As Syrian rebels now surround Russia’s two main bases in Syria, Russian war blogger Rybar writes on Telegram: “Russia’s military presence in the Middle East region hangs by a thread.” Gunfire is heard around the Russian Navy base at Tartus, he and others write. As for the 1,000–bed Russian Air Base 90 miles up the coast, Rybar writes: “The Khmeimim base is cut off.”

After 24 years as Syria’s president, Bashar Al-Assad resigned yesterday and fled with his wife and three children to the safety of Moscow. “Assad is gone. He has fled his country. His protector, Russia, Russia, Russia, led by Vladimir Putin was not interested in protecting him any longer,” President-elect Trump wrote yesterday on his social media platform Truth Social. “There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place. They lost all interest in Syria because of Ukraine”

As the rebel tide swept across Syria in 11 days, the Kremlin left its military bases behind. Today, besieged on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, these bases, Russia’s only bases outside the former Soviet Union, stand as symbols of imperial overstretch. More than symbols, the bases had served as staging areas for Russian military operations in Libya and Central Africa.

Today, Kremlin sources leak to Russian state news organizations that Syria’s Turkish-backed rebels will respect the 49-year leases signed with Russia over the last decade. Yet why should they? Did the Vietnamese rebels say America could keep its navy base at Da Nang? Did the Afghan rebels say America could keep its airbase at Bagram?

Instead, the harsh reality is that Russia has lost in Syria a huge amount of face and huge amount of power projection. In the Mideast, Russia is down and Turkey is up. “There is now a new reality in Syria, politically and diplomatically,” Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said Saturday in a speech at Gaziantep, 35 miles north of the Syrian border. The Ottoman Empire ruled Syria for 400 years, until 1916. Today, the leader of modern Turkey says he has no designs on Syrian land.

However, Mr. Erdogan largely funded the rebel army, down to paying for the bullets in their weapons and the gasoline in their pickup trucks. With as many as 3 million Syrian refugees now preparing to come home from Turkey, Turkey is expected to displace Russia as Syria’s main patron. A Russia war blogger, Rybar, lamented, according to default translation on his Telegram account: “Dear partner Erdogan has stabbed another scimitar in our back.”

It will reverse history going back almost 70 years. In 1956, Syria signed its first arms purchase deal with the Soviet Union. Through the 1980s, the Soviet Union supplied Syria with 90 percent of its arms, according to the Congressional Research Service. Relations were so tight, and seemingly eternal, that during the Brezhnev years, Syria refused to condemn the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the Putin years, it refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Starting in the 1960s, tens of thousands of Syrians studied in the Soviet Union, and then, its main successor state, Russia. One was Hafez Bashar Al-Assad, the runaway dictator’s oldest son. Last year, he graduated with honors from Moscow State University. 

Another student, Basil Al-Assad, was the oldest son of Hafez Al-Assad, the defense minister who seized power in a coup in 1970. Nicknamed the “Golden Knight,” Basil was groomed as a dynastic  heir, studying at Soviet military academies and learning to speak fluent Russian. After he was killed in a car accident, succession unexpectedly fell to his younger brother, Bashar, an ophthalmologist.

It is no surprise that Bashar al-Assad now is at Moscow. A regular interlocutor of President Putin, Bashar al-Assad went to Moscow four times since 2015. The Financial Times has reported that since 2018, the Assad clan bought “at least 20 apartments” in Moscow. During the past decade, Russian military aid was crucial to the Assad regime’s survival.

In reverse, Mr. Putin flew to Khmeimim, Syria, in 2017 to inspect Russia’s new overseas air base. Over the last decade,Russian warplanes flew 39,000 sorties out of this base, according to Airwars, a London-based non-profit that tracks military air attacks in Iran and Syria. The group estimates that Russian aviation killed about 5,000 Syrian civilians and wounded about 8,500 more.

According to the Britain-based Syrian Network for Human Rights, Russian pilots in Syria innovated “double tap” strikes. After hitting a civilian target, often a hospital, the aircraft would loop back to kill rescue workers. Russian pilots brought this strategy with them to Ukraine in 2022, when many pilots were shifted north.

At the base’s peak, Russia maintained about 70 warplanes at Khmeimim. In 2020, Russia and Iran reached a reduction in hostilities deal with Turkey. In 2022, as the war in Ukraine became more difficult for Russia, warjets and land troops were quietly moved out of Syria. However, as recently as last year Russia still maintained a web of 20 military bases in Syria, plus about 85 outposts.

It is unclear how many Russian soldiers made it to the coast, to the relative safety of the two main bases. Surrounded by hostile forces, some of them black flag jihadists, many of these Russians now may feel trapped in modern day Alamoes.

Rybar, the blogger with 1.3 million followers in Russia, predicted gloomily of Syria’s insurgents: “They will try to inflict the maximum defeat and the maximum reputational and physical damage on the representatives of the Russian Federation and in particular to destroy our military bases.”

Last week, Russia’s war machine continued on autopilot. The Russian Air Force carried out dozens of air strikes up through Friday, the day the Russian embassy ordered an evacuation. Last week’s airstrikes hit towns, refugee camps, and a hospital in northern Syria. An estimated 50 people were killed and 100 wounded, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and an opposition aid group, the White Helmets.

The rebel coalition includes radical jihadists who are already issuing appeals in Russian to the 15 percent of Russians who are Muslim. Syrian rebel coalition spokesman Hassan Abdelghani said the targets of the opposition include the Russian Army which he accused of bringing “devastation, death, and killing to the region.”

Russian bloggers are already writing an obituary for the Kremlin’s Syrian adventure. “Ten years there, dead Russian soldiers, billions of rubles spent and thousands of tons of ammunition expended,” Starshe Eddi, a blogger with 600,000 followers, wrote of Russia’s wasted investment in Syria.

A veteran of Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine, Igor Ghirkin,  wrote: “Now our enemies have naturally decided to take advantage of our weakness at the moment when we are busy on the Ukrainian front. We are overstretched. The defeat of the Syrian side will also be our defeat.”