Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had no intention of yielding to the rebel forces at the start of this past weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported. As the rebels neared Damascus, Assad ordered his army to defend the capital, Syrian sources said. But by late Saturday, Assad has vanished into thin air, failing to appear for a scheduled speech. His cabinet members had no idea where he was until they learned from the media, along with the rest of the world, that he had escaped the country hours before the rebels’ arrival to the capital. The fall of the Assad regime highlighted the failures of Syria’s army after years of corruption, defections, and economic woes. The army was low on supplies and suffered from a decline in recruitment. “Even before they reached the capital, the regime fell,” said Mohammed Alaa Ghanem, a Syrian-American opposition activist in Washington. “Syrian Arab Army troops deserted their positions, the police deserted their positions, and Bashar Al Assad just fled.” Since early on in the civil war in Syria, Assad leaned heavily on outside forces to bolster his military. Iran helped Syria to bring in militias from Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Russia sent warplanes, air defense systems, and military advisers. But world circumstances have drastically changed in the past several years and Russia’s forces are on the front against Ukraine and Iran and its proxies are still reeling from Israel’s blows in the past year. When the rebels captured Aleppo on November 29, Assad appealed to his “faithful” allies, Russia and Iran. Russia responded by launching airstrikes but stopped within days, too mired in its war with Ukraine to become involved in the conflict in Syria. Iran responded that it couldn’t do much, if at all. Iranian officials blamed Assad for not being prepared for the rebel uprising and said they couldn’t send military reinforcements because of Israel. An Iranian plane headed toward Syria had to make a U-turn because of the threat of Israeli airstrikes, Syrian officials said. Not only did Iran not provide aid to Syria but it ordered its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other militias to stay out of the conflict and then arranged a safe exit for its nationals from the country. “Both Russia and large parts of the Syrian regime, including senior political and military figures, recognized that Assad’s circle was a sinking ship,” said Lina Khatib, a Middle East security expert associate fellow at Chatham House, a policy institute in London. (YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)