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
Shortly after crash Syrian Army Command informs officers about fall of the regime https://xcancel.com/Alhadath_Brk/status/1865587913817305454#m
update: it’s not spoofed transponder data or controlled landing, locals reported plane crash in the area. rumors so far, but dawn will break soon in Syria and we’ll know https://xcancel.com/Schizointel/status/1865593800678130081#m
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
Holy shit! The Russians shot him out of the sky??
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
Or ground crew sabotage.
Yeah, Assad has killed a lot of his own people even without getting into Islamist stuff.
Unlikely but not impossible IMO.
If you want revenge so much you take out a whole plane, you’d done it earlier. But again, maybe there was a lot of panic so surveillance was not that good, and feeling the imminent collaps could have pushed someone over the limit. But I wonder what one man can do in a situation like that.
So very unlikely until more information I guess.
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.