While it was easy to follow, via social media, the military developments on the ground in real time as Assad’s regime collapsed, historians will still need to write accounts of what was going on behind the reports about various localities falling to the insurgents. Performing research for these accounts will hopefully involve recovery of important internal documents and interviews with personnel who fought on both sides.
In this post, I present an in-depth interview conducted on 20 January with an individual who is originally from the Idlib Shi‘a village of Kafariya (whose original inhabitants have still not returned) and served in the Iranian and Hezbollah-backed ‘Local Defence Forces’ network until the very end. Following the regime’s final collapse, he fled from Syria to Lebanon. In this interview, he explains his own unit’s role in the final fighting, his broader feelings about what happened and how he views the roles of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah in Syria.
Interestingly, the interviewee continues to defend the deposed president Bashar al-Assad- a perspective I am interested in hearing from people inside Syria or who left following the final collapse of the regime, whereas I could not care less to hear the views supporters of Assad who are not Syrian or those like ‘Partisan Girl’ who live far away in the comfort of exile.
Q: First can you describe to me your last days in Syria? Were you on the fighting fronts? How were your feelings?
A: Brother I will tell you what happening in detail. I was not in the Aleppo battle because I was on leave permit. As soon as the attack on Aleppo began, my friends and comrades in the regime I was in came out, and when they first arrived, they deployed at the barriers to support our brothers in Nubl and al-Zahara’. The men did an excellent job, and the insurgents could not take on inch in the area they were in. But regrettably, in the rest of the areas there was no resistance, and I learned why later: betrayal by the senior officers!