Days after rebels routed the Syrian army from a major city in the north, a five-page report landed on the desk of military-intelligence officers in Damascus with an alarming diagnosis. The reports detailed the speed and direction of rebel advancesβand increasingly frantic plans and orders aimed at slowing their progress. The trove of thousands of pages of top-secret intelligence documentsβdiscovered in the building by reporters for The Wall Street Journal in Decemberβchronicles the remarkably rapid unraveling of the despotic regime that had ruled Syria with an iron fist for decades.
As HTS sped across Syria, the government, in its public pronouncements, played down the extent of rebel advances and sought to project an air of confidence. Internal communications among the forces trying to protect the regime, however, were marked with escalating alarm.
In the end, the officers and men of Branch abandoned their posts, too, leaving behind a pile of uniforms, weapons and ammunition along with empty whiskey bottles, stubbed-out cigarettes and reams of intelligence reports, some annotated in binders, others just heaped in stacks. Until that moment, it was widely believed that Assad had prevailed after 13 years of civil war. Backed by Russia and Iran, Syrian government forces had retaken control over most of the country, with rebels largely confined to a pocket in the northwest.
That changed in November, when HTS leaders noticed that Iran, Hezbollah and others helping defend Assad were facing setbacks and Russia was increasingly preoccupied with its war in Ukraine. HTS launched a surprise attack, advancing quickly toward Aleppo. As rebels approached the city on Nov. Two days later, the rebels were inside. Within hours of deploying on Nov. Nicolas Moussa, the intelligence officer who wrote the report, said that repeated efforts to rally army units failed as soldiers fled, abandoning weapons and military vehicles.
Lack of air support and artillery cover added to the panic, he wrote. Critical information about troop positions was leaked during the attack, it said. The diagnosis echoed what analysts have observed for years.
