedigger and his colleagues would unload the corpses into the trenches, which would be covered with dirt by excavators as soon as a section of the trench was full, he said.
‘Every week, twice a week, three trailer trucks arrived, packed with 300 to 600 bodies of victims of torture, starvation, and execution from military hospitals and intelligence branches around Damascus,’ he told Congress in a written statement.
The grave digger escaped from Syria to Europe in 2018 and has repeatedly testified about the mass graves, but always with his identity shielded from the public and the media.