Assad Loyalists Are Plotting a Comeback in Syria — and It's Falling Apart

For more than half a century, the Assad family dynasty ruled Syria with an iron fist. So when Bashar al-Assad was unceremoniously ejected from Damascus in late 2024, after a nearly fourteen-year civil war that left more than half a million people dead, Syrians and onlookers around the world largely greeted the news with relief. Today Assad has retreated to Moscow, his allies have scattered across the globe, and although Syria’s new transitional government absolutely has its own problems, life under the new leadership is still a vast improvement over the old regime.

But the defeat of the Assad government does not mean the Assad family and its allies have given up. Across post-war Syria, and across a hidden international network, powerful figures from the old regime are plotting a comeback. Their leaders draw on immense concealed wealth, their loyalists have melted into mountain hideouts and government ministries, and their ambitions for Syria have not changed a bit. All of the old regime’s skills of intelligence and infiltration, all of its tools of violence and repression, remain at their disposal — and the people who survived the fall of the dynasty have become ghosts, watching and waiting for a chance to take power.

There is, however, one key problem for them. As hard as it may have been to preserve and protect the Assad dynasty, it is even harder to bring a dead regime back to life. WarFronts traces the shadow campaign to restore Assadist rule, the rivals at its center, and the reasons it is now coming apart.

Key Takeaways

Bashar al-Assad was forced out of Damascus in late 2024 after a civil war lasting nearly fourteen years that killed more than half a million people; he now lives in Moscow under close Russian supervision.
The fall of a family dictatorship displaces an entire elite — ministers, generals, intelligence chiefs, and regime financiers — many of whom fled with cash, valuables, and offshore reserves while others went to ground inside Syria.
On March 6, 2025, pro-Assad loyalists ambushed transitional-government forces in Jableh, Latakia province, triggering a security crackdown in which up to 1,700 Alawite civilians were killed.
Two exiled figures dominate the resistance: Kamal Hassan, Assad’s former head of military intelligence, and Rami Makhlouf, a billionaire who managed the family’s finances; both live in Russia and despise each other.
Bashar al-Assad wants no part of the plot, and his brother Maher al-Assad — who commands thousands of soldiers from Moscow — has refused to endorse either contender, leaving the movement without a figurehead.
Russia is pulling back, money is running short, and a stabilizing Syria with little appetite for renewed war has effectively closed the window for an Assadist restoration.

When a Regime Falls, an Entire Elite Falls With It

Across the modern world, dictatorships have a way of evolving into a family business. The Kim family has ruled North Korea for three generations, with the young Kim Ju-ae poised to inherit her father’s legacy one day. Turkmenistan and Nicaragua, two of the most repressive states on Earth, have each been ruled by family dynasties for generations, and similarly repressive Eritrea appears set to follow. In the Islamic world, the Bin Salman family in Saudi Arabia, the Bin Zayed family in the Emirates, and the Aliyev family in Azerbaijan have grown incredibly wealthy at the head of petrostates, while in Africa, leaders such as Museveni, Deby, and Obiang have either handed power to their sons or are preparing to do so.

What these dynasties share is a tendency to obscure the much larger base of support that lets them function. When Kim Jong-un addresses the North Korean public, he is flanked by dozens, even hundreds, of figures in suits and uniforms — nameless functionaries most observers never bother to identify. It is easy to dismiss them as mere cogs in the machine, ministers or generals who exist only to do the leader’s bidding.

Yet they matter enormously to the regime. Whether in North Korea, Syria, or anywhere else, family-run dictatorships are surrounded by a very wealthy and usually very corrupt national elite. These figureheads maintain loyal power bases, oversee the countless levers of state power the dictator has no time to track, and compete relentlessly for a bigger slice of the pie.

So when a regime falls, as Syria’s did in 2024, it is not only Bashar al-Assad’s immediate family that is put out of work. The entire human infrastructure that powered the regime collapses with it: government ministers and bureaucrats, military chiefs and generals, the heads of the intelligence apparatus and the security state, and the operators who protected and expanded the regime’s business interests, often without holding any official post. All of them spent decades getting rich together, extracting from an entire nation and its people.

How the Old Guard Scattered After Assad’s Fall

When the regime crumbled, all of those people scattered to the wind at once, each with a vested interest in not being caught. As they fled, they helped to spirit money out of state coffers and load suitcases with cash in foreign currencies. They smuggled precious jewels, paintings, artifacts, and other portable stores of wealth.

They hid weapons caches, burned or stole sensitive documents, and drew up lists of enemies marked for future retribution. Those who stayed behind went to ground — often mid-level military officers or intelligence operatives still commanding networks of their own. They vanished with their subordinates, lay low, and waited for opportunities or direct orders from their former superiors.

The figures at the top, meanwhile, fled into exile — to Moscow, Paris, London, Dubai, or Riyadh — and on reaching safety, tapped massive reserves of offshore wealth accumulated across decades of preparation for precisely this moment.

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When Assad was ousted from Damascus, that process played out as it always does. Some elites, particularly experienced military commanders and provincial leaders in the path of the revolution, were forced to go down with the ship. Others did not get out in time and were dragged into the streets and humiliated, or tracked down and killed in secret by anti-regime operatives who had waited years for the chance. But for the most part, those who were in the room with Bashar al-Assad understood what was coming before the collapse arrived — even though Assad himself fled without warning much of his inner circle.

Many of his former allies reached private jets or snuck aboard commercial flights. Others escaped into the Mediterranean on speedboats, or slipped through rebel-held checkpoints amid the chaos of the decisive hours. Still others reached foreign embassies, particularly Russia’s, where they received the full generosity of Moscow’s best and brightest.

Those who did not flee disappeared into the country — especially the governorates of Latakia and Tartus on the Mediterranean coast, areas with majority Alawite populations, the same ethno-religious group as the Assad family and many of the regime’s most powerful deputies. There, and in other parts of Syria where anti-regime sentiment ran weaker, soldiers and intelligence agents could rendezvous, form cells, and melt into the population, waiting to reactivate.

The Jableh Ambush and the March Massacres

In the earliest weeks of post-Assad Syria, the threat of violence from loyalist factions was well understood but mostly abstract. The Assadists, it was assumed, would have their tails tucked between their legs and would need time to reconstitute their forces or coordinate a national resistance. In reality, it did not even take three months for them to begin hatching plans.

On March 6, 2025, in the village of Jableh in Latakia province, groups of pro-regime loyalists ambushed fighters loyal to the new transitional government in Damascus. First in Jableh, and then in nearby towns, villages, and along highways, pro-Assad forces killed dozens of fighters — many of them part of Syria’s General Security Service, but also members of militias that had chosen to ally with the new leadership. Assadist leaders abroad later claimed to have had nothing to do with the uprising, though there is little reason to take them at their word.

The pro-regime rebels on the ground were not trying to seize local control. They were trying to provoke a very specific kind of chaos, and they got it. The Assadists had made a calculated bet: that if battle-hardened, often ideologically extreme, and perpetually nervous Syrian security forces were attacked by organized gunmen in the same majority-Alawite areas that had been regime strongholds for decades, those forces would assume the worst. That is exactly what happened.

Fighters loyal to the transitional government streamed into Latakia in massive numbers.

The Assadists worked to accelerate the spiral, ambushing a military convoy and killing several more soldiers, while their leaders announced the creation of the so-called Military Council for the Liberation of Syria, led by a former brigadier general known both for his close ties to Assad and his deep connections to Iran. The Assadists understood that government-aligned fighters would respond with overwhelming force against the Alawite population — but that was the point. Many Alawites would die, yet the survivors would be embittered toward Syria’s new leadership and might come to see the Assadists as their protectors. Up to 1,700 Alawite civilians were killed by the time the March massacres concluded.

A Low-Grade Insurgency and Its Hidden Leadership

Since then, pro-Assad forces have not attempted escalation on that scale, but they have remained in regular contact with government forces. Across 2025 and into 2026, Damascus-aligned fighters have worked to disrupt pro-regime resistance cells, loyalist militias, and the funding and arms-smuggling networks that sustain them. Alleged cells are announced as dismantled with some regularity, while the Military Council for the Liberation of Syria and other known groups — including the Coastal Shield Brigade and the Saraya al-Jawad — have continued guerrilla-style operations.

These groups lean heavily on disinformation, targeting Alawite and other minority communities and exploiting well-documented abuses of power by Syria’s transitional leadership to amplify their own message. Dozens of high-level ex-regime personnel are believed to be hiding in Lebanon and coordinating resistance actions. But even those operatives are merely a gateway to the Assadist leaders who are really calling the shots.

Hidden Hands: Kamal Hassan and Rami Makhlouf

Go all the way to the top of the secretive, ex-regime resistance and you find two men in charge. One is Kamal Hassan, who served for many years as Assad’s head of military intelligence and was known to have overseen the brutal torture and mass disappearances of Syrian civilians. He now lives in Russia.

The other is Rami Makhlouf, also currently residing in Russia — a billionaire who oversaw the transfer of vast sums out of Syria for the Assad family’s benefit and, for a long time, sat inside Bashar al-Assad’s inner circle, essentially running the national economy. After a falling-out with the family, Makhlouf was kept under house arrest until the regime fell, then escaped to Lebanon in an ambulance. The scale of his wealth is suggested by his brother’s fate: he failed to flee the country, attempting to escape in his Maserati only to be shot and robbed of millions of dollars in cash.

Although both men are high-ranking veterans of the former regime, and on paper appear aligned in their ambitions, it is by examining their day-to-day operations that the cracks in the Assadist resistance become visible. Hassan and Makhlouf are not working together. They are in direct competition, each building up rival militias in Syria and Lebanon, courting the Alawite community, and — perhaps most important — vying for control of a network of fourteen underground command posts that the regime constructed in its final years in power.

According to an extensive Reuters report published in December 2025, Hassan and Makhlouf are the two major players in what has become a crowded contest, as several factions jockey for the lion’s share of an estimated fifty thousand loyal fighters. That report describes both men as deeply, and unproductively, personally invested in the effort. As Reuters put it, “Hassan […] seethes about his lost influence and outlines grandiose visions of how he would rule coastal Syria […] Makhlouf […] now portrays himself in conversations and messages as a messianic figure who will return to power after ushering in an apocalyptic final battle.” The same report concludes that the two men despise each other.

The Assad Family Wants No Part of It

Armed with money, loyal fighters, and delusions of grandeur, Hassan and Makhlouf are both competing for the favor of the Assad family itself — and here lies a second problem. According to numerous insider accounts from Moscow, and especially a December 2025 report from The Guardian, Bashar al-Assad wants nothing to do with the new resistance. The Assad family remains quite wealthy, living in a prestigious gated community in Moscow, but the patriarch is under close scrutiny from Russian minders who keep him from contacting senior officials of his former regime.

Not that Bashar appears especially interested. According to The Guardian, he is returning to the practice of ophthalmology — one of the world’s most brutal ex-dictators is also a trained eye doctor — and has developed a real affection for video games. The German newspaper Die Zeit reported that he spent his final days in Syria largely absorbed in Candy Crush; today he reportedly locks himself in his luxury apartment for most of the day, occasionally stepping out to visit a shopping mall in the same building.

With Bashar checked out, Makhlouf and Hassan have instead been courting the endorsement of his brother, Maher al-Assad, who also lives in Moscow and exerts control over thousands of his own soldiers. Maher has yet to take a side. He is very wealthy, with global connections and a record as commander of what was once Syria’s most powerful military unit, but he has not been able to win support from Moscow, and he does not appear to consider himself the heir apparent to the old regime. The goal, at this stage, is simply to identify someone capable of leading Syria in the future and to rally the former regime’s assets behind that person — if anyone can actually prove himself the leader of the pack.

A Plot Undone by Exposure and a Stabilizing Syria

Once a leader is chosen, both Makhlouf and Hassan claim to have a general outline of what comes next, though neither seems particularly invested in the details. Both are pursuing a fractured Syria, conceding that they are unlikely to retake Damascus outright but betting that nationwide chaos would let them seize local control in Alawite areas. From there, they imagine drawing on external backers like Russia and Iran, rebuilding their forces, reintroducing financial assets to the country, and preparing for a larger, second-stage offensive.

But all of this points to another serious problem: the word has gotten out. Put simply, if the plot were going well, WarFronts would not know about it — nor would outlets like Reuters or the New York Times, which published its own report on the Assadist faction, and nor would the new Syrian government. Today, Damascus is relying on a former member of the Assad regime, Khaled al-Ahmad, to serve as a messenger to the Alawite population after he switched sides during the civil war.

Based on recent reporting from majority-Alawite areas, he and his allies are doing a fairly decent job. There is plenty of pro-Assad sentiment if one looks hard enough, but life was also very difficult in Alawite areas under the old regime, and hundreds of thousands of Alawites want nothing to do with a resurgent Assadist regime, no matter who is in charge.

Worse for both Hassan and Makhlouf, officials in Damascus and the coastal provinces are openly confident that the Assadist resistance is being tracked, and that there really isn’t very much to worry about. The plotters may command tens of thousands of fighters on paper, but there appear to be no real plans to get those fighters to do anything.

Money Dries Up and Russia Walks Away

The ground in Syria is shifting fast. Barely a year ago, the country really was fractured and chaotic in the way the Assadists were hoping for — a state in which they might seize territory while the government fought on multiple fronts. But in the wake of multiple large-scale massacres by government-aligned forces, and battles in Aleppo and the Kurdish-held northeast that have greatly diminished the power of Kurdish paramilitaries, Syria’s other fighting factions have lost a great deal of their strength.

Those still partially intact are focused mostly on their own survival, with no appetite for large-scale fighting. In many regions, economic recovery and reconstruction are well underway, and while many Syrians still distrust the new leadership in Damascus, they are not so distrustful that they refuse to give it a chance.

Nor are Makhlouf and Hassan especially good at cultivating loyalty among pro-Assad fighters on the ground. According to multiple sources speaking to Reuters, Makhlouf does have more than fifty thousand fighters on his payroll, but he is paying them only the equivalent of about thirty US dollars a month, or even less. Hassan commands a fraction of that — only twelve thousand fighters — and has been exposed for trying to set up a charity as a humanitarian front for his force, ostensibly to support Alawites who have not actually received much aid.

Watching the Syrians fail to get their act together, Russian officials have reportedly been meeting with them less and less, especially now that Moscow has built a working relationship with the transitional government. Hassan has even tried to lobby the US government, according to the New York Times, but has generated no real momentum in Washington. For both men, the money is starting to run out, and even the ground commanders still inside Syria — those with control over the secret underground command posts and weapons caches — have seen nothing worth supporting.

Makhlouf’s Network Comes Apart

Most recently, Rami Makhlouf’s network in particular appears to be unraveling. His close allies in Lebanon are being detained and investigated, including his purported top money-man in the country, while his message to the Alawite population has been undercut from within the community. A prominent Alawite religious figure, Sheikh Ghazal Ghazal, has taken an increasingly active role advocating peaceful federalism despite overreaches by Damascus.

He has become a more palatable option for Alawites who want to take a hard line against the new government but would rather not return to all-out war. Hassan’s faction is faring no better: with security in Alawite regions seeming to stabilize compared with 2025, local sources suggest there simply is no longer an appetite for the kind of large-scale resistance either man is promising.

If the past decade and a half in Syria has shown anything, it is that nothing is ever truly certain. But at least for now, the specter of an Assadist revolution appears to have come and gone. The regime loyalists, the weapons, the financiers, and the former kingpins of the Assad government are all still out there — but their window of opportunity has closed, and neither their Russian allies, nor their Alawite communities, nor even Bashar al-Assad himself wants to see them succeed.

These last few holdouts have their ambition, but they also have quite a bit of money, and they have escaped to places where they can live undisturbed for the rest of their lives. In the end, all of Syria will be better off if they can learn to enjoy their retirement.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened in Jableh in March 2025, and what were the consequences?

On March 6, 2025, pro-Assad loyalists in the village of Jableh, in Latakia province, ambushed fighters loyal to Syria’s new transitional government, killing dozens. The attacks spread to nearby towns and highways. The crackdown that followed escalated into mass violence: up to 1,700 Alawite civilians were killed by the time the March massacres concluded.

Who are Kamal Hassan and Rami Makhlouf, and why do they matter?

Kamal Hassan served as Assad’s head of military intelligence and oversaw torture and mass disappearances; he now lives in Russia. Rami Makhlouf is a billionaire who managed the transfer of vast sums out of Syria for the Assad family and once effectively ran the national economy; he escaped to Lebanon in an ambulance after the regime fell. Both lead rival wings of the exiled resistance and, according to Reuters, despise each other — a rivalry that has prevented any unified effort.

Does Bashar al-Assad support the effort to restore his regime?

No. Reporting from Moscow and a December 2025 Guardian account indicate Bashar wants no part of the resistance. He lives under close Russian supervision, is returning to the practice of ophthalmology, and has reportedly developed an affection for video games, including Candy Crush. His brother Maher al-Assad commands thousands of soldiers from Moscow but has also refused to endorse either Makhlouf or Hassan.

How large are the loyalist forces, and how well are they paid?

Makhlouf reportedly has more than fifty thousand fighters on his payroll, but pays them only the equivalent of about thirty US dollars a month or less. Hassan commands roughly twelve thousand fighters. Despite these numbers, officials in Damascus say the resistance is being actively tracked and that there are no real plans to mobilize those forces, while Hassan has even been exposed for running a charity as a humanitarian front for his faction.

Why is the Assadist comeback plot falling apart?

Several factors have converged: the deep personal rivalry between Hassan and Makhlouf, a Syria that has stabilized faster than the plotters anticipated, dwindling funds, Russia’s pivot toward building a working relationship with the transitional government, and the public exposure of the plot through outlets like Reuters, the New York Times, and The Guardian. Alawite religious figures such as Sheikh Ghazal Ghazal are steering the community toward peaceful federalism, closing the window the Assadists were counting on.