The quick collapse of the Assad regime in Syria over the weekend is at least in part a testament to the improved warfighting skills of the rebel forces. In the run-up to the latest offensive, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the leading rebel group, had developed several impressive capabilities, including nighttime specialist units, suicide drone squadrons, improvised cruise missiles, and assassinations deep behind enemy lines. The rebel groups put aside their differences to focus on a common goal: ousting Bashar al-Assad.
But other incumbent regimes around the world have faced similarly capable insurgent groups and have fared much better and even won. The truth is that Assad’s forces performed poorly through much of the 13-year war—finally leading to the disintegration of the regime.
The quick collapse of the Assad regime in Syria over the weekend is at least in part a testament to the improved warfighting skills of the rebel forces. In the run-up to the latest offensive, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the leading rebel group, had developed several impressive capabilities, including nighttime specialist units, suicide drone squadrons, improvised cruise missiles, and assassinations deep behind enemy lines. The rebel groups put aside their differences to focus on a common goal: ousting Bashar al-Assad.
But other incumbent regimes around the world have faced similarly capable insurgent groups and have fared much better and even won. The truth is that Assad’s forces performed poorly through much of the 13-year war—finally leading to the disintegration of the regime.
Bashar and his father, Hafez al-Assad, sought to shape Syria’s armed forces to counter the largest threat the regime faced: military coups. In the Middle East from 1945 to 2011, dictators were significantly more likely to lose power from a military overthrow than to be toppled through an uprising or foreign invasion. Hafez al-Assad, who took power in 1970 after a two-decade period that featured repeated coup attempts in Syria, sought to ensure that his coup would be the country’s last. He and later Bashar tried to limit the armed forces’ ability to move against them at the expense of combat efficacy.
Through a process known as coup-proofing, the Assads took several steps including stifling communication, promoting loyalists in senior positions, neglecting training, and creating multiple intelligence agencies to watch over the military and one another. Although these steps succeeded in preventing most military challenges to their rule, they hamstrung the armed forces’ ability to fight against insurgents as well as formidable external enemies such as Israel.
Both Assads filled the upper echelons of the Syrian army with a small circle of family members and officers who had cult-like loyalty to the president. Hafez organized the army into five divisions despite having the troop numbers for nine because he could only find five men he trusted. Nor did he seek unity of effort among elements of his military; a unified military could more easily carry out a coup. Disorganization and disunity continued up until the Syrian civil war and beyond: Syrian senior commanders quarreled frequently, with subordinates breaking hierarchy over conflicting goals and loyalties, and occasionally even physical confrontations and gun fights among senior officers.
Other issues inhibited Bashar al-Assad’s ability to respond to the uprising, including overlapping intelligence services, restrictions on information sharing, and limitations on training in urban areas. Decades of stacking loyalists from Assad’s Alawite sect in the army’s senior officership left the force’s Sunni majority resentful. On the eve of civil war in 2011, Assad’s fear of his military rendered his forces hollowed out and demoralized, with the majority of troops sympathizing with the protesters.
When the protests spread throughout the country in 2011, Assad’s principal concern became how to use troops of dubious loyalty to brutalize the opposition. Assad took drastic measures to ensure that his troops would not defect on the battlefield. Units thought to be less trustworthy were locked in their barracks, with the assumption that soldiers who came into contact with the population would defect. The bulk of the army was denied leave for the first year of the conflict. Assad ordered soldiers and officers showing any sign of disloyalty to be shot, detained, arrested, or tortured. His strategy worked in that Syrian units did not defect en masse in the early days of the war, but individual soldiers and units sought to defect in battle, with at times devastating results.
The army devised a unique order of battle for when its units came into contact with protesters and insurgents. In dozens of cases, intelligence units directed snipers stationed in the rear of army formations to shoot any Syrian soldiers who would not fire on protesters or insurgents.
Because he sidelined most of the army due to his fear of disloyalty, Assad could only channel a fraction of the combat power he possessed on paper. This meant Assad could not employ sufficient force needed to quell the uprisings across Syria at any one time. The regime initially concentrated force against individual cities—but in doing so lost other cities to rebels because it did not have enough troops. This city-centered approach gave rebels free rein to retreat into areas not controlled by the regime, making it difficult for government forces to translate territorial gains into lasting blows. The result was more a whack-a-mole approach than a comprehensive plan to crush the insurgency once and for all.
Morale and trust issues also plagued the Syrian counterinsurgency effort. Commanders who expressed remorse over the regime’s crackdown or were suspected of disloyalty were put under house arrest or disappeared. In this culture of mutual mistrust, officers constantly sought to outdo, undermine, or circumvent one another.
The constant sidelining and reshaping of units eroded the armed forces into a mishmash of army personnel, intelligence officers, pro-regime gangs, and militia fighters by 2012. These forces, when reinforced with large-scale shelling and airstrikes, managed to overcome the opposition with slow, frontal operations that relied on brute force.
In 2013, at the start of Iran’s broad intervention in the Syrian civil war, Iranian Gen. Qassem Suleimani concluded within a few days that the Syrian army was “useless” in fighting the insurgents, who had now started to mobilize into conventional units. Iranian operatives, their Lebanese Hezbollah allies, and Russian air support dominated most of the fighting, with Syrian forces supporting them as necessary. When Iranian units carried out basic military maneuvers against the rebels, such as pincer attacks or night assaults, the insurgents largely floundered—a sign of just how poorly Assad’s troops performed.
Russian and Iranian troops helped create an imbalance of firepower that enabled pro-regime forces to slowly reclaim most of Syria and reach a favorable stalemate over the next decade. Even when they were at their most effective, however, Syrian forces were hampered by corruption and ineptitude. As the war progressed and the regime’s revenue streams eroded, its units turned to other sources of rents and illicit gains to ensure their financial well-being. The hollowing-out of the Syrian army became so pervasive that Syria scholar Charles Lister rated the effectiveness of the force, up to its elite formations, as lower than that of pro-regime militias. However, as long as Iran, Hezbollah, Russia, and militias took on the brunt of the fighting, Syrian regime forces could get away with this diversion of effort.
With Russia distracted by its war in Ukraine and Iran by its conflict with Israel, which has decimated its proxy Hezbollah, the regime could no longer hold the status quo. Syrian forces, weak, distracted, and demoralized, could not muster sufficient effort to hold off the rebels. Although no one in the international community predicted the speed of the regime’s collapse, it should not have been a surprise. Syrian forces were fighting a war that they were not designed to fight, relying heavily on foreign support that would not be forthcoming. Stagnant in the face of change, corrupted by organized crime, and lacking hierarchy save for increasingly wavering loyalty for Assad, regime forces simply collapsed.
By the standards of other dictatorships, Assad’s was both a success and a failure. Yes, the regime collapsed quickly after years of civil war. But having gained power in one of the most volatile periods in Middle Eastern history, the Assads outlived most of their peers. Bashar al-Assad hung on for 13 years of internal fighting, in which at least half a million of his citizens died. And he abdicated just in time—jetting off to a safe retirement in exile.