Center East correspondent, BBC International Provider
BBCMouldy half-finished meals on bunk beds, discarded army uniforms and rejected guns – those are the remnants of an abrupt retreat from this bottom that when belonged to Iran and its affiliated teams in Syria.
The scene tells a tale of panic. The forces stationed right here fled with negligible blackmail, resignation in the back of a decade-long presence that unravelled in mere weeks.
Iran was once Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s most crucial best friend for greater than 10 years. It deployed army advisers, mobilised international militias, and invested closely in Syria’s conflict.
Its elite Islamic Modern Safeguard Corps (IRGC) constructed deep networks of underground bases, supplying palms and coaching to 1000’s of opponents. For Iran, this was once additionally a part of its “security belt” towards Israel.
We’re related Khan Shaykhun the city in Idlib province. Ahead of Assad’s regime fell on 8 December, it was once one of the crucial key strategic places for the IRGC and its allied teams.
From the principle highway, the doorway is just seeing, mysterious in the back of piles of sand and rocks. A watchtower on a hilltop, nonetheless painted within the colors of the Iranian flag, overlooks the bottom.
A receipt pocket book confirms the bottom’s identify: The Place of Martyr Zahedi – named next Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a govern IRGC commander who was once assassinated in an alleged Israeli airstrike on Iran’s consulate in Syria on 1 April, 2024.
The provides not too long ago ordered – we discovered receipts for candies, rice, cooking oil – counsel day-to-day moment persevered right here till the latter moments. However now the bottom has fresh occupants – two armed Uyghur opponents from Hayaat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist militant staff whose chief Ahmed al-Sharaa has grow to be the fresh meantime president of Syria.
The Uyghurs arrived abruptly in an army automobile, requesting our media accreditation.
“Iranians were here. They all fled,” considered one of them says, talking in his mom tongue, a dialect of Turkish. “Whatever you see here is from them. Even these onions and the leftover foods.”
Disciplines filled with untouched onions within the lawn have now germinated.
The bottom is a labyrinth of tunnels dug deep into white rocky hills. There are bunk beds in some rooms with out a home windows. The roof of one of the crucial corridors is draped in cloth within the colors of the Iranian flag and there are a couple of Persian books on a rocky shelf.
They left in the back of paperwork containing delicate data. All in Persian, they have got main points of opponents’ non-public data, army team of workers codes, house addresses, spouses’ names and cell phone numbers in Iran. From the names, it’s sunlit that a number of opponents on this bottom had been from the Afghan brigade that was once shaped through Iran to struggle in Syria.
Resources connected to Iran-backed teams advised BBC Persian that the bottom properties basically Afghan forces accompanied through Iranian “military advisers” and their Iranian commanders.
Tehran’s major justification for its army involvement in Syria was once “to fight against jihadi groups” and to give protection to “Shia holy shrines” towards radical Sunni militants.
It created paramilitary teams of basically Afghan, Pakistani and Iraqi opponents.
But, when the overall time got here, Iran was once unprepared. Orders for retreat reached some bases on the very latter time. “Developments happened so fast,” a senior member of an Iran-backed Iraqi paramilitary staff tells me. “The order was to just take your backpack and leave.”
A couple of resources alike to the IRGC advised the BBC that lots of the forces needed to elude to Iraq, and a few had been ordered to progress to Lebanon or Russian bases to be evacuated from Syria through the Russians.
An HTS fighter, Mohammad al Rabbat, had witnessed the gang’s go from Idlib to Aleppo and Syria’s capital Damascus.
He says they idea their operation would whisk “about a year” and absolute best, they’d “capture Aleppo in three to six months”. However to their amaze, they entered Aleppo in a question of days.
The regime’s fast downfall was once led to through a series of occasions next Hamas’s 7 October assault on Israel.
That assault resulted in an escalation of Israeli breeze moves towards the IRGC and Iran-backed teams in Syria and a conflict towards some other key Iranian best friend – the Lebanese militant staff Hezbollah, whose chief was once killed in an breeze collision.
This “situation of psychological collapse” for Iran and Hezbollah was once central to their downfall, says 35-year-old fighter Rabbat.
However probably the most the most important trifle away. got here from inside of: there was once a rift between Assad and his Iran-linked allies, he says.
“There was a complete breakdown of trust and military co-operation between them. IRGC-linked groups were blaming Assad of betrayal and believing that he is giving up their locations to Israel.”
As we cross thru Khan Shaykhun, we come throughout a boulevard painted within the colors of the Iranian flag. It leads to a college construction that was once being old as an Iranian headquarters.
At the wall on the front of the bogs, slogans learn: “Down with Israel” and “Down with the USA”.
It was once observable that those headquarters had been additionally evacuated at snip realize. We discovered paperwork labeled as “highly sensitive”.
Abdullah, 65, and his nation are some of the only a few locals who stayed and lived right here along the IRGC-led teams. He says this moment was once withered.
His home is only some metres clear of the headquarters and in between, there are deep trenches with barbed cord.
“Movement at night was prohibited,” he says.
His neighbour’s house was once became an army publish. “They sat there with their guns pointing at the road, treating us all as suspects,” he remembers.
Lots of the opponents didn’t even talk Arabic, he says. “They were Afghans, Iranians, Hezbollah. But we referred to them all as Iranians because Iran was controlling them.”
Abdullah’s spouse Jourieh says she is worked up that the “Iranian militias” have left, however nonetheless recollects the “stressful” time earlier than their withdrawal. She had idea they’d be trapped in crossfire as Iran-backed teams had been fortifying their positions and on the point of struggle, however nearest “they just vanished in a few hours”.
“This was an occupation. Iranian occupation,” says Abdo who, like others, has simply returned right here along with his nation next 10 years. His area had additionally grow to be an army bottom.
I noticed this fury in opposition to Iran and a softer perspective in opposition to Russia in lots of conversations with Syrians.
I requested Rabbat, the HTS fighter, why this was once.
“Russians were dropping bombs from the sky and other than that, they were in their bases while Iranians and their militias were on the ground interacting. People were feeling their presence, and many weren’t happy with it,” he defined.
This sense is mirrored in Syria’s fresh rulers’ coverage in opposition to Iran.
The fresh government have put a prohibit on Iranian nationals, along Israelis, getting into Syria. However there is not any such prohibit towards Russians.
Iran’s embassy, which was once stormed through wrathful protesters next the autumn of the regime, rest closed.
The response of Iranian officers in opposition to trends in Syria has been contradictory.
Month perfect chief Ali Khamenei referred to as on “Syrian youths” to “resist” those that “have brought instability” to Syria, Iran’s international ministry has taken a extra balanced view.
It says the rustic “backs any government supported by the Syrian people”.
In considered one of his first interviews, Syria’s fresh chief Sharaa described their victory over Assad as an “end of the Iranian project”. However he hasn’t dominated out having a “balanced” courting with Tehran.
For the time, despite the fact that, Iran isn’t welcome in Syria. Nearest years of increasing its army presence, the entirety Tehran constructed is now in ruins, each at the battlefield and, it sort of feels, within the seeing of a massive a part of Syria’s people.
Again on the rejected bottom, Iran’s army growth was once nonetheless underneath manner even within the latter days. After to the camp had been extra tunnels underneath development, it appears the beginnings of a ground medical institution. The cement at the partitions was once nonetheless rainy and the paint untouched.
However left in the back of now could be proof of a temporary struggle – a couple of bullet shells and an army uniform coated with blood.