With Moscow's help, Bashar al-Assad managed to escape Syria, just before rebels stormed Damascus, ending his rule.
Bloomberg reports in his article the background of the deposed president's escape from Syria. Russia, according to Kremlin sources, arranged for Assad to leave via a Russian air base as the Syrian opposition made a rapid advance on Damascus.
Seeing the developments, Russia feared for the fate of its old ally and convinced Assad that he would lose to the forces of the Islamic organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. So the Kremlin offered him and his family safe passage if he left immediately, which he eventually did.
Assad's departure took place through the Khmeimim airbase. The sources said Russian intelligence coordinated the launch. First, the ousted president left Damascus in a private plane. He had not told any of his advisors, for fear of a betrayal scenario, while he deactivated the plane's transponder.
The plane was headed to the Russian Khmeimim air base on the Syrian coast, and from there he flew a Russian military jet to Moscow.
Disappearance of the plane from the radars
Bashar al-Assad, advised by Russian agents, took off in the early hours of Sunday from Damascus, disabling the radar of his personal plane.
Around that time, Fligthradar24 data showed that a plane believed to be carrying Assad headed for the Mediterranean before making a U-turn and disappearing from radar, leading to scenarios of its possible crash.
Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, however, told NBC News that Assad left Syria "in the safest possible way" over the weekend. "He is safe and this shows that Russia is acting as required in such a critical situation," he said.
Assad's fall angered Putin
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov refused to reveal the whereabouts of the ousted Syrian president.
However, he clarified that Vladimir Putin has no intention of meeting with Assad in Moscow. "There is no such meeting on the official agenda of the president and we have nothing to say about his location", he declared to the Russian media.
So far, Moscow has made no official comment on the fall of the Assad regime. But the shocking developments in Syria have angered Putin, who is demanding to know why Russian intelligence did not detect the growing threat posed by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to the Assad regime until it was too late for Moscow to offer its support to the president.
The fall of the Syrian regime comes after years of massive Russian financial and military support for the Syrian war. According to Russian military personnel, Moscow helped Assad because "it was based on concerns about its military bases in the region - a naval base in Tartus and an air base in Khmeimim - which are the country's only bases outside the territory of former Soviet republics." .
A Business Insider report on Monday said Moscow withdrew its warships from the Russian naval base in Tartus on the Syrian coast after Assad fled, while the Russian military has yet to fully withdraw its forces from Syria. (A2 Televizion)
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