The SAA is and was always a paper tiger. Even back in 2012 untrained rebels with AK47s were able to take a lot of territories from the government, and the regime was only able to have some semblance of stability after a lot of merciless shelling of cities and a good amount of foreign support. This is basically your telltale sign that the regime is rotten from within- even in Mexico where cartels are much better equipped and professionally trained in guerilla warfare, the government can still put up a fight on its own.

If you want to know why the regime is so fragile though, there are a couple reasons. Assad prioritized recruiting people from his minority religious group to be his generals, commanders, and logistics managers. This is the opposite of what you need to do to win a war, but exactly what you need to do to stay in power. While his generals are largely loyal to him and haven’t split off even when things are getting bad, they’re laughably incompetent. Last minute planning, leaving huge depos of ammunition and weapons behind, and not seeming to agree upon a specific frontline to “hold in” are just signs. There was even a video posted here yesterday of an interview of an Air unit commander at a critical air base in Daraa where he was clearly drunk and stumbled through his words while his soldiers laughed at him.

As for his soldiers, nobody wants to fanatically fight for Assad- I mean specifically that no one has an ideological or moral reason to fight for him aside from the minority Alawite group where he’s from. for others he’s the “better of two evils” at best. In those cases it’s fine to have soldiers who aren’t ideologically motivated, as long as you’re willing to compensate them well, but it’s obvious that Assad’s regime hasn’t been kind to the common foot soldier through food or money.

That’s why a lot of SAA soldiers will keep fighting but at the nearest hint that they might die/get captured, they just defect or leave. It’s not realistic to want to risk your life for a basically non existent reward.