(CNN) — Biden administration officials, watching the remarkable speed of the Syrian rebel advance, increasingly see the possibility of the regime of Bashar al-Assad falling within days, five US officials told CNN.
If the American analysis proves true, it would represent a spectacularly fast fall from power for the Syrian dictator after a 14-year war, one that had been relatively stagnant until just last week.
Officials cautioned that a formal assessment on Assad’s fate hasn’t emerged and that views vary, saying his demise isn’t a forgone conclusion.
“The emerging consensus is that is an increasingly plausible scenario,” one senior US official said.
“Probably by next weekend the Assad regime will have lost any semblance of power,” another official said.
“Only thing that would delay a rebel conquest would be a well-organized coup and reorganization, but Assad’s folks have done a good job of stifling any potential competitors,” the official added.
Another source familiar with US intelligence about the developments noted that so far, the opposition has made progress because regime forces have largely not stayed in the fight. But the areas the opposition forces have advanced the most — Aleppo, Idlib and Hama — also are not flush with regime support, so they encountered less resistance, this person said.
“The question is whether regime forces actually stand their ground when it comes to Damascus,” they added.
Rebels are racing toward the Syrian capital after routing government forces in two of the country’s biggest cities in an advance that started just over a week ago. Homs, Syria’s third largest city, lies next in their path as they sweep south.
Beyond there, the capital Damascus.
The Biden administration appeared caught off guard by the speed of the rebel advance launched last week. Regime troops have collapsed and melted away, leaving a fragile shell of an army to defend the president and Damascus.
The US has misjudged the staying power of regimes before, most recently in Afghanistan — where the US intelligence community judged that the Afghan government would be more resilient than it ultimately was — and in Ukraine, which the US wrongly believed would fall to Russia within days of Moscow’s invasion. As a result, in 2022 the US intelligence launched a review of how it assesses the “will to fight” of foreign militaries, CNN previously reported.
The offensive is the first major flare-up in years between the Syrian opposition and the regime of Assad, who has ruled the war-torn country since 2000. Syria’s civil war began during the 2011 Arab Spring as the regime suppressed a pro-democracy uprising against Assad. More than 300,000 civilians have been killed in more than a decade of war, according to the United Nations, and millions of people have been displaced.
Leading the rebel advance in Syria is a group designated by the US as terrorist organization: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, which was previously linked to al Qaeda.
“We have real concerns about the designs and objectives of that organization,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN last weekend. “At the same time, of course, we don’t cry over the fact that the Assad government, backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, are facing certain kinds of pressure.”
There is little sign that Iran and Russia — whose support have kept Assad in power — are going to swoop in to save him, at least in a way that would make a difference. Russia is bogged down with its war in Ukraine, and Iran has been significantly weakened after Israel’s recent strikes on its air defenses and decimation of its regional proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. HTS appears to have taken advantage of the fact that Assad’s allies were all distracted — and that the world was not paying much attention to Syria — when it launched its operation, one of the US officials said.
One of the US officials said the Pentagon, which has around 900 troops in Syria, is not making plans to change its force posture in the country and is waiting to see what happens while taking additional force protection measures.
The US has long partnered with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces for anti-ISIS operations in Syria. The SDF has maintained contact with the rebel group known as HTS, the US official said, but the US does not communicate with HTS because it is considered a terrorist organization.
HTS does not appear to have the overt support of Assad adversary Turkey, but US officials believe Turkey gave the group a green light to launch its operation.
One significant concern the administration has is the safety of Assad’s stockpile of chemical weapons, thought to include both chlorine and sarin, which Assad has infamously used in rebel areas to the horror of the international community.
It is unclear where Assad would flee to, US officials said. His patrons could offer refuge in Moscow or Tehran, and it remains to be seen whether the rebels will set their sights on Latakia, an enclave of the Alawite sect to which Assad belongs.
The potential fall of the regime in Syria comes at a critical time in the United States as President Joe Biden prepares to hand over power to President-elect Donald Trump.
The incoming president is already making his views clear, taking to social media Saturday to call for the US to stay out of any potential regime change and let the conflict unfold.
“Syria is a mess, but is not our friend,” he wrote, urging a hands-off approach and concluding with the message: “LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”
Early in his first term, Trump ordered strikes against Assad’s regime in response to a chemical weapons attack that killed dozens of civilians. Trump later sought to withdraw US troops involved in the fight against ISIS from northern Syria, though hundreds remained in the country.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, warned Friday on social media that the US government needs to ensure ISIS prisoners detained in northeast Syria are not set free and that US troops in the country have the support they need.
“If there is a further collapse of the Syrian government, I fear that U.S. forces could be put in jeopardy. It is therefore imperative that we have contingency plans to reinforce our troops to make sure the anti-ISIS mission does not collapse,” the South Carolina Republican wrote on X.
This story has been updated with additional information.
CNN’s Sam Fossum contributed to this report.
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