Bashar al-Assad had no wish to become Arsenal Football Club's second-most famous dead supporter. Accordingly, the 59-year-old dictator of Syria fled to Moscow over the weekend as insurgents closed in on Damascus after a lightning campaign.
Assad's downfall came less than two weeks after an initial incursion west of the country's second largest city, Aleppo, triggered a cascading series of routs and retreats by the demoralized Syrian military.
The forces that took the capital are not the same rebels that overwhelmed Aleppo and Homs in the north, though they are reportedly co-ordinating. The abandonment of Syria by allies with their own problems—Hezbollah and Russia—meant that Assad had only his own indifferent troops left to fight for him. It was just a matter of time before the situation was grasped, and as soon as one enemy moved in the rest followed.
Celebratory gunfire was heard in Damascus, as word spread of Assad fleeing the capital. Footage shared on social media and verified by CNN showed similar scenes in Aleppo, which fell to the rebels just over a week ago as they launched a surprise lightning offensive which has since swept several major cities.
The sheer speed of the rebel advance has caught much of the world off guard and brought about a stunning reordering of power in a Middle Eastern nation that has long been at the crossroads of a regional power struggle. Both Iran and Russia were supporters of the Assad regime and helped keep him in power during a grueling civil war that sparked one of the world's largest recent refugee crises.
