DAMASCUS\/AMMAN\/BAGHDAD
\nTwenty-three-year-old Syrian military conscript Farhan al-Khouli was badly paid and demoralized. His army outpost in scrubland near the rebel-held city of Idlib should have had nine soldiers but it just had three, after some had bribed the commanding officers to escape serving, he said.
\nAnd, of the two conscripts with him, one was regarded by his superiors as mentally unfit and not trusted with a gun, Khouli said.
\nFor years, the Islamist rebels of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) had sat behind the nearby frontline, with Syria\u2019s long civil war frozen. But on Wednesday, Nov. 27, Khouli\u2019s commanding officer – at another post behind the frontlines – called his mobile phone to tell him a rebel convoy was heading his way.
\nThe officer said the unit should stand its ground and fight.
\nInstead, Khouli put his phone on airplane mode, changed into civilian clothes, dropped his rifle and fled. As he walked along the road back south, other groups of soldiers were abandoning their posts too.
\n\u201cI looked back and saw everyone walking behind me. When they saw one person flee, everyone started to toss their weapons and run,\u201d he told Reuters this week in Damascus, where he has found work at a horse stable.
\nIn a little less than two weeks, the rebels would sweep into the capital Damascus, toppling former president Bashar al-Assad as his army simply melted away. The rout abruptly ended a 13-year conflict that had killed hundreds of thousands of people.
\nReuters spoke to a dozen sources including two Syrian army deserters, three senior Syrian officers, two Iraqi militia commanders working with the Syrian army, a Syrian security source and a source familiar with the thinking of Lebanese group Hezbollah, one of Assad\u2019s main military allies.
\nThe sources, along with intelligence documents Reuters found in an abandoned military office in the capital, painted a detailed picture of how Assad\u2019s once-feared army had been hollowed out by the demoralization of troops, heavy reliance on foreign allies particularly for the command structure, and growing anger across the ranks at rampant corruption.
\nMost of the sources asked not to be named because they were not authorised to talk to media or feared retribution.
\nSince the war began in 2011, Assad\u2019s army command had come to depend on allied Iranian and Iran-funded Lebanese and Iraqi forces to provide the best fighting units in Syria, all the senior sources said.
\nCrucially, much of the Syrian military\u2019s operational command structure was run by Iranian military advisors and their militia allies, they said.
\nBut many of the Iranian military advisers had left this spring after Israeli air strikes on Damascus, and the rest departed last week, said the Iraqi militia commanders, who worked alongside them.
\nHezbollah fighters and commanders had already mostly left in October to focus on the escalating war in Lebanon with Israel, the source familiar with Hezbollah thinking said.
\nThe Syrian army\u2019s own central command and control centre no longer functioned well after the Iranian and Hezbollah officers left and the military lacked a defence strategy, particularly for Syria\u2019s second city of Aleppo, a Syrian colonel, two Syrian security sources and a Lebanese security source familiar with the Syrian military said.
\nBy contrast, rebels in the northwest, on paper numerically far weaker than the army, had spent years consolidating under a single operations room that coordinated their groups and units in battle, an International Crisis Group report said after the fall of Aleppo.
\nReuters was unable to contact a current representative of the armed forces. Syria\u2019s new most powerful figure, HTS chief Ahmad al-Sharaa told Reuters on Wednesday he would dissolve Syria\u2019s security forces. Iran\u2019s mission to the United Nations, the Iraqi militias and Hezbollah did not respond to requests for comment.
\nALEPPO
\nAs Aleppo came under attack in late November, army units were not given a clear plan but were told to work it out for themselves or to fall back to the strategic city of Homs to try to regroup, two Syrian security sources said.
\nAleppo fell without a major fight on Nov. 29, just two days after the offensive began, sending shockwaves through the military, three senior Syrian officers said.
\nWhat was left on the ground was a Syrian army severely lacking in cohesion, all the sources said, describing multiple units that were undermanned because officers were accepting bribes to let soldiers off duty, or had told soldiers to go home and were collecting their salaries themselves.
\nIn 2020, the army had 130,000 personnel, according to think tank IISS\u2019 Military Balance report, describing it as significantly depleted by the long civil war and transformed into an irregularly structured, militia-style organisation focused on internal security.
\nIn the days ahead of the regime\u2019s collapse on Sunday, the United States had information of broad levels of desertions and military forces changing sides, as well as some elements fleeing to Iraq, a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said.
\nReuters could not establish the overall manpower shortage in the military or current force strength.
\nThe Syrian army sources described officers and troops alike as demoralised by pay that was consistently low even after painful military victories earlier in the war and by reports, which Reuters could not verify, that Assad\u2019s close family were growing immensely rich.
\nOn Nov. 28, the General Command of the Army and Armed Forces issued a telegram, ordering all troops to be on full combat readiness, according to a military document found by Reuters at an Air Intelligence office in Damascus.
\nIn a sign the regime was desperate, Syria\u2019s Air Intelligence Directorate, a key agency close to the Assad family, accused its men of \u201claxity\u201d at checkpoints throughout the country after one was overrun by rebels in the south on Dec. 1, and warned of punishment \u201cwithout leniency\u201d if they did not fight, the document seen by Reuters shows.
\nDespite the orders and threats, increasing numbers of soldiers and officers began to desert, all the sources said.
\nInstead of confronting the rebels, or even unarmed protesters, soldiers were seen by residents of Syrian cities, and in many videos that began circulating online, abandoning their posts, changing into civilian clothes and going home.
\nReuters journalists entering Syria on Sunday found army uniforms still strewn across Damascus streets.
\nOFFICERS
\nThe corruption and poor morale went up through the ranks.
\nMany midranking officers had been growing increasingly angry in recent years that the army\u2019s sacrifices and successes during the war were not reflected in better pay, conditions and resources, two serving, one recently retired and one defected officer said.
\nIn 2020, Russia and Turkey agreed a deal that froze the frontlines after Assad retook all major cities and the main highway linking Damascus to Aleppo, further partitioning a country also split by Kurdish-controlled areas.
\nBut Syria\u2019s economy continued to reel from U.S. sanctions and reduced foreign aid, said Aron Lund, a fellow at Middle East-focused think tank Century International. Rampant inflation ensued.
\n\u201cThings just got worse for everyone, except for the oligarchs and elites around Assad. That seems to have been incredibly demoralizing,\u201d Lund said.
\nWhile decrees in 2021 roughly doubled military salaries to keep up with inflation that topped 100% that year, buying power rapidly fell anyway as the Syrian pound crashed against the dollar.
\nCol. Makhlouf Makhlouf, who served in an engineering brigade, said that if anybody complained about corruption they were called in for questioning at a military court – something that had happened to him more than once.
\n\u201cWe were living in a scary society. We were afraid to say a word,\u201d Makhlouf said. He had been stationed in Hama but deserted before the city fell to the rebels on Dec. 5, he said in an interview in Aleppo on Tuesday.
\nAnger had been building particularly over the past year or so, a serving senior military intelligence officer said, saying there was \u201cgrowing resentment against Assad,\u201d including among core high-ranking supporters from his Alawite minority community.
\nYEARS OF DECAY
\nKhouli\u2019s military experience illustrated the army\u2019s problems – and helps explain his lack of loyalty.
\nHe was drafted for the obligatory 18-month service at age 19, after having paid-off an officer to delay his service for a year.
\nWhen his service period expired, he was ordered to remain in the army indefinitely. He deserted but was later picked up by a patrol, put in prison for 52 days and then sent to the remote outpost near Idlib.
\nHe was paid 500,000 Syrian pounds ($40) a month. Army rations were often pillaged before arriving. Sometimes his entire pay went on buying more food, he said.
\nComrades with money would pay officers $100, which he lacked, to get out of service, Khouli said. Khouli\u2019s brigade was supposed to have 80 soldiers, but in fact there were only 60, he said.
\nHe described bad treatment from officers, including being assigned heavy manual labour digging earth berms in both very hot and very cold weather and during nights.
\nReuters was not able to verify independently the details of his experiences.
\nOne former major described the use of forced conscripts as a \u201cfatal mistake\u201d.
\nA former army logistics serviceman, Zuhair, 28, said in an interview in Damascus on Tuesday he had seen officers steal and sell electricity generators and fuel. \u201cAll they cared about was using their positions to enrich themselves,\u201d he said.
\nHe had fought for Assad for years but he had cousins among the rebels and when they advanced, he cheered, he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know how to describe how happy I am,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
DAMASCUS\/AMMAN\/BAGHDAD Twenty-three-year-old Syrian military conscript Farhan al-Khouli was badly paid and demoralized. His army outpost in scrubland near the rebel-held city of Idlib should have had nine soldiers but it just had three, after some had bribed the commanding officers to escape serving, he said. And, of the two conscripts with him, one was regarded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":449072,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-449052","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n