Bashar al-Assad under threat as Syrian rebels draw closer

President Bashar al-Assad used Russian and Iranian firepower to beat back rebel forces during years of civil war but never defeated them, leaving him vulnerable when his allies were distracted by wars elsewhere and his enemies went on the march.

The rebels’ lightning advance through western Syria marks one of the most serious threats to half a century of Assad family rule in Damascus, and a seismic moment for the Middle East.

Statues of Assad’s father and brother were toppled in cities taken by the rebels, while pictures of him on billboards and government offices have been torn down, stamped on, burned or riddled with bullets.

The Syrian presidency issued a statement on Saturday denying Assad had left the country and saying he was carrying out his duties in Damascus.

Bashar al-Assad became president in 2000 after his father Hafez died, preserving the dominance of their Alawite sect in the Sunni Muslim-majority country and Syria’s status as an Iranian ally hostile to Israel and the US.

Shaped in its early years by the Iraq war and crisis in Lebanon, his rule has been defined by the civil war which spiralled out of the 2011 Arab Spring, when Syrians demanding democracy took to the streets, to be met with deadly force.

Branded an “animal” in 2018 by U.S. President Donald Trump for using chemical weapons – an accusation he denied – Assad has outlasted many of the foreign leaders who believed his demise was imminent in the early days of the conflict, when he lost swathes of Syria to rebels.

Helped by Russian air strikes and Iranian-backed militias, he clawed back much of the lost territory during years of military offensives, including siege warfare condemned as “medieval” by UN investigators.

With his opponents largely confined to a corner of northwestern Syria, he presided over several years of relative calm though large parts of the country remained out of his grasp and the economy was shackled by sanctions.

He re-established ties with Arab states that once shunned him but remained a pariah to much of the world.

Bashar al-Assad has not delivered any public remarks since insurgents took Aleppo a week ago but said in a call with Iran’s president that the escalation sought to redraw the region for Western interests, echoing his view of the revolt as a foreign-backed conspiracy.

Justifying his response to the insurgency in its early stages, Assad compared himself to a surgeon. “Do we say to him: ‘your hands are covered in blood?’ Or do we thank him for saving the patient?” he said in 2012.

Early in the conflict, as rebels seized town after town, he oozed confidence.

“We will hit them with an iron fist and Syria will return to how it was,” Assad told soldiers after taking back the town of Maaloula in 2014.

He delivered on the first pledge, but not the second. Years later, large parts of Syria remained outside state control, cities were flattened, the death toll topped 350,000, and more than a quarter of the population had fled abroad.