Iran’s Top General in Syria Contradicts Official Line on Fall of Ally
Iran’s highest-ranking general in Syria, Brigadier General Behrouz Esbati, has publicly diverged from the official Iranian stance on the sudden ousting of its ally, President Bashar al-Assad. In a rare and open speech last week, General Esbati said that Iran had suffered a severe blow, but would continue to operate in Syria.
An audio recording of the speech, held in a Tehran mosque, emerged on Monday in Iranian media, contradicting the assessments of the Iranian president, foreign minister, and other top politicians, who have downplayed the strategic loss of Iran in Syria for weeks. The Islamists had ousted President al-Assad in December 2024.
“I do not consider the defeat in Syria something to be proud of” General Esbati said, according to the audio recording of his speech. “We were defeated, and it was very difficult, we suffered a severe blow, and it was very hard.”
General Esbati revealed that the relations between Iran and Assad had been strained for months, leading to the latter’s ousting. He claimed that the Syrian leader had rejected several requests from Iranian-backed militias to open a front against Israel from Syria, following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.
The Islamists have since taken power in Syria and are trying to form a government. General Esbati said in his speech that Iran would seek ways to continue recruiting insurgents, regardless of the new Syrian government’s shape.
“We can activate all the networks we have worked with in the past years” he explained. “We can activate the social classes where our boys have lived for years; we can be active in social media, and we can form resistance cells. And we have already begun to do so.”
General Esbati stated that the fall of the Assad regime was inevitable in the face of widespread corruption, political suppression, and economic woes, from power outages and fuel shortages to a subsistence income.