Perhaps the primary driver of the Bashar al-Assad’s ouster was his regimes corruption and unpopularity. His own army would fight for him. From Simplicius at simplicius76.substack.com:
Sic transit gloria mundi
Syria has fallen, and history will be strewn with an endless banquet of takes and interpretations as to what happened, how, and why. Here I offer one humble middle approach to piece it together, supported by facts and some deductive reasoning, rather than emotional gut reactions.
What do we know so far?
Firstly, there are now indications ‘rebels’ informed Turkey of their intentions to launch an offensive on Aleppo six months ago, according to Reuters:
The armed Syrian opposition, which took power in Damascus the day before, informed the Turkish side six months ago of its intention to launch a large-scale offensive against the official Syrian authorities, Reuters reported.
“Syrian opposition groups… informed Turkey about plans for a major offensive about six months ago and believed that they had received its tacit approval,” the news agency reported.
At the same time, the United States said that Washington was not aware of Ankara’s “tacit approval” of the armed Syrian opposition’s plans to attack the Aleppo province in the north of the Arab Republic.
I mostly agree with Scott Ritter’s take here that the operation was never meant to topple all of Syria and that this became a kind of emergent improvisation after all the hyenas of the region saw how weak Syrian armed forces were in responding to the initial foray. There is ample ancillary evidence to suggest the assault was initially meant to be limited—but of course grew in scope as Israel, US, Turkey, and others began to see opportunity and activated their various sleeper cells, as well as began to secretly court Syrian generals and other influential army figures to essentially surrender or betray Assad in one way or another.
The silver lining after this storm is all sides in Syria will unite against the Zionist occupation of Syria led by US forces.
Putin may have had this anticipation in his moves.