A deluge of well-informed and credible commentary has accompanied the downfall of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, explaining how and why his regime collapsed so quickly. But we do not yet have an adequate answer to the highly pertinent question posed in a post on X by veteran Syrian reporter and analyst Hassan Hassan: “Something yet to be explained. Assad had the loyalist forces to defend Damascus for at least a while, no question. Before Damascus it was clear the regime was unable to fight in much of the country. After Damascus it’s clear there was a decision not to. That’s not yet revealed.”
Hassan went on, “Assad had the most trained and loyalist forces to put up a fight, but there wasn’t one for the capital.” Nor, it seems, were loyalist units willing to put up a fight in Assad’s much-vaunted Alawite stronghold in Syria’s coastal region.
So why did the army abandon Assad so completely and irrevocably? Analysts such as Gregory Waters and Muhsen Mustafa have pointed to multiple factors that degraded military cohesion and readiness over the past few years, including the transfer of tens of thousands of officers and soldiers to the reserves, the severe erosion of living standards for both active and reservist personnel, extensive corruption resulting in embezzlement of pay and dismal food supply—all of which could only alienate the Alawites, who predominate within the rank and file. As important, clearly, have been factors further undermining morale: the doctrinal shift toward non-combat officers commanding from the rear, and the shock of realization that the kind of military assistance from Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah that was key to past regime survival would not be forthcoming this time.
These were indeed crucial factors contributing to the precipitate crumbling of the Syrian army, but they don’t fully explain why its senior command abandoned initial attempts to marshal and redeploy troops along new frontlines that were militarily defensible, and shifted to a stance of complete passivity. The coming days will reveal much more about perceptions from within the regime and, in particular, the army, but the experience of military politics in other authoritarianism Arab states during systemic crises and transitions offers useful insight in the meantime.
The rupture of authoritarian pacts in Egypt and Libya in 2011, and in Algeria and Sudan in 2019, was shaped by several common factors, at least one of which appears to have been shared by Syria in the final days of the Assad regime. In each of the other Arab countries, when popular uprisings broke out, the military already perceived that incumbent presidents were undermining core understandings or threatening vital interests, and therefore suspended its role as the principal anchor of authoritarian power and guarantor of regime durability.
Concern over the threat of popular uprisings did not drive a wedge between Assad and the army in 2011–2012, but his willingness to abandon virtually every sociopolitical constituency of the regime to its fate appears to have eroded one of the main legacies of his father Hafez’s rule in 1970–2000. This included a large farming class decimated by wartime displacement and loss of state credit, and a business sector subject to repeated shakedowns and predatory takeovers. Crucially, Assad seems to have broken an implicit pact with an Alawite community that lost tens of thousands of men in his defense, by failing to alleviate constantly worsening living standards and the depreciation of incomes in the public sector—including the army and security agencies—due to endless cycles of devaluation of the national currency and inflation.
The tipping point for the army’s senior command, however, may have been the sense that the president could no longer leverage foreign military or financial support at a critical moment, even if the proximate causes for this—Russia’s war in Ukraine, the degradation of Iran’s strategic deterrence, and Hezbollah’s military losses in Lebanon—were entirely out of his hands. The other four Arab cases show that the actual or potential loss of a president’s ability to leverage foreign support—or to protect the military from foreign sanctions—was pivotal in determining military readiness to defend, or abandon, him.
In this respect, at least, Syria appears to have conformed to type with the other Arab military-backed autocracies. But there is a principal difference. Allowing for variations, the armed forces were, and remain, a central political player and the real locus of power in Egypt, Libya, Algeria, and Sudan both before and following their uprisings. Their militaries are moreover broadly autonomized socially and institutionally. In other words, they are independent from any well-defined social coalition and from other state institutions, including the presidency, whether de facto or, as in the Egyptian case, legally, following a critically important amendment in the revised constitution of 2019.
Syria is different. On the one hand, despite the militarization of society and politics and the unambiguous role of the army as a pillar of the regime for decades, the Syrian army lacked the political autonomy of its Arab counterparts. Ironically, the intertwining of its formal command structures with Assad’s informal control networks permeating it meant that he did as much to preserve its cohesion and ensure its survival during the civil war as it did to preserve his power. More recently, his neglect of this function, amid his distraction with squeezing income out of an ever-shrinking economy, further weakened the army’s cohesion and its reason for defending him again. On the other hand, the Syrian army also lacked social autonomy. The very drive to underpin regime survival by relying overwhelmingly on recruiting Alawites in the army ultimately exposed the institution to whatever trends affected the community from which it drew so heavily. The military has long represented a major public sector constituency in and of itself, making it indispensable as a tool of presidential power, and so Assad’s inability to shield it from the pauperization of the rest of the state bureaucracy rebounded on him.
A final, hopeful implication from this reading of Syrian civil-military relations is that what has just happened in Damascus is not a replay of what happened in Egypt in 2011, when the armed forces eased then president Hosni Mubarak out of office in order to protect their position and preserve the core regime, or when the Algerian and Sudanese armies did the same in 2019. The dozens of senior Syrian army commanders who remained in Damascus on the last day of Assad’s rule may well have told him they would not fight for him and advised him to step down. However, they lacked the habit of political autonomy and the social autonomization needed to abort Syria’s political transition and take power into their own hands.
