The Slow Collapse of the Syrian Army
Years of clear signs in retrospect that the army was ill-prepared to fight on its own
The opposition’s rapid advances across the entirety of northwest Syria were not just a result of years of advancements on the part of the opposition, but also of years of decay within the Syrian Arab Army (SAA). Most people, including opposition leaders themselves, were surprised by the extent of the collapse of Syria’s security forces. On paper, regime forces greatly outnumber the opposition and had spent years reorganizing and reforming the structure of the army following nearly a decade of its collapse. However, the structural and command weaknesses at all levels have been exposed over the past week. The Syrian army has not only faced a complete collapse in command, but a severe manpower shortage brought on by internal reforms, corruption, desertions, and the core structural weakness of having fought only with the support of foreign militaries.
The Last Major Offensive
It has been almost five years since the regime last conducted a true offensive (it has conducted large operations against ISIS cells, but nothing like fighting entrenched opposition forces). From April 2019 until March 5, 2020, the Syrian regime, Russian, Iran, and Hezbollah conducted a major offensive against the very rebel factions that have now liberated Aleppo. This offensive targeted the entire northwest front. In Latakia, regime forces spent eight months trying to seize the strategic hilltop village of Kabani, which would open the door to sweeping through the northwest of opposition lines. A small unit of opposition forces was able to withstand the offensive, however, likely saving most of Idlib from capture. Elsewhere the opposition was not so lucky. Pro-regime forces swept through northern Hama, then southern Idlib, then pushed the line back in eastern Idlib and western Aleppo.
The advances continued until February 27, 2020, when a Russian airstrike killed 34 Turkish soldiers along the northern Syria border. In response, Turkey began its “Operation Spring Shield”, a massive eight-day military campaign to put an end to the regime’s advance and finally enforce the Astana de-escalation agreement from 2018. There were several key takeaways from the regime’s performance during this offensive that are distinctly not apparent today.
First, regime forces in northern Hama and southern Idlib relied very little on Iranian and Hezbollah support, whose forces were instead concentrated in western Aleppo. Instead, the Russian military was the key backer, providing non-stop air strikes and aerial surveillance and, for the first time, facilitating continuous night time operations by select regime units (mostly the Tiger Forces, newly reformed into the 25th Division). Small storming groups would advance on opposition-held villages under the cover of dark, while also being able to repel most opposition attempts at night-time counter attacks. One Syrian soldier at the time described the situation to this author as “the Russians are everywhere and Russian PMCs are working closely with local National Defense Forces.”
When the opposition did successfully counter-attack, regime forces were able to quickly re-establish new defensive lines thanks in part to the depth of their auxiliary forces (militias) which were used to plug gaps in the line until more units could be brought up. The Russian air force and massed regime artillery played key roles in stunting opposition advances by pounding whatever town had been lost and heavily striking logistics points in the rear. This effectively countered the opposition’s more skilled infantry and use of rapid pushes supported by car bombs - once the opposition reached a new position, they would get stuck under relentless bombardment while their now exposed logistical lines would be attrited. This system allowed the regime to exploit its manpower and fires advantage over the weaker depth of the opposition, before renewing its advance.
Nevertheless, for eight days in February 2020 regime forces operated largely without Russian fire support as Turkish artillery and airstrikes rained down on their positions and opposition infantry attempted to advance. Turkey’s imposition of a no-fly zone over Idlib shut down the Syrian Air Force while Russian airstrikes were concentrated just on a few critical frontline areas. More than 400 soldiers were killed in those eight days, including the entire command room of the 124th Republican Guard Brigade. It was one of, if not the, deadliest weeks for regime forces in the entirety of the war. Despite this, regime units were able to repel multiple opposition attempts to take Saraqib and largely held their ground in southern Idlib.
This was a rare insight into the regime’s ability to command its troops. Despite never having faced an air force and suffering huge losses in personnel and equipment, regime lines did not collapse. Five years later, what changed?
No more foreign support
The simplest and one of the most important changes is the near complete absence of Damascus’ foreign backers. Iran and Hezbollah have been deeply weakened by their war with Israel since October 7, 2023. Israeli airstrikes in Syria and Lebanon have killed nearly all of Hezbollah’s top commanders as well as many senior Iranian officers working in Syria. The two organizations have both withdrawn some forces from Syria to Lebanon and also likely gone underground in Syria in order to avoid Israeli airstrikes. Local Shia militias backed by these forces did participate in the defense of west Aleppo, suffering at least 22 deaths across all parts of the frontline during the first few days of fighting. These Syrian units, supported by IRGC and Hezbollah commanders, weapons, and at time fighters on the ground, had played key roles in the 2019 and 2020 capture of the western Aleppo countryside which now fell to the opposition in two days. While they did not withdraw entirely from Aleppo (both the IRGC leader of the Aleppo front and a Hezbollah field commander were both killed in the initial attack), the partial pullback and bunkering down of Hezbollah and IRGC commanders likely left these local proxies rudderless and much less effective than in past years.
Meanwhile, Russia has torpedoed its own military in Ukraine over the past two years, now relying on thousands of North Korean soldiers alongside a slew of foreign mercenaries to help make marginal gains in Ukraine’s east, all while continuing to take both material and human losses to its air force. This has left its Syrian detachment with a reduced amount of jets and helicopters, munitions, and less experienced pilots. The Russian Ministry of Defense has also been transferring commanders who were dismissed from their posts in Ukraine to posts in Syria.
Despite these challenges, Russia has continued to demonstrate an ability and willingness to conduct heavy bombing campaigns against the northwest each year. Most recently its air force conducted dozens of airstrikes against both civilian and militant targets in Idlib across four days in October. While it has conducted some airstrikes since November 27, these have all targeted civilian and medical infrastructure and have not reach the rate seen in October, let alone during the 2019 offensive. Furthermore, Russian officers are reported to have completely withdrawn from the northwest front, returning to their bases in Damascus and the coast. This has left Syrian units which had for years received close Russian kinetic and command support suddenly forced to conduct a serious defensive effort entirely on their own.
SAA reforms backfire
The general lack of Russian involvement has likely exacerbated command and control issues within regime forces. Ironically, one of the very reforms pushed by the Russians over six years ago seems to have played a role in this. Throughout the first half of the war, senior Syrian officers were killed at an alarming rate. For example, between March 2011 and December 2013 nearly 800 senior officers - lieutenant colonels and higher - were killed in combat, according to data released by the regime itself and collected by this author. That is a rate of 23 officers killed each month, almost one per day. Many of these were unit commanders and deputy commanders, some killed due to assassination attempts but many from participating in front-line combat and being trapped alongside their units during opposition advances and sieges. Pro-regime military culture is now rife with stories of colonels and brigadiers who fought to the death with a handful of soldiers so the rest could escape.
However, the Russians began to change this ‘institutional practice’ in 2018, making senior leadership lead from the rear so as to lower the risk of dying. The change is clearly reflected in casualty data, with significantly fewer senior officer and especially command officer deaths during the 2019 offensive. As a Syrian soldier described it at the time, “there is a new policy implemented by Russians that commanders above the level of field commander should have a more tactical role”.
Five years later, and the practice of ‘leading from the rear’ seems to have taken root. Years of stagnant frontlines and multiple command dismissals and appointments further added to this culture, and when the opposition attacked, senior leadership seemed nowhere to be found. Four colonels and a lieutenant colonel were killed in the first three days of fighting, but only one of them was a unit commander and none of the regiment or brigade commanders that manned the west Aleppo front were among the dead.
The reality is that the Syrian command was absent from the battlefield from the start, and then unable to rally troops while remaining safe from the fighting. Without battalion and brigade commanders anywhere nearby, each platoon and company stationed across west Aleppo was suddenly left to make its own decision. Some stayed and fought - this is clear both in the videos that have emerged and in both opposition and regime casualty reporting. Regime media reported a high number of captains (usually platoon and company commanders) killed, indicating that many smaller unit commanders were present and attempting to organize the defense or withdrawal of their specific position. But without senior officers coordinating defenses between multiple points or for troops to rally behind, the positions quickly fell.
More broadly, the Syrian Ministry of Defense has pursued a large reform initiative for the past several years, seeking to transition the SAA from a conscript military to a volunteer army. Muhsen al-Mustafa, a researcher at the Omran Center for Strategic Studies, has tracked this process closely. According to him, the Ministry of Defense has been moving many active duty soldiers into the reserve service, essentially a half step towards full demobilization, and then discharging many long-time reservists and allowing many veteran officers to voluntarily demobilize. According to his data, the regime discharged nearly 25,000 reserve service soldiers between 2023 and May 2024 while as many as 3,000 officers were allowed to end their service as well. This process has resulted in an army that still has a large reserve but a smaller pool of active duty soldiers that it can rely on in an emergency like this - and many of its most veteran officers have left.
With the cessation of all major operations in 2020, many regime brigades were gradually moved back to their bases, their soldiers entering partial civilian life. Most of Syria’s active military was deployed to Idlib, so its collapse leaves a smaller pool of units to now draw upon. The transition of many of these units soldier’s to the reserves further means that, as the senior command struggles to organize the collapsed forces around the northwest front, it must now undertake the administratively complicated task of mobilizing its reserves.
The 30th Division problem
Yet morale in the army has never been lower. Reforms have focused on training, integrating reconciled rebels and civilians, and forming new units and command structures. However corruption has remained rampant, with the continued collapse of Syria’s economy fueling it even more. The corruption and abuse of military commanders has resulted in undermanned frontline units and consistent reports of desertions.
In Aleppo, this reform process involved rebuilding the fractured command chain that had emerged after five years of intense fighting. The 30th Republican Guard Division was officially announced in January 2017, just a few weeks after the regime successfully recaptured Aleppo city. The division, a project initiated and backed by Russia, would gradually merge the various army and militia forces that had fought in Aleppo over the previous years under one administrative command. While Hezbollah and Iran had, and would continue to, play a key role on this front, it was the 30th Division that would become both Damascus’ and Moscow's main unit in securing Aleppo from any future opposition attack (Russian officers were regularly stationed alongside 30th Division points in Aleppo, in the past).
Yet SAA complaint pages - an informal system where soldiers anonymously raise concerns about issues in their unit on Facebook - have for years revealed deep problems within the army more broadly, and the 30th Division especially. Many complaints focus on the issue of leave and ‘tayfish’, the (pre-war) practice of bribing your commanding officer for semi-permanent leave. Soldiers have continually complained that battalion commanders have severely reduced the frequency of, or even eliminated altogether, leave, and then encourage deployed soldiers to pay bribes for extended time at home. The complaints emphasize that this has left their positions severely undermanned and destroyed morale as the remaining men have not seen their families for months.
Other common complaints about the 30th Division in just the past five months include:
The commander of the 47th Regiment’s 69 Battalion filing false reports against his soldiers resulting in at least eight being jailed
A senior officer in the 47th Regiment regularly stealing his soldiers’ food and fuel allowances, demanding bribes to go on leave, is regularly drunk on duty and generally abusing the soldiers resulting in more than 30 from his battalion deserting
A 1st Lieutenant in the 47th Regiment’s 62 Battalion engaging in sectarian abuse and opening smuggling routes with the opposition through the west Aleppo front
The commander of 102nd Regiment’s 419 Battalion having members of the unit assist in theft from locals and extorting other battalion members
The commander of the 102nd Regiment 415 Battalion ordering his men to loot antiquity sites instead of establishing defensive position around Basratun, west Aleppo as well as looting farmers’ crops, engaging in sectarian abuse of soldiers, and regularly bringing prostitutes to his office at the front
The security officer of the 102nd Regiment’s 415 Battalion insulting and attacking unit members while engaging in antiquity looting
More seriously, these pages began accusing the 30th Division in general, and the 47th Regiment in particular, of being infiltrated by opposition sympathizers over the past year. These accusations became even more explicit as opposition forces began conducting successful raids against 30th Division positions in western Aleppo this year. A 47th Regiment 67th Battalion point was attacked in Qabtan al-Jabal on the night of March 16, losing two tanks and triggering accusations that one of the unit’s members was an opposition ‘agent.’ This same battalion had been accused for months of being rife with corruption. On September 2 a 30th Division position in Kabashin was attacked and two soldiers captured, triggering a new round of complaints explicitly calling for the ‘cleansing’ the division of sleeper cells. Within hours of the initial attack on November 27, one SAA complaint page wrote a scathing post addressed to Bashar al-Assad:
“We had previously talked about corruption within the division and we talked about the presence of traitors within the division but no one listened. We talked about the entry of militants more than once and the theft of tanks and their safe exit but one of them called us agents and today, after 5 years of fortification on the axes of the 30th Division, three main regiments fell in less than an hour. The battalion leaders fled and left the elements and officers to their fate. Today our loss is great, more than 70 martyrs and dozens of wounded. We had to tell their families that they died because there are traitorous officers whom we cannot hold accountable. Tomorrow I will publish and provide evidence of the treason of the battalion officers, especially the battalions of the 47th Regiment.”
On December 3 a member of the 47th Regiment’s 63rd Battalion claimed that both the regiment and battalion commanders ignored the battalion’s communications when it came under siege in the first day’s attack, leaving them to die. There has been no sign of the 30th Division leadership since November 27. One former regime fighter with extensive contacts in Aleppo told the author, “no one has heard from them, likely they are in hiding or have been arrested.” Fear of making mistakes, or being blamed for the army’s failures, and being arrested has reportedly paralyzed many commanders. Major General Salah Abdullah, the former head of the 30th Division and recently appointed commander of the 25th Division, was sacked on December 2, replaced by his predecessor Major General Suhail Hassan. Abdullah, a rising star within the SAA, had reportedly failed to effectively organize his division - the main reinforcement in the first few days - and may have been arrested after the fall of Aleppo city.
Elsewhere, other regime commanders are being arrested as well. On December 1, Brigadier Mohamed Takla was arrested in Hama City for unlawfully withdrawing his brigade from the Jabal Zawiya front, which opposition forces had quickly swept through the day before. Takla was the commander of the infamous 76th Brigade, and in fact was the subject of a complaint in August 2023 accusing him of weakening frontline points by allowing officers to go on frequent leave while extending the time between leave for non-officers to nearly two months, contributing to what the post claims was “a large amount of desertions”.
Desertions are a not-uncommon claim made in complaint posts in recent years, a result of the general treatment and conditions soldiers endure. This was only made worse when the opposition began its offensive. Within 24 hours of the attack on Aleppo, some pro-regime community Facebook pages were posting about “the safe return of our son from the battles in Aleppo,” a clear sign that men had deserted their posts and returned home. A former pro-regime fighter who traveled through Hama on November 30 told this author that he had both seen himself and heard from others of deserters leaving the northwest fighting to return home.
Who is left to fight
Eight days into the offensive and the regime now appears to be relying heavily on local loyalist militias. Having reached northern Hama, opposition forces now find themselves on the edge of the familiar ‘minority wall’ of past years. From here south through Homs province lies a dense strip of Alawite and Shia villages, the heart of the regime’s militia networks.
Militias have formed for a variety of reasons since 2011, each with its own identity and unique relationship to the state which shaped the specific role they played during the war (for a deep-dive on this, see “Shabiha Forever”). Generally, however, militias served as mobile auxiliary units that could quickly fill the gap left by defecting soldiers. They were often highly motivated, if under-trained, fighters due to their frequent (though not exclusive) roots in Syria’s minority Alawite and Shia communities. Existential threat narratives - both exaggerated and very real - played a major role in mobilizing these networks early on (for more on this see “The Alawite Dilemma in Homs” by Aziz Nakkash).
Yet militias saw their most success when fighting side-by-side with the heavy armor, artillery, and air force of the SAA, or with the help of Russian, Hezbollah, and Iranian commanders. In the first half of the war, local loyalist coverage of regime offensives and defenses would highlight a plethora of units involved, including militias, elite army units, the mukhabarat, and always regular SAA brigades. However the past week has seen only references to reinforcements from the two pillar units of the regime - the 25th Division and the 4th Division - suggesting that the regime is struggling to mobilize its regular army, which contains manpower and equipment critical to an operation of this scale.
The opposition’s advance into northern Hama has triggered a slew of calls for youth to join militias - “grab a gun and report to the intelligence office to defend the homeland”, as some loyalist Facebook pages have posted. Local regime militia leaders are also advertising new “volunteer contracts” with multi-million Syrian pound salaries across Facebook. But it is unclear how willing young men are to join at a time when the regime has never been weaker, and to fight for cities that are not their own. So while the opposition may find it difficult to seize specific minority towns, it is not certain that these units will fight, or fight hard, in the nearby Sunni communities the way they have in the past.
While militias have served in critical roles, those roles were often deeply intertwined with that of the army. But how effective these militias will be is an open question now with the army in an apparently unprecedented state of collapse and the opposition stronger, more heavily armed, and better organized than ever. The full truth of why the army collapsed so extensively will take time to be uncovered, meanwhile the offensive continues with the opposition on the verge of liberating a second provincial capital.