The lightening military offensive launched on 27 November 2024 by Syria's main armed opposition group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and the subsequent ousting of President Bashar al-Asad caught even researchers, experts, and analysts by surprise. How was it possible that, after 13 years of stalemate of the Syrian civil war, the goal of the numerous armed opposition groups and their regional and international sponsors was finally reached in just 11 days?

The answer is that the regime has not really been toppled; rather it collapsed. What has collapsed is the repressive security system that had enabled Bashar al-Asad and his father before him, Hafez, to remain in power for decades, despite multiple episodes of contestation. 

The total lack of resistance from the security apparatus, especially from the army, surprised observers, and even more so the HTS fighters, whose only initial military objective had been to seize positions in the north of the country and possibly Aleppo, the country's second largest city. Despite the Syrian regime's reinforcement of its positions in and around Aleppo to resist a possible opposition offensive, HTS secured the city with limited combat losses. The same was then true for Hama, south of Aleppo towards Damascus, but above all for Homs, a city defended by elite Syrian army units. Damascus itself was protected by elite intelligence troops. In fact, the center of the city, home to the ruling power, had never really been under threat since the start of the civil war. However, it took just two days on 7 and 8 December to seize it from the Syrian regime and officially declare its downfall. 

Analysts point to corruption, demotivation, and desertions to explain the Syrian army's lack of resistance. While these elements do indeed exist, they are not the cause but rather the mere consequences of the fragmentation and weakening of the military institution, caused by its control by the Syrian intelligence services, which are fragmented themselves and obey neither logic of state-building nor national patriotism. Syrian intelligence was structured more by a logic of predation, gang competition, and impunity. Intelligence services have, in a way, established themselves as the primary power in Syria, dominating and weakening the army for decades. Consequently, the collapse of the Syrian army under the offensives of armed opposition groups is just the latest act in the agony of an institution that was, before Hafez al-Asad came to power, the most stable and robust institution of the Syrian state; the only institution where, despite the purges, the different ethno-religious communities were represented. 

Why has this “zombie” army survived the civil war all these years, when its structural weakness was already well known? Quite simply because Syrian intelligence used all its capacity for repression to force soldiers to fight, but also to redistribute some of the economic rents that it extracted from the meagre revenues of a country at war. 

Nevertheless, signs of the Syrian army's organisational and operational weakness had already appeared on several occasions. The Lebanese Hezbollah and elite Iranian officers had indeed coordinated the operations of the various Syrian army units against opposition groups, notably between 2014 and 2017. The Syrian army's military successes would never have been achieved without the organisational and operational efficiency of its Lebanese and Iranian allies, or without the air support of Russian forces. 

Far from being insignificant, the collapse of the Syrian army constitutes perhaps the greatest challenge for the new era that is beginning in Syria: how to reconstitute a national army, after 54 powerless years of dictatorial rule, to serve as the foundation for the independence of a Syrian state?