In November 1948, General Markos, as Vafiadhis was now known, had to relinquish leadership of the guerrillas to Nikos Zakhariadis, a seasoned militant communist. A month or two later, Marshal Alexander Papagos, winner of the Albanian campaign of 1940-1941, took command of the Greek army.
The partisans were now engaged in a hopeless struggle, but they might have held out longer in the northern mountains if President Tito had not made public in July 1949 his intention to close the Greek-Greek frontier. Yugoslavia and to cease all assistance to the partisans. Marshal Tito had separated from the communist bloc, it was dangerous for him to have a hostile nation on his southern border. He therefore hastened to conclude an alliance with Athens.
On October 16, the Communists announced on the airwaves that they were ceasing the fight in order to spare the country from total destruction.
The third phase of the Greek Civil War was coming to an end. It had cost government forces more than 21,000 dead and missing and 40,000 wounded. Almost 12,000 houses were destroyed and more than 4,000 civilians executed by the partisans, thousands more, including children, were taken as hostages across the Greek borders. But the most serious consequences of this civil war were moral and psychological. Greece still bears the brunt of the hatred and suspicion left by the civil war; it also suffers from the fact that a whole generation has matured in a period when the political struggle could only offer it this image.