‘They were ordered to take their backpacks and leave’

Wet foods at half -finished in bunk beds, discarded military uniforms and abandoned weapons: these are the remains of an abrupt retirement of this base that once belonged to Iran and its affiliated groups in Syria.

The scene tells a panic story. The forces parked here fled with little warning, leaving behind a presence of a decade that was unraveled in just weeks.

Iran was the most critical ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for more than 10 years. He disappointed military advisors, mobilized foreign militias and invested a lot in the Syrian War.

His elite of the body of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) built deep networks of underground bases, supplying weapons and training to thousands of fighters. For Iran, this was also part of his “seat belt” against Israel.

We are close to the city of Khan Shaykhun in the province of Idlib. Before the Assad regime fell on December 8, it was one of the key strategic locations for the IRGC and its allied groups.

From the main road, the entrance is barely visible, hidden behind lots of sand and rocks. A surveillance tower in a hill, still painted in the colors of the Iranian flag, dominates the base.

A receipt notebook confirms the name of the base: the position of martyr Zahedi, which bears the name of Mohammad Reza Zohedi, a main IRGC commander who was killed in an alleged Israeli air attack at the Iran consulate in Syria on Syria on April 2024.

The supplies were recently ordered: we found receipts for chocolates, rice, kitchen oil) suggest that daily life continued here until the last moments. But now the base has new occupants: two armed Uyghur fighters of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist militant group whose leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has become the new interim president of Syria.

The Uyghurs suddenly arrived in a military vehicle, asking for our media accreditation.

“The Iranians were here. Everyone fled,” says one of them, speaking in their mother tongue, a Turkish dialect. “Whatever you see here is theirs. Even these onions and leftover foods.”

The boxes full of fresh onions in the patio have now germinated.

The base is a maze of tunnels excavated in the white rock hills. There are bunk beds in some rooms without windows. The roof of one of the runners is covered with cloth in the colors of the Iranian flag and there are some Persian books on a rocky shelf.

They left documents containing confidential information. Everything in Persa, they have details of the personal information of the combatants, the codes of military personnel, the directions of the households, the names of the spouses and the mobile phone numbers in Iran. From the names, it is clear that several combatants in this base were from the Afghan brigade that was formed by Iran to fight in Syria.

The sources linked to the groups backed by Iran told the BBC Persian that the base mainly houses Afghan forces accompanied by “Iranian military advisors” and their Iranian commanders.

Tehran’s main justification for his military participation in Syria was “fighting jihadist groups” and protecting “Sacred Shiite sanctuaries” against radical Sunni militants.

He created paramilitary groups of mainly Afghan, Pakistani and Iraqi combatants.

However, when the final time came, Iran was not prepared. Retirement orders reached some bases at the last moment. “The developments occurred very fast,” a main member of an Iraqi paramilitary group backed by Iran tells me. “The order was simply to take its backpack and leave.”

Multiple sources close to the IRGC told the BBC that most of the forces had to flee to Iraq, and that some were ordered to go to Lebanon or Russian bases to be evacuated from Syria by the Russians.

An HTS fighter, Mohammad to Rabbat, had witnessed the advance of the Idlib a Aleppo group and the capital of Syria, Damascus.

He says they thought that their operation would take “approximately one year” and the best, “Aleppo would capture in three to six months.” But to their surprise, they entered Aleppo in a matter of days.

The rapid drop in the regime was caused by a chain of events after Hamas attack on October 7 to Israel.

That attack led to an escalation of Israeli air attacks against IRGC groups and backed by Iran in Syria and a war against another key Iranian ally: the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, whose leader was killed in an air strike.

This “psychological collapse situation” for Iran and Hezbollah was fundamental for its fall, says Rabbat, 35.

But the most crucial blow came from inside: there was a crack between Assad and its allies linked to Iran, he says.

“There was a complete breakdown of trust and military cooperation between them. Groups linked to IRGC were blaming Assad for betrayal and believing that it is renouncing its locations to Israel.”

When we pass through Khan Shaykhun, we find a street painted in the colors of the Iranian flag. It leads to a school building that was being used as Iranian headquarters.

On the wall at the entrance of the bathrooms, the slogans said: “Down with Israel” and “Down with the USA”.

It was evident that these venues were also evacuated in the short term. We find documents classified as “highly sensitive.”

Abdullah, 65, and his family are among the few locals who stayed and lived here with the groups led by IRGC. He says this life was difficult.

His house is just a few meters from the headquarters and in the middle, there are deep trenches with barbed wire.

“The movement at night was prohibited,” he says.

His neighbor’s house became a military post. “They sat there with their weapons pointing to the road, treating us all as suspects,” he recalls.

Most combatants didn’t even speak Arabic, he says. “They were Afghan, Iranian, Hezbollah. But we refer to everyone as Iranian because Iran were controlling them.”

Abdullah’s wife, Jourieh, says she is happy that “Iranian militias” have gone, but still remembers the “stressful” moment before her withdrawal. She had thought they would be trapped in the crossfire, since the groups backed by Iran were fortifying their positions and preparing to fight, but then “they simply disappeared in a few hours.”

“This was an occupation. Iranian occupation,” says Abdo, who, like others, has just returned here with his family after 10 years. His house had also become a military base.

I observed this anger towards Iran and a softer attitude towards Russia in many conversations with the Syrians.

I asked Rabbat, fighter HTS, why was this.

“The Russians were dropping bombs from heaven and, apart from that, they were in their bases, while the Iranians and their militias interacted. People felt their presence, and many were not happy with that,” he explained.

This feeling is reflected in the policy of Syria’s new rulers towards Iran.

The new authorities have put a prohibition of Iranian citizens, together with the Israelis, entering Syria. But there is no such prohibition against the Russians.

The Iran Embassy, ​​which was assaulted by angry protesters after the regime’s fall, remains closed.

The reaction of Iranian officials towards developments in Syria has been contradictory.

While the supreme leader Ali Khamenei asked the “young Syrian” to “resist” those who “have brought instability” to Syria, the Iran Ministry of Foreign Affairs has had a more balanced opinion.

He says that the country “supports any government supported by the Syrian people.”

In one of his first interviews, the new leader of Syria, Sharaa, described his victory over Assad as an “end of the Iranian project.” But he has not ruled out having a “balanced” relationship with Tehran.

At the moment, however, Iran is not welcome in Syria. After years of expanding its military presence, everything Tehran built now is in ruins, both on the battlefield and, apparently, in the eyes of a large part of the public of Syria.

Back at the abandoned base, Iran’s military expansion was still underway even in recent days. Next to the camp there were more tunnels under construction, apparently the beginnings of a field hospital. The cement on the walls was still wet and fresh paint.

But now there is evidence of a brief fight: some bullet shells and a military uniform covered with blood.