Russia Says Bashar Assad ‘Resigned,’ No Longer in Syria

The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday it could confirm longtime Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, a close ally of Moscow’s, had resigned from his position and fled the country.

The Foreign Ministry notably omitted any information regarding where Assad had gone and only offered vaguely that it expected a transition in government to occur “peacefully.”

Assad had been embroiled in a civil war against mostly Sunni Muslim rebel forces, for over a decade, crushing their advanced and pummeling the war into a dormant state in 2016 and 2017. At that time, Syria had been divided into several warfronts featuring nearly a dozen different actors. The separatist Kurdish forces of northwest Syria played a key role, alongside American forces, in dismantling the Islamic State “caliphate;” al-Qaeda affiliated forces dedicated themselves to toppling Assad; pro-Turkish militias and the official Turkish military waged war against the Kurds on their border.

In addition to support from Russia, Assad relied heavily on support from neighboring Iran, particularly from its proxy terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah. In the aftermath of the elimination of Hezbollah’s senior leaders in an ongoing war with Israel, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an al-Qaeda affiliated jihadist militia, began storming the country in late November, capturing the critical city of Aleppo and moving on to several major population centers with little resistance.

Between the hours of late Saturday and early Sunday, HTS began announcing through social media that it had entered Damascus. Rumors began spreading that Assad had boarded a plane out of the capital to an unknown destination; he remains missing at press time.

Multiple news outlets identified an airplane departing Damascus on Sunday morning, citing unidentified Syrian military sources, that allegedly carried Assad. According to the Saudi news agency al-Arabiya, the plane “initially flew towards Syria’s coastal region, a stronghold of al-Assad’s Alawite sect, but then made an abrupt U-turn and flew in the opposite direction for a few minutes before disappearing off the map.”

Al-Arabiya shared a rumor spread by “two Syrian sources” that someone on the plane may have killed Assad and redirected the aircraft. No reports have offered any supporting evidence for this claim as no confirmation exists that the plane was carrying Assad.

The official state news agency of Syria, SANA, was reporting that Assad was in power and working at his office as recently as Saturday afternoon.

The Russian Foreign Ministry shed no light on Assad’s location, outside of confirming he was no longer in Syria on Sunday. According to the Iranian state propaganda outlet PressTV, which translated the Foreign Ministry statement, Moscow said Assad “resigned” and left the country after negotiating with “a number of participants in the armed conflict on the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic.” In Damascus, Assad allegedly left “instructions for a peaceful transfer of power.”

The terrorist in charge of HTS, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, told CNN This week that his group does not intend to persecute minorities – despite jihadis’ established record of massacring non-Muslims, particularly Christians – and rejected the designation of HTS as a foreign terrorist outfit. The United States maintains a $10 million bounty for information leading to Jolani’s capture.

Jolani made an announcement on Sunday on social media, claiming to ban gunfire in Damascus and enforce a peaceful transition.

“To all military forces in the city of Damascus, it is strictly forbidden to approach public institutions, which will remain under the supervision of the former Prime Minister,” he said, according to PressTV, “until they are officially handed over, and it is also forbidden to fire bullets into the air.”

HTS has also reportedly renamed itself the “Syrian National Transitional Council” and promised the public it would “protect all citizens and their property, regardless of their affiliations” and “achieve comprehensive national reconciliation.”

Prime Minister Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali has confirmed to multiple news outlets that he remains in Syria and has no plan to leave.

“We are offering our hand to opponents who have confirmed that they will not do harm to anyone who is part of our homeland,” he said in a statement published on Facebook. “We are ready to work with them in such a way as to provide all possible help to them and to gradually transfer state affairs, protecting state facilities.”

The streets of Damascus were filled with people celebrating the end of the regime on Sunday, which had ruled for decades under both Bashar and Hafez Assad, the outgoing dictator’s father. The victory of a Sunni jihadist terrorist organization has alarmed much of the country, however, primarily the religious minorities that the Assad regime protect from genocide. Christians have faced multiple genocides in Syria at the hands of the Islamic State and other Sunni jihadist groups, leaving Christians in the West especially concerned for their fate.