Hours before December 8, the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad He had already left without notifying his relatives or his closest collaborators, as five senior officials revealed to the France Presse (AFP) agency.
The night before, Assad even called his advisor Buthaina Shaaban to ask her to prepare a speechnever pronounced. Finally he took a plane in Damascus to go to the Hmeimim Russian air basein the west of the country. “He left without notifying his closest collaborators,” a former senior official told AFP, requesting anonymity for security reasons. Once at the Hmeimim base, “a plane took him to Moscow,” this person adds.
“His brother Maher,” at the head of the feared Fourth Brigade, “found out causality when he was with his soldiers defending Damascus. He then decided to take a helicopter and leave, apparently to Baghdad,” indicates the same source.
Former senior officials and other sources told AFP what the last hours of the president Syrian, who authoritatively ruled the country since 2000 after succeeding his father, Hafez.
A ship without a captain
The day the rebel offensive began from the northern province of IdlibOn Wednesday, November 27, Bashar al-Assad was in Moscow, where his wife, Asma, is receiving treatment for cancer.
The leader did not appear at the doctoral thesis defense of his son Hafez, a mathematician living in Russia, two days later, even though the entire family did attend, according to an official from the deposed presidency, who requested anonymity.
On Saturday, November 30, when he returned from Moscow, the great city of northern Syria had already fallen.
Within days, the rebellion, led by the Islamist movement Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) and made up of pro-Turkish groups, took over Hama y Homsin the center of the country, before surrounding Damascus a week later.
“That Saturday [7 de diciembre]Assad did not meet with us. We knew he was there, but we didn’t have a meeting with him,” says a former senior official at the presidential palace. “There was no explanation; “That caused a lot of confusion at the top and even on the ground,” he adds. “Since the fall of Aleppo we didn’t see him again, which was very strange,” continues this senior official.
In the middle of last week he met with the heads of the intelligence services to reassure them. But in fact, there was no one at the helm. “The fall of Aleppo shook us,” says this former head of the presidency.
Then it was the turn of Hama, a city in the center of the country of great strategic value. “On Thursday I spoke at 11:30 in the morning with soldiers from Hama, who told me that the city was completely closed and that not even mice could enter,” a colonel, speaking under anonymity, told AFP. “Two hours later they received the order to not give battle and to redeploy to Homs, further south. The soldiers (…) were not knowing what to do; They changed their clothes, threw away their weapons and tried to return home. Who gave the order? We don’t know,” adds this colonel.
In Homs, the governor assured a journalist that he had asked the Army to resist. But it was of no use: no one defended the city in the name of the regime.
A speech continually postponed
On Saturday morning, with Damascus surrounded, there was talk of the possibility of Bashar al-Assad giving a speech. “Everything was ready,” says the former senior presidential official. “Later we were surprised to learn that the speech had been postponed, perhaps to Sunday morning.”
According to him, all senior officials were unaware that at that time the Syrian Army had begun to burn your files.
On Saturday at 9:00 p.m. (18:00 GMT), “the president calls his political advisor Buthaina Shaaban to ask her to prepare a speech and present it to the political committee, which must meet on Sunday morning,” another former senior official told AFP. . “At 10 at night she calls him, but he no longer answers the phone,” adds this close collaborator of the deposed president.
In the evening, presidential press chief Kamel Sakr told reporters: “The president is going to make a statement very soon.” But then he stops answering the phone, as does the Minister of the Interior, Mohamed al Rahmun. The former senior official says he was in his office until 2:30 in the morning. “We were ready at all times to receive a statement or a message from Assad. We would never have imagined such a scenario. We didn’t even know if the president was still in the palace,” he recalls.
Around midnight, it was made known that the president would need a cameraman for an event scheduled the next morning. “He reassured us that he must still be there,” says the former senior official. But around two in the morning, a person in charge of the intelligence services called him to tell him that everyone had left. “I was in shock. There were only two of us in the office. The palace was almost empty, and we were very confused.”
At 2:30 in the morning, therefore, he left the palace. “When I reached the Umayyad Square, I saw many soldiers fleeinglooking for a means of transportation.” “There were thousands; They came from security institutions, the Ministry of Defense and other branches of the security services. We found out that their superiors had given them the order to flee,” he says. “The scene was terrifying. Tens of thousands of cars leaving Damascus, and many more people walking on the roads. At that moment I knew that everything was lost and that Damascus had fallen“.
