Iran had lost faith in now-deposed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad before his fall from power, according to analysts and insiders, and its foreign minister told him that a weakened Tehran could no longer send more forces to support his regime.

When Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi visited Damascus last week, days after Syria’s second-largest city of Aleppo fell to the rebels, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad claimed that “his retreat from Aleppo was tactical and that he remained in control,” said an insider in Tehran’s government.

“Araghchi responded that Iran was no longer in a position to send forces to support him anyway. But we did not expect the collapse to come so quickly or expose such hollowness in his regime. This came as a shock to us, too.”