Ousted Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad planned to keep fighting rebel forces in the country before Russia evacuated him, according to a statement attributed to him released Monday.
“My departure from Syria was neither planned nor did it occur during the final hours of the battles,” Assad, 59, said on his Telegram account.
Assad said he remained in Damascus until the early hours of Dec. 8 — the day the rebels entered Syria’s capital.
Assad said that as rebel forces swept through the city, he moved north to Lattakia in coordination with Russian allies “to oversee combat operations.” It was at the nearby Hmeimim air base when “it became clear that our forces had completely withdrawn from all battle lines and that the last army positions had fallen.”
Assad said that with no viable means of leaving the base, which he said had come under intensified drone strikes, Moscow requested an immediate evacuation to Russia that evening.
“This took place a day after the fall of Damascus,” he said. NBC News was not able to independently verify his account of events.
Assad maintained that prior to that point, he had not considered “stepping down or seeking refuge.”
Assad was trying to convey that he had no intention of escaping the country, according to Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow at the London-based think tank Royal United Services Institute.
“It was a sort of sudden escape given the ‘terrorist offensive,’ as he calls it and as he has always called it, branding the opposition, any opposition, whether it’s (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) or not as terrorist factions enforced by external influences,” she said.
Syrians across the country celebrated as thousands of people held in Assad’s notorious prisons were released by rebel forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, after his regime fell. And the celebrations have continued in the days since, with mass rallies demonstrations across Syria on Friday marking the end to the Assad family’s 50 years of brutal rule.
Ozcelik said that while Assad’s “influence is in tatters,” it remains that “rather than being brought to justice, he in shadows in Russia” and able to communicate with regime loyalists in Syria.
HTS and Syrian de facto leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, a former Al Qaeda fighter, has sought to project a more moderate image and has vowed to rebuild a Syria inclusive of the religions and ethnic groups that constitute the country.
But HTS remains a globally designated terrorist group, with the United States holding a $10 million bounty over Jolani’s head, though the Biden administration has said it is weighing whether to remove HTS from its list of terrorist organizations.
President Joe Biden was one of many world leaders to welcome Assad’s fall, but he also called for caution at a “moment of risk and uncertainty as we all turn to the question of what comes next.”
Gabrielle Nolin and Raf Sanchez contributed.
