You heard it here first: Bashar Assad might be dead
Flight path of a plane that took off from Damascus shorty after news broke that Assad left the city towards unknown destination, which might have been Latakia on Syrian coast which is still under SAA control as of now. Terrain in place where flightradar stopped tracking that plane isn't especially suited for emergency landing
clarification: there's some chance that Assad went out of Damascus before on other, private jet, so it's not sure and it's all conjecture on unproven information
update 2: there's a claim by Russian media that Assad is in Moscow, so he would have to flee on some earlier plane, but no photos as of now. Still, looked mildly credible at the time
You know when NCD has actual writeups and citations shit is getting real. Getting Wagner coup vibes, what a time to be alive where we can glimpse into the sausage of geopolitics being made in real time.
The funniest part is it may be days before news starts reporting he was probably on this plane. They'll want to wait for some sort of confirmation, which probably doesn't exist.
My conspiracy theory is that Trump will "Talk tough" to Putin and "tell him" to back off and take only "minor" concessions to end the war. He gets to claim that he ended it, look how strong and diplomatic he can be. Putin will spin it differently back home, nobody will buy it but nobody will care because the sanctions will be lifted and money will start flowing.
The Ukraine wont get NATO admission, the US will block it but they will be a whole lot better off than if Trump just removed all US support and the bombing will stop so they wont like it, but the alternative is losing the whole country.
that would be pretty stupid so it's definitely an option
we can guess that 1. assad was on that plane, and 2. it did something that looked like a bad malfunction and 3. there are rumors of plane crash in the area. maybe it was some stupid reason like mechanical malfunction, or maybe friendly fire from russian S300 at Tartus, or maybe unfriendly fire from whatever SAM HTS now has. or something else
The plane flew over opposition controlled territory in Homs, and then it started losing altitude very fast. I think the Russians didn't have the chance of doing anything funny this time.
Oh come on, its not like the rebels would have any anti aircraft systems... Other then the odd Pantsir, maybe a BUK or two. And even if they did, why would they need anything like that marching on the last stronghold of the regime? /s
Buk (TEL) lacks a radar. Pantsir or MANPADS lacks range (7km altitude give or take). Either they networked radar to Buk, or made these super old S75 work, or planted bomb onboard like with Prigozhin, or something else. It's also possible that F35 sneaked around and took it down with A2A missile, not that we'll ever see it
BBC article mentioning this flight. A tweet from FR24 says that the aircraft "was old with an older transponder generation, so some data might be bad or missing", that it was "flying in an area of GPS jamming, so some data might be bad", and that there was not aware of any airports in the area where the signal was lost.
There's no evidence this was Assad (and the flight path directly over Homs instead of e.g. into Iraq makes it implausible), but it seems like it was almost definitely a plane crash.
it seemed plausible when it happened. i still think it's likely that that plane crashed, there's a red dot on FIRMS map for 8.12 around that area that wasn't there before or after. there's a SAM site (S-125) at 34.707328, 36.788321 near Homs and there floated a photo of these missiles on liveuamap. whether these were used in this incident, or usable at all, is different question