A Lebanese prisoner who had been held in Assad's prisons for 33 years, Suhail Hamawi, returns to his hometown of Chekka (a Christian town in northern Lebanon).
سهيل حموي رجع عبلدتو شكّا عند اهلو من بعد ٣٣ سنة بالسجون السوريّة …
After 33 years in Syrian prisons, Suhail Hamoui has returned to his family...
Also, locals have been tearing down Assad's posters and cursing his name even in Qardaha, the hometown of the Assad clan.
Finally,
even Hamas has now publicly congratulated the Syrian rebels on their victory. (
Archive) Granted, they were part of the Muslim Brotherhood and thus by default had to at least nominally oppose the Assads for crushing the Brotherhood's Syrian branch in 1982, but has
de facto always been on Assad's side due to both of them being Iranian lackeys (Iran would have had to move most assistance to them & Hezbollah through Assad's Syria after Iraq in the past) and formally restored full relations with him in 2022. Axis of Resistancebros, it's even more over than previously thought possible...
The israelis will likely keep a permanent buffer zone, if Syria remains a divided warlord state, or with a weak central administration, the israelis will have gained new territory, beyond the Golan. A great victory for the state of Israel, probably one of the greatest victories since the state was founded in 48.
I've heard the Russians can keep their naval base and other assets-likely Turkey and Russia had agreed to this weeks ago. I'd be curious to know when these backroom arrangements were being made-because it seems Assad signed off on a "lay down and give up" order, maybe a week ago?
My read? Assad decided in late November, to not bother putting up a fight. Likely he either knew or was told that the SAA was crumbling, or that Iran and Russia weren't coming-and so some arrangements were made to ensure he got off with a minimum of risk, and a general standdown was ordered.
Iran seems to have wanted to fight on? IDK there were Shiite fighters defending that shrine until just yesterday. But if Assad had already thrown in the towel and IRGC reports were telling Tehran it was going down the drain, order to evacuate to Iraq was given with the most fanatical shiites left to die standing, and anyone else went back to Iraq.
Turkey also apparently flat out lied to the Iranians-saying the HTS wasn't planning anything but they were. Iran may start treating Turkey now as a full on enemy.
The HTS also had been re armed-modern night vision, drones, Turkish APCs, Ukrainian military advisors-whereas the SAA was rotting on the inside.
As the dust settles and we can start considering a clearer picture of everything that just happened, I'd say that in hindsight while the sudden & comically quick fall of Aleppo, Assad had not made the decision to throw in the towel until
Hama fell. The SAA was clearly caught off-guard and routed in a clean sweep at Aleppo, but even in their panic they did make a genuine effort to try to hold Hama - the pictures & videos of large SAA formations moving into positions around the city and getting into pretty heavy artillery duels with the rebels were posted in the earlier pages of this thread - and that city lasted longest out of all the government-held cities in this past offensive (5 days, Aleppo fell in like 2 days and Damascus in 1). It even seemed early on that the SAA
had won there, the earliest footage of rebels in Hama turned out to have been from scout/raider parties that left or were driven out after the SAA came back in force and started filming themselves inside Hama. Had Assad actually won the battle for Hama, he would've stalled HTS' advance and while clearly the SAA in hindsight was in no shape to fight for Aleppo afterward, breaking the rebels' momentum there would have allowed him to drag this civil war out into the next year at least.
However, when Hama fell, so did whatever SAA morale remained. HTS boasted of destroying the Tiger Forces, one of Assad's most famous 'elite' units, and wounding its commander Suhail al-Hassan ('al-Nimr' or 'the Tiger' himself) at Hama, the latter being proven by a photo of Al-Hassan where he visibly had a bandaged hand (also posted somewhere in the early pages of this thread IIRC). I know for sure I had posted video links of rebel fighters driving through their bases & filming all the equipment captured from their hands back then. The SAA relied on elites comprised of well-paid volunteer fighters like the Tiger Force to do almost all of the hard fighting these past 13 years, the rank & file were well known to be conscripts fighting to collect their paltry paycheck/because the Mukhabarat secret police would disappear them & their family if they didn't go and have pretty much always proven to be failtastic losers this entire time unless boxed into a corner (they would fight with a courage born from desperation against enemies who made it clear they'd be executed even if they surrendered, like ISIS, but that was it). Assad still had hope of at least stabilizing the situation & buying himself more time as long as units like the Tigers were even partly intact, but he rushed them all to the front lines in his initial panic and gave HTS the chance to destroy them in a single engagement, so...
Russia was also still bombing away & Hezbollah moving in what troops it still had for some time after Aleppo, only definitively giving up after Hama and during the 'battle' for Homs when the SAA had clearly stopped bothering to fight back almost entirely; they wouldn't have bothered if a deal had been made before Al-Jolani started getting things rolling.
Iran had spent $50 billion on propping Assad up and laid down roots across 570 bases & outposts across the country, (
Archive) there's no way they would have given up that investment voluntarily. Assad himself had no reason to assume things would collapse this quickly either, he seemed to have all but won the war in 2018-20 and until November 26, it seemed like it was a matter of time that Idlibistan would fall to the SAA; the initial rebel attack was codenamed 'Deterrence of Aggression' and its objective was to push the SAA out of artillery range of Idlib (they had been shelling Al-Jolani's emirate before all this), not take Aleppo much less the whole country (obviously, when Aleppo fell with minimal resistance, Al-Jolani changed his mind and decided to start pushing as far as he could, which turned out to be 'everywhere').