Chandler Brownlee stood atop a cluster of rocks protruding from a secluded stretch of Costa Rican beach, Bible in hand, gazing at one of the world’s most coveted surfing waves.

He was on the hunt — not for the perfect wave (that’s always a given), but for surfers who were ready to accept Jesus Christ as their savior.

Born and raised in Florida, Mr. Brownlee, 52, is a real estate agent, an avid wildlife conservationist and the father of three daughters.

But he is also two other things that can seem contradictory: a former Baptist minister and a hardcore tatted-up surfer. Those identities combine to make him a senior member of the Christian Surfers organization, an international group of missionaries who love to surf.

As dusk fell, he watched the tide calm and surfers retreat to the shore. Walking away from the beach, he came across three sunburned Canadians hanging out in their beat-up R.V., sharing a joint.

“Where you guys comin’ from?” he asked.

“Squamish,” one of them replied, a small Canadian town north of Vancouver, British Columbia, nearly 5,000 miles away. “We were in Nicaragua. We’ve been driving for over a year. Sometimes it’s been dicey. But man, the waves down here.”

A big grin broke out on Mr. Brownlee’s chiseled face, framed by salt-and-pepper stubble.

“That’s why surfers make such good missionaries,” he said, shaking his head jovially. “They’ll sleep where they can, eat whatever they get their hands on. They don’t mind roughing it, being patient for the perfect swell, the perfect wave, an opportunity to talk to someone about God.”

The Christian Surfers organization tries to bridge the connection that surfers feel with nature — a spiritual pursuit even skeptics recognize — and show them how that feeling is just a hair away from forming a relationship with God.

The interdenominational group has more than 175 chapters in over 35 countries, including Japan, Norway and the United States. In Costa Rica, one of the world’s best surf spots, they founded their newest chapter this year in Pavones, on the southernmost tip of the country on the border with Panama.

Pavones, with a population of about 4,000, is home to the second-largest left-hand wave in the world. Its main street is called Perfect Waves.

The town’s isolation, lack of infrastructure and dirt roads attract only the most committed surfers — a dedication that Mr. Brownlee hopes to tap into. In his mind, even if you trek out here and catch the perfect wave, you may still feel empty inside.

And that’s an opening for God, he says.

“Gringos are always trying to find themselves through ayahuasca,” he said. “But what about knowing the Lord instead?”

The surfing missionaries know that they have to tread carefully or they may scare people off. So they swap button-up shirts for swimsuits, tattoos and barefoot living.

For possible converts, there is no pressure to go to church. Rather, the missionaries aim to be a “bridge from the beach to the church,” as their motto states. The cover of the “Surfers’ Bible” they distribute does not bear a cross, but an enticing barrel wave.

“When you tell surfers to come to church, they think pews, stained glass, organs,” Mr. Brownlee acknowledged. “We aren’t trying to mass proselytize people, but to bro-out with ’em, love on ’em, catch a wave with ’em.”

Amid the psalms in the “Surfers’ Bible” are testaments from surfers about how God has affected their sport, including Bianca Buitendag, a South African surfer who won silver in the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics. Knowing that God loves her “unconditionally” helped her take losses more easily in competitions and move on, but learn from the mistakes, according to her testimony.

Christian Surfers was established in Australia in the late 1970s to counter the discrimination its founders faced on the waves and in the pews. They were shunned by the church for their tattoos and flip-flops and the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll stereotype of surfer culture. But surfers also shunned them for their Christian beliefs, perceiving them as uptight, judgmental and decidedly uncool.

The group’s members come together to surf when the swell is good, and when it isn’t, they hang out over hamburgers or beers to connect over the sport and discuss scripture.

The Christian Surfers organization is relying on one family, the Leons, to broaden its presence in Costa Rica. On a recent evening in the town of Esterillos Oeste, Kyle Leon was cooking a vat of pasta and getting ready to host a group of children and young adults for surf videos and a Bible study led by her husband, Dennis.

Ms. Leon, 43, joined the Christian Surfers in Santa Barbara, Calif., in the 1990s. She was one of the only female surfers on the water at the time, and probably the only religious one. But she “didn’t love youth group” and felt the games were “silly and infantile.”

That changed when Christian Surfers came to Santa Barbara.

Pretty soon, she was hitting the water every week with other devout Christians before walking up the beach in their bathing suits to youth group meetings, where they hung out around a fire and discussed the Bible.

During her last years of high school, her father moved the family to Esterillos Oeste and introduced Christian Surfers to Costa Rica. That is where she met Dennis Leon.

Mr. Leon had recently joined the Pentecostal church when she arrived with her family. “But I had to quit surfing,” he said. “The thinking was you couldn’t be a surfer and a Christian because surfers were potheads.”

Eventually, he was able to reconcile his love for Jesus with surfing after meeting Ms. Leon and her family. He says he now uses the sport as a way to evangelize in a more real, less uptight way.

“Jesus didn’t use a church,” he said. “His followers followed him through nature. Remember, his disciples were the fishers of men.”

As night set in, a group of teenagers and young adults walked up to the Leons’ house atop a hill overlooking the water.

Amid the full-sleeve arm tattoos, exclamations of “dude!” and bathing suits, it was easy to forget that everyone was gathered for Bible study. A small cross hung on a wall, next to a towering surfboard. Stickers on the doors to the Leon children’s bedrooms featured their favorite bands, and the flaming logo for the skate magazine Thrasher.

“This is not an intimidating place, like a church building can be,” said Ms. Leon, gesturing to the living room where kids were splayed out on the couch and dogs ran in and out of the house. “This isn’t scary. And that’s our main goal here as missionaries. You don’t need to believe to belong. But you can belong before you believe.”

The group watched surfing videos as they chowed down on spaghetti, gasping as the world’s most famous surfer, Kelly Slater, rode Tahitian waves.

Then, it was time for Bible study.

Mr. Leon sat on a wooden bench in the living room and opened up his Bible as the room went quiet, the young devotees looking up at him from the floor. He went on to compare the Apostle Paul with Mr. Slater, before tying the sermon into what they could do to draw on their love of Jesus, surfing and nature in order to serve their communities.

The Leons run a church called Pura Vida — a Costa Rican saying that means the “pure life” — that holds worship services on the beach during the dry season and under a roof with no walls just next to the town’s basketball court when it rains.

Of the crowd that gathered in the family’s living room, Mr. Leon estimated that 40 percent had not accepted Jesus “yet,” he said, lifting a finger to the air.

But that could change.

“They feel less pressure coming here than a church,” he said. “This is just Dennis’s house.”

Soon, it was time for everyone to go home.

“Lord,” Mr. Leon wrapped up, “thank you for the opportunity to be together, to eat food together and to talk about surfing together. Amen.”

A frequent critic on social media of the German government, as well as of radical Islam. A reclusive neighbor who appeared to live most of his life on the internet. A man whose extreme political postings online prompted an alert to Germany from Saudi Arabia.

Officials in Germany were trying on Sunday to piece together the complicated profile of the man in custody suspected of killing five people by driving an S.U.V. into a crowd at a Christmas market two days earlier, an attack that has stunned the country.

The authorities have described the suspect as a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who had been living in Germany for nearly two decades. They say they are still trying to determine his motives. The Salus Clinic in Bernburg, a town about a half-hour drive from Magdeburg, said that the man worked as a psychiatrist in their closed ward, treating offenders who suffer from drug addiction.

The victims in the assault, which took place in the eastern city of Magdeburg, were a 9-year-old boy and four women aged 45 to 75, the police said in a statement on Sunday.

More than 200 others were wounded, 41 of them seriously, in the attack that shattered the peace of Germany’s Christmas season, which is celebrated in hundreds of outdoor markets around the country.

Mourners on Sunday visited a memorial to the victims set up on the steps of a church across the street from the market in Magdeburg, and a service was held on Saturday night. At the same time on Saturday, in a square nearby, several hundred people attended a rally where demonstrators chanted, “Deport! Deport!”

The suspect, identified as Taleb A. in keeping with German privacy laws, was questioned on Saturday, security officials said. On Sunday, a judge ordered him to remain in detention as the authorities continued their investigations.

Officials said that they were still trying to understand why the attacker decided to drive the S.U.V., a rented vehicle, into the crowded Christmas market, which was being held in a square in front of Magdeburg’s city hall.

Holger Münch, head of Germany’s domestic security agency, the Federal Criminal Office, said that the authorities had been aware of the suspect and had received a warning about him from Saudi Arabia in November 2023. But the tip-off was “so unspecific” that the German authorities did not treat it as a signal that the man was plotting an attack, he said.

“He was not seen to be capable of violent acts,” Mr. Münch told a German public broadcaster.

The state police in Saxony-Anhalt, which includes Magdeburg, said that they had opened an investigation after that warning and had questioned the Saudi doctor but had then closed the inquiry. The authorities said that he had not fitted their profile of an Islamic extremist and that they had not categorized him as a potential threat.

Mr. Münch said that the authorities had not yet been able to establish a motive. If it turns out that the attacker was driven by political or religious conviction, the killings could be considered terrorism, which would cause the federal prosecutor to take up the case.

In any case, the authorities appear likely to face questions about whether they ignored warning signs that might have helped prevent the attack.

In social media posts, the doctor had criticized Germany for what he called the authorities’ tolerance of radical Islam. He also expressed support for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party and reposted comments by the group’s leaders warning of the threat of Islamic law being imposed in Germany. But Mr. Münch said that the doctor’s activity did not fit into the description of a far-right extremist either, describing him as “atypical.”

Interviews, social media posts and witness accounts from several years back suggest that the detained man had gone from criticizing Islam into something else, in which he saw the German government and even fellow refugee activists as plotting against him.

“I am the most aggressive critic of Islam in history,” he told the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an interview that he gave in 2019.

In the days since the attack, several people have posted messages on social media about their encounters with the suspect, which they described as often upsetting or provoking a feeling that he was harassing them.

One of his targets was Mina Ahadi of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims, a group in Germany that represents people from Muslim countries who do not believe in or no longer practice Islam. She told the German publication Der Spiegel that the doctor had first donated money to her association, only to ask for it back within days. She said that she decided to block him after his messages became increasingly aggressive.

In a message posted to his social media account in the minutes between the attack and his arrest, the doctor suggested that the German authorities were targeting him.

While online, the doctor was an outspoken activist; in person, people who worked with or met him described him as friendly and polite, but private.

The doctor lived in a house in a quiet street not far from the clinic in Bernburg, a small town of about 30,000. Apparently, he did not own a car and walked to work, his neighbors said.

“A smile at most, but we never spoke,” said Horst Hirschmann, 53, a former police officer, who often walks his dog past the three-story house where the doctor lived in an apartment.

Two to four times a week, the doctor would walk a mile or so to Saale Grill, one of the few Middle Eastern restaurants in Bernburg, said Yaser al-Alo, the owner.

Mr. al-Alo, a Kurd who speaks Arabic, said he tried several times to engage his guest in conversation, but never got far, with the man even refusing to say where he was from.

“He would not look right or left, but only stared at his screen,” Mr. al-Alo said. “I didn’t even know the man was a doctor.”

A small private plane carrying 10 people crashed in a tourist city in southern Brazil on Sunday, clipping buildings as it fell from the sky and injuring at least 17 others, officials said.

Authorities for the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where the crash took place, said 10 people were aboard the plane that went down Sunday in the mountain resort town of Gramado.

“We wish to express our solidarity with the families of the passengers on this plane, who unfortunately did not survive a serious accident,” the state’s governor, Eduardo Leite, said during a news conference on Sunday.

As the plane fell, it reportedly struck the chimney of a building and the second floor of a house before crashing into a furniture store and sending debris into a nearby bed-and-breakfast, civil defense officials said in a statement.

At least 17 people on the ground were injured, most from smoke inhalation. Two women were in serious condition for burns and were being transported to the state capital for treatment, Mr. Leite said.

The plane crashed in Gramado at 9:15 a.m., just minutes after taking off from a nearby airport.

The aircraft was owned and piloted by Luiz Claudio Salgueiro Galeazzi, a Brazilian businessman, according to the state authorities. The passengers on board the plane are believed to have been relatives of Mr. Galeazzi.

Governor Leite said flight conditions in the area on Sunday were poor, with rain and fog prevalent, although it was not immediately clear if weather played a role in the crash.

Brazil’s aviation accident investigation center, Cenipa, said it was analyzing the damage at the site of the crash and had opened an inquiry into its cause.

Local media outlets showed images of flames and flying debris in the moments after the aircraft struck buildings in Gramado.

The town is a popular destination for tourists during the holiday season, drawing large crowds with its traditional Christmas decorations.

In May, Rio Grande do Sul State was battered by torrential rains that caused one of Brazil’s worst floods in modern history, leaving more than 100 dead and nearly the entire state submerged.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva expressed his condolences to the victims on social media and also promised an inquiry.

“The air force is investigating the causes of the accident, and the federal government is at the disposal of the state government and local authorities to provide clarification as soon as possible,” Mr. Lula said in a post on X.

Unimpressed by the substitute for Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker,” the mother and her young daughter left at the intermission, a small protest over a decision by the opera house not to perform the Russian composer’s Christmas classic.

“Everything about ‘The Nutcracker’ is much better — the music, the dance, the story,” said Egle Brediene, 38, hurrying out of Lithuanian’s National Opera and Ballet Theater this past week after the first act of a replacement ballet composed by an Italian.

Lithuania, an unwavering supporter of Ukraine in the war waged by Russia, set aside Tchaikovsky and the holiday favorite two years ago after declaring a “mental quarantine” from Russian culture in a gesture of solidarity against the aggressor.

That stirred grumbling by theatergoers, but their annoyance had largely calmed — until a new government took power in Lithuania this month and a newly installed culture minister announced that he liked listening to Tchaikovsky. There was no reason, the minister, Sarunas Birutis, said in a radio interview, to be “afraid that after watching a Christmas fairy tale we will become pro-Kremlin.”

His remarks prompted fury from ardent supporters of Ukraine and applause from lovers of Russian music, igniting a bitter debate, largely one between generations, about whether culture and politics can be separated at a time of war.

Many in the art world oppose banning works on the basis of their nationality, believing that culture has the power to unite and should not be contaminated by politics.

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A U.S. Navy ship mistakenly shot down an American fighter jet over the Red Sea early Sunday, the U.S. military said, highlighting the potential risks for international forces as they try to stop attacks on cargo ships by the Houthi militia in Yemen.

The U.S. military’s Central Command described the incident as an apparent case of friendly fire and said that the two pilots had been safely recovered after they ejected from their F/A-18 aircraft. One had minor injuries, Central Command said in a statement, adding that an investigation was underway. The incident occurred during a refueling operation, a Defense official said.

The jet had flown off the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman when it was mistakenly fired upon by the guided-missile cruiser Gettysburg, the command said.

Both ships are in the Harry S. Truman carrier strike group. The U.S. military said on Dec. 15 that the group had been deployed to its area of responsibility, which includes Yemen and the surrounding waters. It did not specify where the group was located.

The apparent incident of friendly fire came after Central Command said on Saturday that it had conducted airstrikes against a Houthi missile storage facility and a command facility in Sana, the capital of Yemen. It said it had also shot down multiple Houthi unmanned aerial vehicles and anti-ship cruise missiles over the Red Sea. These operations included F/A-18s, the command said.

The Houthi militia, which is backed by Iran, controls much of northwestern Yemen and has been striking ships with missiles and drones for over a year in what it has described as a campaign in solidarity with Palestinians under Israeli bombardment in Gaza. The attacks on shipping have disrupted one of the busiest maritime routes in the world, forcing many vessels to avoid the area.

The U.S. military, sometimes joined by British forces, has conducted multiple strikes this year on Houthi targets in Yemen in an effort to secure international waterways. Those have so far failed to halt the militia’s ability to strike targets far beyond the territory that they control.

In recent weeks, the Houthis have stepped up attacks against Israel. At least 16 people were slightly injured by flying glass in Tel Aviv on Saturday after Israeli air defenses failed to intercept a missile fired from Yemen. That came after Israeli air defenses early Thursday intercepted a missile fired from Yemen.

Israel has responded with its own strikes, including attacks on Thursday on ports in Yemen controlled by the Houthis.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Sunday that the Houthis would pay a heavy price for their attacks. “Just as we have acted forcefully against the terror arms of Iran’s axis of evil, so we will act against the Houthis,” Mr. Netanyahu pledged in a statement addressing Israelis that noted that the United States and others were behind the effort and also saw the group as a threat to international order. “In this case, we are not acting alone,” he added.

He hinted that the militia could face the same fate as Hamas in Gaza, as Hezbollah in Lebanon and as President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. All received support from Iran, but Hamas and Hezbollah have been weakened by Israeli military action, while rebels ousted Mr. al-Assad this month. “I’m telling you that even if it takes time, the result will be the same,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

Ephrat Livni and John Ismay contributed reporting.

As rebels advanced toward the Syrian capital of Damascus on Dec. 7, the staff in the hilltop Presidential Palace prepared for a speech they hoped would lead to a peaceful end to the 13-year civil war.

Aides to President Bashar al-Assad were brainstorming messaging ideas. A film crew had set up cameras and lights nearby. Syria’s state-run television station was ready to broadcast the finished product: an address by Mr. al-Assad announcing a plan to share power with members of the political opposition, according to three people who were involved in the preparation.

Working from the palace, Mr. al-Assad, who had wielded fear and force to maintain his authoritarian rule over Syria for more than two decades, had betrayed no sense of alarm to his staff, according to a palace insider whose office was near the president’s.

The capital’s defenses had been bolstered, Mr. al-Assad’s aides were told, including by the powerful 4th Armored Division of the Syrian Army, led by the president’s brother Maher al-Assad, the insider said.

They had all been deceived.

After dusk, the president slipped out of the capital, flying covertly to a Russian military base in northern Syria and then on a Russian jet to Moscow, according to six Middle Eastern government and security officials.

Maher al-Assad fled separately that evening with other senior military officers across the desert to Iraq, according to two Iraqi officials. His current location remains unknown.

Bashar al-Assad left his country so secretively that some of his aides remained in the palace hours after he had left, waiting for a speech that never came, the insider said. After midnight, word came that the president was gone, and they fled in a panic, leaving the palace gates wide open for the rebels who would storm in a few hours later.

Mr. al-Assad’s fall brought to a sudden end his family’s 50-year authoritarian grip on Syria, causing jubilation among his victims and enemies, scrambling the strategic map of the Middle East and setting Syria off on a new, uncertain trajectory.

During his final days in power, Mr. al-Assad pleaded for foreign military help from Russia, Iran and Iraq to no avail as his military’s own intelligence service documented his forces’ collapse in real time, according to secret reports reviewed by The New York Times.

Diplomats from a half-dozen countries sought ways to push him from power peacefully in order to spare the ancient city of Damascus a bloody battle for control, according to four regional officials involved in the talks. One proposal, an official said, was that he pass power to his military chief, effectively submitting to a coup.

The account of Mr. al-Assad’s fall, much of which has not been previously reported, is based on interviews with Syrian, Iranian, Iraqi and Turkish officials; Damascus-based diplomats; as well as associates of Mr. al-Assad and rebels who participated in his ouster. Many of them spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing diplomatic protocols or fear of retribution from remnants of the former regime — or from the rebels who toppled it.

Now, rebels guard the Presidential Palace. Mr. al-Assad’s home has been picked clean by looters. And Syrians who remained loyal to him through years of civil war fume that he left without a word, abandoning them to their fates.

“For your own personal safety, you sacrificed all your people?” said the palace insider, who barely escaped before the rebels arrived.

Hiding from Syria’s new masters far from Damascus, he was still struggling to come to grips with Mr. al-Assad’s sudden flight.

“It is a betrayal that I cannot believe,” he said.

As Aleppo Fell, ‘Life Was Normal’

In late November, when rebels from Syria’s northwest launched an offensive aimed at pushing back Mr. al-Assad’s forces, the president was a continent away for a joyous family occasion. His elder son, Hafez al-Assad, was defending his doctoral dissertation at Moscow State University.

Gathered in a cavernous, wood-paneled auditorium on a hill overlooking the Russian capital were Mr. al-Assad’s wife, Asma al-Assad, and two of Hafez’s grandparents.

The 98-page dissertation — “Arithmetic Questions of Polynomials in Algebraic Number Fields” — was unlikely to attract a wide readership. But it bore a unique dedication: “To the martyrs of the Syrian Arab Army, without whose selfless sacrifices none of us would exist.”

Bashar al-Assad was in Moscow, too, though he did not attend the defense. Back at home, the army his son had lauded as heroic was crumbling before the rebel advance.

For 13 years, Mr. al-Assad had been fighting a brutal civil war against armed groups seeking his ouster. The conflict had ravaged the country, killing more than a half-million people and creating millions of refugees. Iran and its ally, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, had supported his troops, and Russia sent fighter jets whose air raids devastated rebel communities.

Around 2020, the war appeared to settle into a stalemate. Syria’s economy was trashed, and much of its territory was out of Mr. al-Assad’s hands. Still, he remained in power and was working of late to shed his status as an international pariah.

“Life was normal, and everyone was looking to the future,” recalled the palace insider, who worked down the hall from Mr. al-Assad for many years.

On Nov. 30, a rebel coalition led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist group with roots in Al Qaeda, seized the northern city of Aleppo, a major economic hub, shocking people across the Middle East. Mr. al-Assad rushed back to Damascus and found his staff uneasy, the palace insider recalled, although no one thought the capital was vulnerable.

Aware that his army had been ground down by years of battle, Mr. al-Assad sought help from the foreign powers that had helped him before.

In Tehran, senior commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps held emergency meetings to explore ways to aid Mr. al-Assad, according to three Iranian officials, including two members of the Revolutionary Guards. Two days after Aleppo fell, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, traveled there, publicly reinforcing that Damascus was stable. Television cameras filmed him posing for photographs with families on the street and eating at a popular shawarma restaurant with his Syrian counterpart. He vowed to the Iranian news media that Iran would stand with Mr. al-Assad to the end.

Iran’s options were limited.

Throughout the Syrian war, Iran had provided great military aid to help Mr. al-Assad, sending its own commanders and fighters from the Revolutionary Guards, as well as commandos from Hezbollah and fighters from many other countries. But Hezbollah had just emerged from its own war, with Israel, badly battered. Israel had killed or wounded thousands of its fighters, destroyed many of its munitions and killed most of its top leaders. Israel had also threatened Iranian aircraft going to Syria and any mobilization of ground forces there, leaving Iran no practical way to support Mr. al-Assad.

Mr. Araghchi told state media that he found Mr. al-Assad confused and angry that his army had failed to hold Aleppo, saying that the Syrian president “did not have an accurate read of the situation.” Mr. al-Assad told him in private, according to two Iranian officials, that his generals had described his forces’ withdrawal as a tactical move to shore up the defense of Damascus.

Mr. al-Assad’s other key champion was President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Russia maintained a military base in northern Syria and a naval base on the Mediterranean coast in Tartus that allowed Mr. Putin to project power far from Moscow.

Mr. Putin came to Mr. al-Assad’s rescue during the Syrian war in 2015, the Russian military overwhelming the rebels. He tried to broker a reconciliation between Mr. al-Assad and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who had long supported the rebels, but the effort never progressed.

In the first days of the rebels’ advance after Aleppo fell, Mr. al-Assad felt a sudden chill in his relationship with Mr. Putin, the palace insider and a Turkish official said: The Russian leader stopped taking his calls.

‘No Plan to Fight’

After taking Aleppo, the rebels continued south and seized the Assad stronghold of Hama, in another sudden shock to the regime.

The rebels’ swift march revealed the deep rot inside Mr. al-Assad’s army. Economic distress and punishing sanctions had hollowed out Syria’s currency, reducing soldiers’ salaries to less than $30 per month. So many had been killed that the army relied heavily on conscripts, who were poorly fed and equipped with outdated gear.

The rebels, too, mostly carried light arms. But they had one great advantage, drones, which they used to strike command centers, scattering regime soldiers. Syrian military intelligence reports, which were reviewed by The Times, described relentless drone attacks across the country that Mr. al-Assad’s forces had no way to counter. Many of the drones took off from a field in rebel-held Idlib Province in the northwest, next to a warehouse that housed at least 200 of them, one report read.

In Tehran, military commanders told the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that the rebels were advancing too fast for Iran to help, according to four Iranian officials.

Shocked, Ayatollah Khamenei sent a senior adviser, Ali Larijani, on a secret trip to Damascus to tell Mr. al-Assad to buy time by promising political overhauls and a new government that would include members of the opposition, according to four Iranian officials. Mr. Larijani also discussed the topic of defection, raising the possibility of Tehran or Moscow.

Realizing that Russia would not save him and that Iran could not, Mr. al-Assad sent his foreign minister to Baghdad. He told the Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, that Mr. al-Assad’s fall would endanger Iraq, according to three regional officials with knowledge of the talks. He pleaded for Iraqi military support, but the country’s top leaders — the prime minister, the president and the speaker of Parliament — all refused.

In public, Iranian officials called for a diplomatic solution. But officials in Tehran had concluded that Mr. al-Assad would not survive, according to six Iranian officials, and Iran began quietly withdrawing its diplomatic and military staff from Damascus.

“They told us that the rebels will arrive in Damascus by Saturday and there is no plan to fight,” read an internal Revolutionary Guards memo viewed by The Times. “The people of Syria and the army are not up for another war. It’s over.”

‘No One Knew Anything’

Panic gripped Damascus as the sun rose on Dec. 7. Overnight, the rebels had advanced toward Homs, Syria’s third-largest city and the last major urban center standing between the rebels and the capital.

Residents rushed to stores to stock up on food in case street battles trapped them at home. Others fueled up their cars and fled the city.

Inside the army, it was becoming clear that Mr. al-Assad’s forces were failing, according to dozens of military intelligence reports on Dec. 6 and 7, which were reviewed by The Times.

The forces were overwhelmed, they said. Rebels disguised in army uniforms were approaching Homs in cars adorned with portraits of Mr. al-Assad, and other armed groups had seized army checkpoints in Daraa, south of Damascus. One memo said that soldiers had left behind armored vehicles and weapons that the rebels had claimed.

“They are planning to control the entire southern region and then head to the capital,” another report said. “This will happen within a few hours.”

The sense of alarm had not reached the Presidential Palace, the insider recalled. Mr. al-Assad and his staff were in their offices, trying to manage a crisis whose gravity they did not comprehend.

“People were still drawing up scenarios,” he said, “and the idea of Damascus falling was not suggested by anyone.”

Palace staff spent the day waiting for the speech that Mr. al-Assad was supposed to record, hoping that it would somehow stop the rebel advance.

“There were lots of people in the palace who said that it was time for him to appear, to support the army, to reassure people,” the insider said.

But the filming kept getting postponed without explanation. By dusk, the staff was no longer sure where Mr. al-Assad was, the insider said.

On the other side of the Middle East, in Doha, Qatar, many of the region’s power brokers had gathered to try to find a way to stop the situation in Syria from escalating further. Many of the countries represented hated Mr. al-Assad but had come to accept that he had survived the war, and they did not trust that the rebels could hold Syria together.

Among the assembled officials, from five Arab countries plus Turkey, Russia and Iran, there were many who had concluded that it was too late for Mr. al-Assad, according to three officials from different countries who attended.

That evening, the rebels entered Homs, exacerbating fears that Damascus was next.

“After Homs fell, everything got very tense and no one knew anything, not in the palace or outside the palace,” the insider said.

‘Burn Everything’

While Mr. al-Assad had his pick of palaces to use for official business, he lived with his wife and three children in a four-story modernist villa surrounded by palm trees and fountains in the upscale Damascus neighborhood of al-Maliki.

After he was gone, his neighbors said that living near him had been a nuisance. Soldiers blocked access to the street and interrogated visitors, they said. Installing a new satellite dish or air-conditioner required complicated dealings with the intelligence service.

But at least Mr. al-Assad and his family were quiet — which is why the neighbors jumped when they heard his guards screaming hours before dawn on Dec. 8.

“‘Guys, flee, flee! They’re coming!’” one neighbor recalled them yelling. “‘May God curse him. He left us!’”

Chaos also gripped an air force intelligence branch elsewhere in the city, according to a soldier who gave only his first name, Mohammed, for fear of retribution from the rebels. As the rebels approached, orders came to defend the capital, he said. But on their phones, the soldiers saw images of their comrades elsewhere taking off their uniforms and running away.

After night fell, their orders changed.

“Burn everything: documents, files and hard disks,” Mohammed recalled being told. “At this moment, I and my colleagues all felt that the regime was falling.”

He, too, changed into civilian clothes and walked out of the base, he said.

Inside the palace, the hours ticked by as Mr. al-Assad’s aides waited for the speech, the insider recalled.

“The idea that he had fled never came to mind,” he said.

After midnight, they received a call telling them that the president had escaped, he said. Then the head of security for the area called to say that the guards were gone and that he was leaving, too.

Terror set in, the insider said, and he ran to his car, finding the palace empty and its gates open. He rushed into hiding, he said, concluding as he drove that there had never actually been a plan for a speech. It had, he believed, been a ploy to distract Mr. al-Assad’s staff while the president sneaked away.

“He tricked us,” the insider said. “Does he still have any popularity among his people? No. To the contrary. He betrayed us.”

North of Damascus, Bilal Shahadi, 26, was among thousands of prisoners held in the Sednaya prison, a lockup so brutal that Amnesty International called it a “human slaughterhouse.”

During his two years there, Mr. Shahadi’s days began with guards shouting, “Animals, come!” so that the inmates would call out their prisoner numbers one by one — a grim roll call to see if anyone had died overnight.

Before dawn on Dec. 8, he awoke to jostling in his crowded cell and the sounds of voices outside yelling, “God is great!”

He made his way to the door and, to his surprise, pushed it open and walked out.

A prison guard, he said, had opened one cell and fled, leaving the keys behind. The first prisoners to get out unlocked the other cells.

Mr. Shahadi tore through the prison. In a guards’ office, he said, he found a poster of Mr. al-Assad, which he set on fire with a cigarette lighter. He set off on foot with thousands of others, cheering and crying as they walked home.

“It was a dream,” he recalled. “All of it felt like a dream.”

Anton Troianovski contributed reporting from Berlin, Jacob Roubai from Beirut and Falih Hassan from Baghdad.