Deterring aggression.. Why did the Assad regime forces collapse so quickly?

Locally, the current year 2024 witnessed the Baath Party holding elections for the party’s central leadership, and elections for the leadership of the branches in the governorates, and Bashar al-Assad was unanimously re-elected as the party’s Secretary-General. Then, the People’s Assembly elections were held, and the Baath Party won, and Bashar al-Assad subsequently assigned Muhammad Ghazi al-Jalali to form a new government. There were also changes in the governors, while the Ministry of Defense announced changes to the recruitment mechanism, according to which the maximum period for reserve service will become two years, with the dismissal of everyone who spent five years in reserve service, which means the dismissal of tens of thousands before the end of this year in preparation for relying on volunteers in the army.

These developments sent a message that Assad had broken the wall of Arab isolation and had once again become the recognized ruler of Syria in his regional surroundings, which also prompted several European countries to change their position on him, while the process of engineering the internal scene on the partisan, political and security levels was a prelude to announcing the regime’s victory over the forces of the revolution opposing it after nearly 14 years of war during which Assad and his allies had shed the blood of Syrians without restraint.

Before Operation "Deterrence of Aggression"

In light of this, talk this year has focused on the fate of the Syrian opposition factions, especially with the escalation of talk about normalizing Turkish-Syrian relations, and the extent of its impact on the reality and future of those factions in the event that the Turkish army withdraws from its military points in the liberated areas, and whether they will be able to stand alone in the face of the regime forces.

This coincided with the regime forces expanding their use of suicide drones daily to launch dozens of attacks on targets in villages located on the contact lines, in addition to artillery and missile shelling, which inflicted losses on the opposition and their military equipment, as well as civilians and their property.

In contrast, with the outbreak of war in Lebanon last September, and Hezbollah’s neglect of the Syrian file, in addition to Russia’s preoccupation with the long war in Ukraine, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham intensified military courses and field maneuvers to raise the combat capabilities and readiness of its members in preparation for seizing appropriate opportunities to expand the scope of the liberated areas.

The "Al-Fath Al-Mubin Operations Room" also increased the pace of qualitative operations that include storming regime positions. It launched a qualitative operation on Assad forces' bunkers in the Kabashin axis, which resulted in the capture of two soldiers. It also launched a qualitative operation in Jabal Al-Turkman, north of Latakia, which resulted in the killing and wounding of 28 officers and soldiers from the regime. It also carried out a third operation on the Ain Issa axis in the northern Latakia countryside, which resulted in the killing and wounding of 15 regime elements.

The Salvation Government’s Political Affairs Department also issued a statement holding the Assad regime responsible for targeting civilians and displacement movements, with the aim of holding the regime responsible for a potential escalation in the event of a new military battle. However, doubts remain about the ability of the Syrian revolutionary factions to launch an attack that bypasses the air control of the regime’s and Russian aircraft, and the cost of any military operation for the opposition, especially for civilians.

sudden collapse

But at dawn on November 27 of this year, the opposition factions in Idlib announced, under the banner of the “Military Operations Administration,” the launch of a battle entitled “Deterring Aggression,” and began attacking the “46th” regiment of the Syrian regular army west of Aleppo, which fell quickly, and the operation expanded on two axes, the first towards the city of Aleppo, and the second towards the city of Saraqib in Idlib Governorate, which is located at the intersection of the international Aleppo-Damascus road and the Aleppo-Latakia road.

On the third day, a heavy-caliber surprise was achieved when the opposition entered the city of Aleppo without a violent fight, took control of the city of Saraqib, and the regime forces fled randomly and not in an organized withdrawal towards Hama Governorate, which allowed the opposition to take control of huge weapons stores that included anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, rocket shells, more than 100 tanks, rocket launchers, and other special and heavy equipment.

On the fourth and fifth days, the opposition was able to control Aleppo International Airport, which the regime forces handed over to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) before withdrawing. It also took control of the Abu al-Duhur, Kuweires, and Meng military airports, the Artillery College, and the Military Academy in Aleppo. Military operations began in the northern Hama countryside after completing control over the entire Idlib governorate and tightening control over most of the neighborhoods of Aleppo city.

The sudden collapse of the regime forces, and the fall of cities, villages, airports and military bases in a matter of days, despite the opposition not having warplanes, air defense systems or effective and influential armored weapons, raised questions about the reasons for the collapse of the regime army, the absence of effective Russian air support on the battlefield, and the reasons for the absence of pro-Iranian militias. The answer lies in a mixture of international, regional and local reasons, some of which relate to the regime and its allies, and others to the opposition factions themselves.

The Syrian regime at a time when the allies are busy

On the regular side, it is clear that the war in Ukraine has attracted the bulk of Russia’s attention, and it has directed most of its capabilities to it, even to the recent use of forces from North Korea, which has affected the Russian military leadership’s focus on Syria despite the importance of the naval base in Tartus for Russian deployment in the Mediterranean and North Africa, although the only tangible measure is Russia’s withdrawal of the S-300 air defense battery, which is not as influential in the current fighting as Moscow’s directing of elite Russian pilots to Ukraine instead of Syria.

While there are rumors about reducing the number of Russian warplanes in Syria, this does not appear in the statistics of the Military Balance report issued by the Center for International and Strategic Studies in London, for the years 2022 and 2024, which indicate the presence of 10 Russian Sukhoi 24 aircraft, 6 Russian Sukhoi 34 aircraft, and 6 Russian Sukhoi 35 aircraft, in Syria.

As for the Iranian presence, its leadership structure in Syria was damaged by Israeli strikes, which in December 2023 targeted Brigadier General Razi Mousavi, head of the “Resistance Front Support Unit in Lebanon and Syria,” in an Israeli airstrike on his home in Damascus. Then, in January 2024, Hojjatollah Amidvar, the commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force intelligence in Syria, along with four of his assistants, was targeted by bombing their headquarters in Damascus.

Then, in April 2024, Brigadier General Mohammad Zahedi, commander of the Quds Force in Lebanon and Syria, and his deputy, Brigadier General Mohammad Rahimi, and five of their accompanying officers were killed in an Israeli airstrike on an Iranian consulate in Damascus, in addition to the killing of other Iranian advisors in Israeli raids, including Colonel Mohammad Shorjeh, Colonel Panah Taghizadeh, Saeed Ali Dadi, Reza Zarei, and Behrouz Vahedi, in addition to the killing of Hezbollah’s first military leadership in Lebanon, and the bombing of the party’s warehouses and headquarters in Damascus, Qusayr, and Palmyra, which forced Iranian advisors and Hezbollah members to reduce their presence inside Syria and evacuate many headquarters, amid fears of violent Israeli airstrikes.

As for the regime forces, which are primarily based on compulsory conscription, they were suffering from the effects of their lack of ideological doctrine that would stabilize the fighters as the war dragged on, in addition to the low salaries, which did not exceed the equivalent of about $30 per month for each soldier.

“Many soldiers fight as long as they get paid, and as long as they believe they can win. Fighting is a paycheck, not a cause worth sacrificing one’s life for,” is a common refrain in military psychology literature, as cited in the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s 2021 report on the collapse of Afghan government forces in the face of the Taliban.

Other factors also play a role in the collapse of the regime forces, such as the low level of training, the limited ability to fight in the absence of supporting air cover, the spread of corruption which has undermined the culture of discipline, the erosion of the command and control system in light of the spread of the “militia” culture following previous rounds of fighting, the defection of many officers and soldiers over the years of war, the reliance on the support of local and regional militias in the fighting, and the conviction of many officers and soldiers that they are defending a regime that does not care about them.

Over time, the state of flight and collapse, and the feeling of futility of fighting, usually leads to additional collapses, spreading a state of loss of control and dominance, until gathering at an organized defensive line, or friendly parties intervene to target the attackers to stop the pursuit and advance operations, which gives an opportunity to organize the ranks and gather the scattered forces, and this is what the Syrian regime hopes to achieve at a defensive line in Hama, specifically at the town of Qamhana, which the Chief of Staff of the Syrian Army visited on the fifth day of the battle, and in conjunction with requesting support from Moscow, Tehran and Baghdad.

Opposition in a new guise

However, the collapse of the regime forces in Aleppo and Idlib cannot be attributed to internal factors related to the regime and its allies alone. Rather, there are other factors related to the attacking party, the opposition. Following the end of the regime's last military campaign on the liberated areas in 2020, the process of studying the causes of the field collapse among the opposition factions during the fighting began, and work began to avoid obstacles, most notably the weakness of command and control and the multiplicity of military decision-making centers. The "Al-Fath Al-Mubin Operations Room", which was established in 2019, worked to further coordinate military activities between the factions in Idlib, and to reduce the level of chaos and conflict in planning and field activities.

The process of institutionalizing and governing military and security work also began, through interest in establishing regular military and police colleges, for which curricula are prepared that suit the Syrian field, with a move towards local military manufacturing, which focuses on technology, which was evident at the start of the battle in the "Shaheen" brigades, which use drones with a professional methodology, which allowed the factions to target helicopters belonging to the regime at Al-Nayrab Airport in Aleppo, kill the commander of military security in Hama Governorate, and attack sensitive headquarters, military equipment, and gatherings of regime forces, which created a state of confusion among its forces.

In addition to expanding the use of weapons equipped with night-vision thermal scopes, which allowed for the continuation of combat operations at night effectively, and relying on intelligence information to carry out qualitative operations, as in the attack that led to the killing of Brigadier General Kiomars Pourhashemi, the commander of Iranian military advisers in Aleppo.

The "Deterrence of Aggression" battle shows a high level of professionalism among the opposition factions today, compared to the state of chaos that characterized most of their previous battles. In fact, the current battle was accompanied by psychological operations targeting the regime's officers and soldiers through the distribution of leaflets by drones, statements on social media, and messages via phones calling on them to defect, in addition to presenting a political and media discourse that reassures religious and sectarian minorities about the lives and properties of their members, and addresses countries supporting the regime, such as Russia, with a discourse expressing readiness to cooperate in what serves the interests of both countries.

What's next?

As a result, the momentum of the opposition factions’ attack, which has not stopped since its launch, has put regime forces under constant pressure, and forced them to flee, while army leaders are trying to strengthen the defensive line in Hama, while waiting for reinforcements to arrive from Iraq, Iran and Russia. Meanwhile, airstrikes continue on civilian areas in Idlib and Aleppo with the aim of inflicting casualties among the population to pressure the opposition.

Syria is not like any other country in terms of importance, but rather it is a strategic country, and its importance is explained by Sami Sharaf, former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s secretary for information, in the first part of his memoirs, saying: “The English point of view is that Syria is the key to the region, and the fate of Jordan and Lebanon depends on what happens in Syria.” Likewise, Syria represents for Russia a point of concentration and launching for Russian military activities in the Mediterranean and North Africa, reaching the Sahel and Sahara region. It also represents for Iran the link in the land route from Iran to Lebanon, and its interruption means Iran’s withdrawal into itself. Therefore, the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon stated that “Iran, Russia, and the axis of resistance will not allow the events of the past years to be repeated in Syria, and that Tehran will provide the necessary support to Damascus,” which was later emphasized by the Iranian president in a call with Bashar al-Assad.

The Iraqi government is also concerned about the repercussions of the rise of the Syrian opposition factions once again on the Iraqi interior, and its repercussions on the Sunni sect, while many Arab countries are wary of the narrative of the victory of armed "revolutionary" factions over an Arab regime, which may mean that the experience will inspire others in other countries.

Israel is closely monitoring what is happening, as it does not want to replace Iranian influence with other armed Islamic forces, while Washington is also following up, as it has forces on the ground in the areas controlled by the "SDF", which was forced to withdraw from several areas in Aleppo, especially from Tal Rifaat, to avoid being besieged. Finally, there is Turkey, which is watching cautiously, as the attack came in its favor, but after it had bet in vain on the path of normalization with the Assad regime.

The above data indicates that there are several parties that have deep interests in the survival of the Assad regime, and others that have interests in the opposition not advancing further. Therefore, the option of intervening to support the regime’s forces, organize its ranks, and launch a counterattack remains likely. However, what happened confirms that the regime’s fragility is profound, that betting on its victory was an illusion, and that peoples who cling to their rights, seize available opportunities, and develop their capabilities cannot have their hope eliminated, no matter how long the conflict lasts, and no matter how high its costs are.

Source: Al Jazeera