December 12, 2024 T
Why Armies Crumble
Like other militaries, Syria’s seemed stable—until it didn’t.
by Stuart A. Reid
By 2017, after six years of civil war, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria had settled into a new normal. It wasn’t the placid, pre-Arab Spring normal the Assad family had enjoyed ever since cracking down on an Islamist insurgency in the 1980s, but it was something. With help from Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah—and, in a strange way, the United States, which was attacking ISIS—Assad’s forces had succeeded in beating back the rebels. As the years went on, his regime came to control roughly two-thirds of Syria.
Secure in power, Assad started traveling abroad, visiting Moscow, Beijing, Abu Dhabi, and Tehran. Everyone seemed to begrudgingly accept that the brutal strongman was here to stay, with “normalization” the watchword not only among Middle Eastern diplomats but also even some Western ones. In September, after a thirteen-year diplomatic freeze, Italy appointed its first ambassador to Syria.
But then, on Saturday, after a ten-day-long surprise offensive by the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, that stability vanished. The Syrian Arab Army melted away, with soldiers abandoning their posts and stripping off their uniforms. The rebels took Damascus without a fight, and Assad was spirited away to Moscow. Even the opposition was surprised by how easy it all was.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-armies-crumble-214079
