Eurasia Press & News
The Syrian Arab Army is no more, an institution built to fight Israel that eventually ate itself due to rampant corruption and ineptitude.
Few analysts could have predicted the events that unfolded last week in Syria when a limited rebel offensive in Aleppo province led to the downfall of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, 13 years after a revolution against his corrupt and authoritarian rule began.
Those familiar with the poor state of the Syrian military and economy were aware that Assad’s rule was always feeble, but when his foreign backers who maintained his regime quietly downscaled, he was left with a ragtag of criminal gangs, sectarian militias, and malnourished conscripts to hold the fort from an increasingly well-armed and disciplined rebel force.
The state of the Syrian military on the frontlines of Idlib and Aleppo was a reflection of the regime’s overall ineptitude, cruelty, and corruption, with soldiers and officers preoccupied with finding ways to survive or enrich themselves – such as operating profitable smuggling routes, shakedowns, and theft – rather than fighting.
They were a personification of the systemic corruption that underpinned the Syrian regime, with a privileged few treating the army as a source of rent or a tool to coerce and fleece the population it had pledged to defend.
When Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) fighters crossed no man’s land and confronted the ‘great’ Syrian Arab Army the thinly manned frontlines were routed, a scene to play out on a national scale a week later that culminated in Bashar Al-Assad making a humiliating flight to Russia, reminiscent of the collapse of the Iraqi military against the Islamic State (IS) group in 2014, again due to corruption and ineptitude.
“Syria’s army, like virtually all of its public institutions, has for years been plagued by rampant corruption: to include posts handed out as patronage, enlisted men bribing officers to escape duty, and so on, but I’d argue last week’s collapse was driven by something deeper than corruption: misery,” Alex Simon, the co-founder of Synaps, a Beirut-based research centre, told The New Arab.
“Syria’s enlisted men were miserably treated and miserably hopeless. Low-level soldiers notoriously practised graft of their own, less out of opportunism than necessity.”
While Assad had recently introduced a series of measures to reduce the size of his conscript army, the conditions for those who remained on the frontlines were grim, with soldiers who surrendered saying the hot food given to them by the rebels was the first proper meal they’d enjoyed for months.
Some brave conscripts had for years anonymously shared their experiences on the front where meagre rations, mouldy food, shoddy equipment, and rolling deployments on the frontlines stretching out indefinitely forced soldiers to bribe officers for cushier posts, and became a chief factor in the exodus of serving-age men from Syria.
One story told to The New Arab highlighted the different shakedowns a refugee experienced during the various checkpoints they passed through in Syria earlier in the war: the regime demanded bribes, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) requested cigarettes, while Al-Nusra fighters only told the passengers to dress modestly.
Low pay meant bribery was a necessity to survive, and the fact that most conscripts were press-ganged from the country’s least privileged and connected margins of society enamoured some pity from civilians, unlike the more notorious regime militia fighters and intelligence ghouls who ruled by terror.
“Like civil servants, the (conscripts) used their position to extract bribes to supplement their truly unliveable salaries,” Simon added.
“The enlisted have long been among the most destitute, vulnerable people in Syria, so much so that some Syrians would give them bribes willingly, as a form of charity.”
Karam Al-Shaar, director of Karam Shaar Advisory Limited and a Syria researcher, said the average salary of a regime fighter was little more than $20 a month, an amount that would scarcely cover their transport costs. When the HTS columns advanced, there was little impulse to stand and die for a regime that had only extracted and bled them, even when Assad made a comical last-minute pledge to boost the conscripts’ salaries.
“Did corruption play a role in the regime’s collapse? Absolutely it did,” Shaar told The New Arab. “That corruption has undermined the morale of the fighters, it showed everyone in military fatigues that while they were fighting – given just a potato, a loaf of bread, and an egg – they could see photos of Bashar Al-Assad living like a king,” he added.
“People came to believe we should not be fighting to defend such a corrupt and self-interested leader, so you saw them just abandoning their posts and not fighting the rebels.”
The generally humane treatment surrendered soldiers received from the rebels must have been another key factor in the mass defections, most opting for food and protection rather than a bullet to the head.
Perhaps anticipating such a scenario earlier in the conflict, Sunni conscripts were largely confined to their bases to prevent mass defections to the rebel Free Syrian Army leaving Iran-linked militias to do most of the fighting.
The barrel bombs of regime helicopters were ineffective against the rapid rebel advances of 2014, forcing the more advanced Russian air force to intervene to save Bashar’s skin by striking opposition bases and logistics supplies.
By 2024, both foreign powers had significantly reduced their support for the Syrian regime due to financial constraints in Iran and the war in Ukraine for Russia, leaving the regime to fend for itself when the rebel offensive in Aleppo province unfolded into a national rebellion.
One source told TNA that the economic and military pressures in recent years were too much for the Syrian regime to stand, leading to a light military footprint in the north with Bashar Al-Assad believing the rebels were a spent force and his rule had been secured, continuing to enrich his small inner circle at the expense of the military. Such hubris was to be his downfall.
While Hezbollah was being battered in Lebanon following an unprecedented Israeli offensive and Russia emptying its jails to man the frontlines in Ukraine, HTS was preparing for a counter-offensive and struck at the regime’s weakest moment.
When they surged through the regime defences they realised that the Syrian Arab Army was little more than a paper tiger and Iran-backed militias were largely gone, said Adi Smajic, a freelance photographer who visited rebel areas in 2015, so after taking Aleppo City and heading south, it became apparent that Bashar’s rule was done.
“Russia’s air force did target the rebels during their initial attacks on Aleppo, but after the city fell and the rebels moved into areas outside the previous de-escalation agreements between Turkey and Russia, the bombing completely stopped,” said Smajic.
“Russian intelligence predicted the fall of other cities and knew it was time to go as the Syrian defences began to crumble. When the rebels reached Homs and former rebels in the south began moving north, most of the officers and airforce pilots fled their bases leaving the remaining soldiers to surrender to the rebels at military checkpoints along the highways.”
Ultimately, a major reconfiguration of the economy and state capture by the presidential palace after Hafez al-Assad meant there were fewer people benefiting from Bashar’s corrupt rule and willing to fight to protect his regime.
When domestic and foreign economic challenges reduced the size of the pie for Syria’s corrupt elite to carve out and Assad ensured most of it went to his family, the leader became detested, even among his support base, with Alawites who had sacrificed their sons to prop up his corrupt regime particularly disheartened as the war progressed.
“During the war, economic opportunities declined so markedly that the capture of state resources by the presidential palace meant he didn’t leave anything for anyone else, creating discontent toward Bashar Al-Assad across many segments of Syrian society,” Jihad Yazigi, editor-in-chief of The Syria Report, told The New Arab.
“You talked to businessmen and they tell you ‘this guy is unbearable’, you talk to Alawites and they were fed up, you talk to the people from the opposition and, obviously, they hate him, so in terms of patronage he allocated less and less funds to these groups, because there were fewer resources available.
“But Bashar also believed fundamentally after winning the war, seeing European and Arab Gulf states coming back gradually without either demanding concessions, he saw himself as invincible and I think all this pushed him to limit his circles of patronage.”
