Donald Trump Sends Message to Putin As Assad Flees Damascus

In a lengthy social media post, Donald Trump has called for a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, while referencing the apparent collapse of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria.

The president-elect made the remarks in a post on his Truth Social website early on Sunday morning, in which he argued Russia was in a “weakened state” due to the Ukraine war and said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to “make a deal and stop this madness.”

On Saturday evening and Sunday morning, Syrian rebels streamed into their country’s capital Damascus as the 24-year-old regime of President Assad reportedly collapsed.

In his Truth Social post Trump commented: “Assad is gone. He has fled his country. His protector, Russia, Russia, Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was not interested in protecting him any longer. There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place. They lost all interest in Syria because of Ukraine, where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead, in a war that should never have started, and could go on forever.

“Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success. Likewise, Zelensky and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness. They have ridiculously lost 400,000 soldiers, and many more civilians.”

The president-elect concluded: “There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin. Too many lives are being so needlessly wasted, too many families destroyed, and if it keeps going, it can turn into something much bigger, and far worse. I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act. China can help. The World is waiting!”

Newsweek contacted the foreign ministries of Russia and Ukraine for comment on Sunday by email outside of regular office hours.

Trump was in Paris on Saturday for the reopening of the 861-year-old Notre Dame Cathedral, five years after it was badly damaged by a devastating fire. Before the ceremony, the president-elect met with Zelensky and French President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace, where he said it “seems like the world is going a little crazy right now.”

The fall of Damascus came after a lightning-fast rebel offensive which began on November 27 when a coalition of opposition groups, led by Islamist faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), attacked toward Damascus, which was captured fewer than two weeks later.

Rebels then marched south, capturing Syria’s fourth biggest city Hama, while besieging its third biggest, Homs. Meanwhile, a string of towns in the southern Daraa province, where anti-Assad protests first broke out in 2011 as part of the so-called “Arab Spring,” fell to local rebel factions who then headed north toward the capital.

Daniel Shapiro, the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, said that if the Assad’s fall was confirmed “no one should shed any tears over the end of the Assad regime.” He added a U.S. presence would remain in eastern Syria to “ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS [Islamic State].”

The Syrian civil war has been one of the bloodiest of the 21st century, resulting in the deaths of more than 507,000 people, including 164,000 civilians, as of March 2024, according to the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The conflict began with massive, largely peaceful, protests against the rule of Syria’s Ba’ath Party, which came to power in a 1963 coup, leading to the regimes of Hafez al-Assad and then his son Bashar al-Assad. However, after security forces opened fire on demonstrators, and imprisoned thousands, it turned into an armed uprising which has lasted more than 13 years.

Over this time, many of Syria’s neighbors, including Turkey, Israel and Iran, were drawn into the conflict to varying degrees, along with outside powers such as Russia and the United States. In September 2015, Putin launched a major military intervention to support Assad, and along with Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, became one of its key backers.

The Syria conflict was also a factor in the rise of the so-called Islamic State, a militant group that at its height controlled around 30 percent of Syria and 40 percent of Iraq after a string of military victories in 2014 and early 2015.

Islamic State went on to claim responsibility for terrorist attacks across the West, including the November 2015 Paris attacks, the June 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando and the May 2017 Manchester Arena bombing in the U.K.

ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed by an American airstrike in October 2019, and by the end of that year the group had lost nearly all its territory to a combination of local forces that were backed by a U.S.-led international coalition.

HTS is led by Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the former leader of Syria’s Al-Qaeda branch the al-Nusra Front. Al-Julani still has a $10-million bounty on his head from the American government.

Al-Julani insists he has moderated his views, and vowed to safeguard Syria’s minority communities. During an interview with CNN on Thursday, he said: “A person in their 20s will have a different personality than someone in their 30s or 40s, and certainly someone in their 50s. This is human nature.”