Why Assad’s Regime Is Collapsing So Quickly

While nobody was looking, the Syrian regime was increasingly hollowing out.

By Charles Lister, a senior fellow and director of the Syria and Counterterrorism and Extremism programs at the Middle East Institute. FOREIGN POLICY.

Over the past week, the future of Bashar al-Assad’s regime has been placed squarely into question.

A coalition of armed opposition factions has gone on the offensive in northern Syria, capturing some 250 cities, towns, and villages and more than doubling the territory under its control. Syria’s second-largest city of Aleppo was captured in 24 hours, as Syrian regime front lines collapsed one after the other. After nearly five years of territorial lines of control being frozen across the country, these are dramatic, game-changing developments.

Yet they should not entirely be a surprise. Not only had Assad never truly “won” his country’s civil war, but his rule has also been weakening for some time. His position is more vulnerable than ever before.

For years, conventional wisdom on Syria had held that the crisis there was frozen, with hostilities a thing of the past and Assad’s regime the inevitable victor. With that, international attention waned, Syria-focused diplomacy all but ended, and governments gradually divested resources away from policy aimed at Syria and onto other global challenges. Meanwhile, as conditions in Syria festered, Arab governments took the step to collectively reengage Assad beginning in 2023, effectively normalizing his status across the Middle East.

For policymakers in the United States, the fact that regional actors appeared to be taking charge of the Syria file was an encouraging sign and a source of relief. More recently, driven by their opposition to the European Union’s policy of isolating Assad and belief in his consolidated victory, a group of 10 European states, led by Italy, have joined forces as they seek to reengage Assad’s regime and explore avenues for diplomacy and refugee returns to Syria.

All of these developments were undergirded by the assumption that although conditions in Syria were bad, the crisis itself was both frozen and contained—and that Assad himself was not just strengthening his position but consolidating it, too. That assumption was misplaced.

Syria’s economy has been in shambles for years. When a cease-fire agreed to by Turkey and Russia—which back opposing sides—froze conflict lines in early 2020, $1 was worth approximately 1,150 Syrian pounds. As the opposition offensive began a week ago, it was worth 14,750 Syrian pounds. On December 4, after a week of renewed hostilities, it was 17,500.

Rather than stabilizing the country and offering Syria’s civilians some respite after more than a decade of war, Syria’s humanitarian crisis has spiraled since the agreement was reached in 2020, with the United Nations reporting that at least 90 percent of Syrians now live under the poverty line. While the regime’s embrace of organized crime brings in at least $2.4 billion in profit each year from the sale of just one type of synthetic stimulant, none of that has helped the Syrian people. In fact, state subsidies on fuel and food have been cut drastically in recent years.

But Assad no longer has anybody to rescue him from state bankruptcy. Russia’s economy has been hit hard by the effects of its war in Ukraine, and Iran’s economy is in poor shape, too.

It did not necessarily have to be this way. If Assad had constructively engaged with the regional governments that normalized their ties with Syria in 2023, and if he had embraced Turkey’s openness to normalization earlier this year, Syria would be in a markedly different place today.

With the nation’s humanitarian crisis worse than ever before, and the world’s will and ability to assist lower than ever, the Syrian people have been suffering. Realizing that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, Syrians started taking back to the streets and calling for Assad’s downfall.

And months ago, former opposition fighters who had “reconciled” with the government under a deal six years ago again began challenging regime forces—and winning.

Meanwhile, amid Syria’s economic collapse, organized crime as well as industrial-level drug production and trafficking has infiltrated the core of Assad’s security apparatus. In fact, Assad’s regime may now be the world’s biggest narco state—specializing in the production of an amphetamine known as captagon.

The drug trade is run by Syria’s elite 4th Division (commanded by Assad’s brother, Maher), but its web has stretched into virtually every corner of the country’s military and loyalist militia network. With that, organized crime and warlordism have torn away at what little cohesiveness remained within the Syrian security state.

Meanwhile, Russia’s war in Ukraine and the regional hostilities that have pitched Israel against Iran and its network of proxies since October 2023 have diverted Russian and Iranian attention away from gluing Syria’s security actors together. Both Russia and Iran—as well as the Lebanon-based Hezbollah—were present on the front line when the opposition offensive began on Nov. 27, and all took early casualties.

But as external actors embedded on front lines, there was little that any of Syria’s backers could do to hold together Syrian regime forces as they spiraled into disarray. None could have been surprised by the offensive itself, given that rebel Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militia’s plans had been known since mid-October, when Turkey intervened in an attempt to stop them and Russia conducted days of heavy airstrikes in response.

Recent events have also demonstrated that Russia’s eight years of investment in rebuilding the Assad regime’s military have had little effect upon its ability to fight effectively under pressure. Though Russia’s efforts have consolidated some effective capacity within select military units, such as the 25th Special Tasks Division, the Syrian Armed Forces as a whole remain disunited and poorly coordinated. In almost all respects, the regime’s military apparatus has stagnated in recent years, decaying from within and fragmenting on the outside. An amorphous network of loyalist militias arguably presents a greater military capability that the army itself. The only qualitative capability that Russia has added to Assad’s military in recent years is the use of first-person view suicide drones—yet that has been wildly outclassed in terms of scale and effect by HTS’s newly revealed Kataib Shaheen (or Falcons Brigade) drone unit, which has launched hundreds of devices into regime front-line posts, tanks, artillery pieces, and senior commanders over the past week.

That brings to light the stark contrast on the other side of the line, where HTS and other armed opposition groups have worked intensively since 2020 to enhance their own capabilities. HTS, in particular, has established entirely new units that have arguably changed the game on the battlefield in recent days. The group’s special forces-type unit, known as Asaib al-Hamra (or Red Bands), has been the tip of the spear of daytime operations, while its Saraya al-Harari (or Thermal Brigade) has made consequential gains every night for a week, with every one of its roughly 500 fighters carrying weapons equipped with night-vision scopes, according to the group.

While another HTS brigade known as the Kataib Shaheen has taken out heavy regime weaponry across the front lines, the group has also made use of indigenously produced cruise missiles, whose explosive power is the equivalent to a suicide truck bomb. With fleets of reconnaissance drones in the air 24/7, HTS and its other allies have completely outperformed Syria’s military.

Looking ahead, Assad’s regime faces a menacing uphill battle as the HTS-led offensive continues to move south along at least two axes in the central Hama province. The regime’s acute lack of popularity across Syria and the opposition’s dramatic advances have also inspired armed factions throughout the country to mobilize and take action. In Daraa in the south, Homs in the center, and Deir ez-Zor in the east, regime towns and military front lines are all being challenged.

The last time that Assad had to deal with multiple concerted challenges to his territorial control—back in 2015—his regime was pushed to breaking point, and Russia had to militarily intervene to save him. There will be no such savior today.