Assad's final hours in Syria: Deception, despair and flight

By Samia Nakhoul, Maya Gebeily, Parisa Hafezi and Suleiman Al-Khalidi

Bashar al-Assad confided in almost no one about his plans to flee Syria as his reign collapsed. Instead, aides, officials and even relatives were deceived or kept in the dark, more than a dozen people with knowledge of the events told Reuters.

Hours before he escaped for Moscow, Assad assured a meeting of about 30 army and security chiefs at the defence ministry on Saturday that Russian military support was on its way and urged ground forces to hold out, according to a commander who was present and requested anonymity to speak about the briefing.

Civilian staff were none the wiser, too.

Assad told his presidential office manager on Saturday when he finished work he was going home but instead headed to the airport, according to an aide in his inner circle.

He also called his media adviser, Buthaina Shaaban, and asked her to come to his home to write him a speech, the aide said. She arrived to find no one was there.

"Assad didn't even make a last stand. He didn't even rally his own troops," said Nadim Houri, executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative regional think-tank. "He let his supporters face their own fate."

Reuters was unable to contact Assad in Moscow, where he has been granted political asylum. Interviews with 14 people familiar with his final days and hours in power paint a picture of a leader casting around for outside help to extend his 24-year rule before leaning on deception and stealth to plot his exit from Syria in the early hours of Sunday.

Most of the sources, who include aides in the former president's inner circle, regional diplomats and security sources and senior Iranian officials, asked for their names to be withheld to freely discuss sensitive matters.

Assad didn't even inform his younger brother, Maher, commander of the Army's elite 4th Armoured Division, about his exit plan, according to three aides. Maher flew a helicopter to Iraq and then to Russia, one of the people said.

Assad's maternal cousins, Ehab and Eyad Makhlouf, were similarly left behind as Damascus fell to the rebels, according to a Syrian aide and Lebanese security official. The pair tried to flee by car to Lebanon but were ambushed on the way by rebels who shot Ehab dead and wounded Eyad, they said. There was no official confirmation of the death and Reuters was unable to independently verify the incident.

Assad himself fled Damascus by plane on Sunday, Dec. 8, flying under the radar with the aircraft's transponder switched off, two regional diplomats said, escaping the clutches of rebels storming the capital. The dramatic exit ended his 24 years of rule and his family's half a century of unbroken power, and brought the 13-year civil war to an abrupt halt.

He flew to Russia's Hmeimim airbase in the Syrian coastal city of Latakia, and from there on to Moscow.

Assad's immediate family, wife Asma and their three children, were already waiting for him in the Russian capital, according to three former close aides and a senior regional official.

Videos of Assad's home, taken by rebels and citizens who thronged the presidential complex following his flight and posted on social media, suggest he made a hasty exit, showing cooked food left on the stove and several personal belongings left behind, such as family photo albums.

RUSSIA AND IRAN: NO MILITARY RESCUE

There would be no military rescue from Russia, whose intervention in 2015 had helped turn the tide of the civil war in favour of Assad, or from his other staunch ally Iran.

This had been made clear to the Syrian leader in the days leading up to his exit, when he sought aid from various quarters in a desperate race to cling to power and secure his safety, according to the people interviewed by Reuters.

Assad visited Moscow on Nov. 28, a day after Syrian rebel forces attacked the northern province of Aleppo and lightning drive across the country, but his pleas for military intervention fell on deaf ears in the Kremlin which was unwilling to intervene, three regional diplomats said.

Hadi al-Bahra, the head of Syria's main opposition abroad, said that Assad didn't convey the reality of the situation to aides back home, citing a source within Assad's close circle and a regional official.

"He told his commanders and associates after his Moscow trip that military support was coming," Bahra added. "He was lying to them. The message he received from Moscow was negative."

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Wednesday that Russia had spent a lot of effort in helping stabilise Syria in the past but its priority now was the conflict in Ukraine.

Four days after that trip, on Dec. 2, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi met with Assad in Damascus. By that time, the rebels from the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamist group had taken control of Syria's second-largest city Aleppo and were sweeping southwards as government forces crumbled.

Assad was visibly distressed during the meeting, and conceded that his army was too weakened to mount an effective resistance, a senior Iranian diplomat told Reuters.

Assad never requested that Tehran deploy forces in Syria though, according to two senior Iranian officials who said he understood that Israel could use any such intervention as a reason to target Iranian forces in Syria or even Iran itself.

The Kremlin and Russian foreign ministry declined to comment for this article, while the Iranian foreign ministry was not immediately available to comment.

ASSAD CONFRONTS OWN DOWNFALL

After exhausting his options, Assad finally accepted the inevitability of his downfall and resolved to leave the country, ending his family's dynastic rule which dates back to 1971.

Three members of Assad's inner circle said he initially wanted to seek refuge in the United Arab Emirates, as rebels seized Aleppo and Homs and were advancing towards Damascus.

They said he was rebuffed by the Emiratis who feared an international backlash for harbouring a figure subject to U.S. and European sanctions for allegedly using chemical weapons in a crackdown on insurgents, accusations that Assad has rejected as a fabrication.

The UAE government didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Yet Moscow, while unwilling to intervene militarily, was not prepared to abandon Assad, according to a Russian diplomatic source who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, attending the Doha forum in Qatar on Saturday and Sunday, spearheaded the diplomatic effort to secure the safety of Assad, engaging Turkey and Qatar to leverage their connections to HTS to secure Assad's safe exit to Russia, two regional officials said.

One Western security source said that Lavrov did "whatever he could" to secure Assad's safe departure.

Qatar and Turkey made arrangements with HTS to facilitate Assad's exit, three of the sources said, despite official claim by both countries that they had no contacts with HTS, which is designated by the U.S. and the U.N. as a terrorist organisation.

Moscow also coordinated with neighbouring states to ensure that a Russian plane leaving Syrian airspace with Assad on board would not be intercepted or targeted, three of the sources said.

Qatar's foreign ministry didn't immediately respond to queries about Assad's exit, while Reuters was unable to reach HTS for comment. A Turkish government official said there was no Russian request to use Turkish airspace for Assad's flight, though didn't address whether Ankara worked with HTS to facilitate the escape.

Assad's last prime minister, Mohammed Jalali, said he spoke to his then-president on the phone on Saturday night at 10.30 pm.

"In our last call, I told him how difficult the situation was and that there was huge displacement (of people) from Homs toward Latakia ... that there was panic and horror in the streets," he told Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV this week.

"He replied: 'Tomorrow, we will see'," Jalali added. "'Tomorrow, tomorrow', was the last thing he told me."

Jalali said he tried to call Assad again as dawn broke on Sunday, but there was no response.