President Bashar al-Assad is facing a serious challenge to his grip on power in Syria after several groups of Turkish-backed Islamic rebels, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), swiftly captured Aleppo last week, which had once been Syria’s largest city. The Syrian army forces collapsed because of a gradual pull-back by Russian- and Iranian-backed Hezbollah forces that had enabled Assad to control the area of western Syria around Damascus since 2015.
HTS was previously known as the Jabhat al Nusra Front. It was formerly associated with al-Qaeda but it broke away from that group in 2016 and has since adopted a more pragmatic approach than other Islamic rebel groups in Syria. It has tried to re-establish regular government services to the residents of Syria’s Idlib province, under the banner of the Syrian Salvation Government. Nevertheless, the U.S. still designates HTS as a terrorist organization, in part because of its past ties to al-Qaeda.
After rebel forces secured the city, Mohammad Al-Bashir, the head of the Salvation Government, declared, “People of Aleppo, your liberation from the clutches of this criminal regime brings in a new era of pride and dignity.”
Russian and Syrian government planes launched airstrikes on rebel-held territory in and around Aleppo, including the province of Idlib along the Turkish border. The rebel advances began in October, at a time when Hezbollah was forced to withdraw some of its forces from Syria due to the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, and Russia was diverting its air power from Syria to press its attacks against Ukraine’s infrastructure. Nevertheless, the sudden collapse of the Syrian forces defending Aleppo last week came as a surprise.
RUSSIA AND IRAN WEAKENED BY ISRAELI AND UKRAINE ATTACKS
Since 2015, both Russia and Iran have helped preserve the Assad regime, but now they find their forces stretched thin because of the demands on Russia’s armed forces due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, and the severe losses suffered by Iran’s proxy terrorist forces, Hamas and Hezbollah in Gaza and Lebanon due to Israel’s counterattacks following the October 7 attack last year.
In addition, over the past several years, even before the October 7 attack, Israel carried out hundreds of air strikes at Hezbollah and Iranian targets on Syrian territory to prevent the transfer of sophisticated arms from Iran to Hezbollah, and to prevent any buildup of hostile Hezbollah or Iranian military forces along Israel’s northern border.
Iran has long viewed its military presence throughout Syria as vital to its efforts to expand its radical Shiite revolution across the region. Through its proxy terrorist organization, Hezbollah, Iran’s influence reaches all the way to Lebanon’s Mediterranean coast. It completes a “circle of fire” designed to attack Israel along all of its borders.
Following the rebel capture of Aleppo, Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, told Iran’s Parliament that “Islamic countries must intervene to prevent America and Israel from exploiting the internal conflicts of countries and prevent the continuation of these crises.”
In return for its support for the Assad regime, Syria has provided Russia with both naval and air bases in Syria, providing Russian forces with a strategic foothold and ready access to the Mediterranean. Because of its heavy losses of planes and anti-aircraft systems due to the war in Ukraine, Russia has reportedly been forced to remove many of its warplanes and S-300 air defense system from Syria, significantly reducing its ability to provide effective air support to Assad’s foot soldiers.
According to a Kremlin statement, in a conversation between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, they “expressed utmost concern over the dangerous escalation in Syria … and reaffirmed strong support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic.” They also “agreed on the need to intensify joint efforts so as to stabilize the situation in Syria.”
Meanwhile, the United States, Britain, France, and Germany released a joint statement saying they “urge de-escalation by all parties” to the Syrian conflict and the protection of civilians, while also calling for a “Syrian-led political solution to the conflict.
ALEPPO’S SYMBOLIC AND STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE
The rebel recapture of the city of Aleppo carries both symbolic significance and strategic importance because it controls one of the country’s most important commercial hubs and a key population center. Aleppo has a population of two million people and before the civil war, it had served as Syria’s manufacturing hub. Aleppo was also one of the early strongholds of the rebellion against Assad. Rebels took over a section of the city in 2011 and continued to occupy it until intensive Russian airstrikes and a long siege forced them to abandon Aleppo in December 2016.
There were reports of intense fighting across northwestern Syria over the weekend after the rebels seized control of several key villages and towns to the South and East of Aleppo. After rebel forces took control of Aleppo, they promised to restore public services that had been disrupted by the fighting and to resume delivery of vital bread supplies.
According to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the fighting in and around Aleppo resulted in 277 people killed, including 28 civilians, with most of the fatalities due to Russian air strikes.
The rebel recapture of Aleppo has already resulted in the return of former residents to their homes that they had fled years earlier. Abdulkafi Alhamdo, a 39-year-old English teacher from Aleppo who returned over the weekend told a reporter for the Washington Post, “I wanted to tell the world, remember us. We’re back. When I left Aleppo in 2016, I left some of my soul there, some of my mind, and [now] I’m reunited.”
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR
The Syrian civil war began in March 2011. Inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings elsewhere across the Middle East, thousands of Syrians took to the streets to protest President Bashar Assad’s authoritarian regime, which he had inherited from his father, Hafez el-Assad after he died in 2000, and to call for democratic reforms. The Assad family is part of Syria’s minority Alawite community, which is an offshoot of Shiite Islam, while the great majority of Syrians are Sunni Muslims.
Bashar Assad reacted to the demands for reforms by launching a brutal military and police crackdown on the mostly peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators, including the shelling of civilian neighborhoods and wide-scale arrests. At that point, some of the Syrian demonstrators began arming themselves to fight back, while several Islamic terrorist groups which previously battled U.S. troops in Iraq, resurfaced in Syria and eventually came to dominate the opposition to the Assad regime. By June 2012, the fighting in Syria had become a full-blown civil war, with various other regimes in the region taking sides.
As the conflict dragged on over the last 12 years, it has killed about half a million Syrians and forced at least 5 million more to flee the country.
While Assad, with the help of Russia and Hezbollah, has been able to maintain control over Damascus and most other major cities in western Syria, other parts of the country have remained under the control of various rebel groups. These include Idlib, which has been under the control of HTS; and northeastern Syria, which is controlled by a Kurdish faction allied with the United States, and the remnants of ISIS. ISIS had flourished in the chaos of eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq in 2014, and was finally vanquished by a U.S.-led coalition in December 2017. To this day, the remnants of ISIS are still operating in the Syrian desert. They are being targeted by coalition forces stationed in Syria, including several hundred U.S. troops and Kurdish fighters.
SYRIAN REBEL FORCES HAVE BEEN REORGANIZED AND RETRAINED
Since the most recent Russian-backed offensive in Syria in 2020, which reclaimed much of northwest Syria for Assad, several smaller rebel groups have spent years reorganizing their forces under the leadership of HTS. They have been retraining their units and working to improve their command-and-control facilities to avoid the disorganization that had plagued them in the past. One of these rebel groups is the Syrian National Army (SNA), which includes fighters who belonged to the uprising’s first rebel group, the Free Syrian Army.
The Russian attacks displaced hundreds of thousands of people and pushed the Syrian rebels into a small enclave along the border with Turkey, where HTS is currently based. Since 2020, the area has been subject to a truce brokered by Turkey and Russia. While the ceasefire has been repeatedly violated, it had largely held before last week’s rebel attack.
Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow for Middle East security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said, “The rebellion at large had regrouped, rearmed, and retrained for something like this.”
Jerome Drevon, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, said that the rebels have “improved training, command and control, level of organization, level of coordination, there is a single leadership, and that’s very different to what we had before.”
But few had expected the Syrian army in Aleppo to collapse as quickly as it did, two days after the rebel offensive started. Reportedly, part of the rebel offensive’s success was due to their use of new battlefield technology, including new tactics in drone warfare that had been developed during the war in Ukraine.
When the rebel offensive was launched last week, Syrian government military forces quickly crumbled across northwest Syria. The rebels who initially poured into Aleppo faced little to no resistance, enabling the long-planned rebel offensive to advance much further than had been expected. The day after rebels initially penetrated the city, the fighting intensified, with rebels capturing the main airport and military academy after fierce battles.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Iran and its proxies are all currently embroiled in conflicts with Ukraine and Israel that are much more important to them than the fight to control Aleppo. To varying degrees, all three of them have been substantially weakened, giving Turkey, the main backer of the Syrian rebels, an opportunity to take advantage of the turmoil.
ISRAEL HAS BADLY DAMAGED HEZBOLLAH’S ABILITY TO HELP ASSAD
Probably the most important factor leading to Assad’s loss of Aleppo is the damage that Israel has inflicted over the past three months during its campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Over the past decade, the Hezbollah fighters had been the most capable infantry fighting on Assad’s behalf. The Syrian army had often used them as shock troops, leading the attacks that drove the rebels back.
But after Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah made the mistake of joining the war against Israel that Hamas had started on October 7 last year, the Israeli military embarked on a campaign that decimated Hezbollah’s senior leadership and eventually killed Nasrallah himself. After launching a ground invasion in southern Lebanon, and a bombing campaign against Hezbollah neighborhoods in Beirut, Israel also managed to destroy most of Hezbollah’s large caches of missiles and other weapons, sharply reducing its fighting capabilities. Eventually, Hezbollah’s surviving leaders felt compelled to agree to a ceasefire agreement with Israel that forced them to retreat from Lebanon’s southern border.
According to Navvar Şaban, a researcher on Syria at the Harmoon Center for Contemporary Studies in Istanbul, “Hezbollah is [now] crippled. This has created a huge [military power] vacuum. Though there were [Assad] regime forces located in Aleppo, they were not trained, they lacked military discipline, they lacked tactics and even their retreat plan was a disaster.”
Since the October 7 attack, Iran has also lost some of its top Revolutionary Guard commanders in Syria and Lebanon due to targeted Israeli air strikes. In addition, Iran’s most recent attempt at a massive missile attack against Israel failed to do much damage and resulted in a devastating Israeli retaliatory bombing raid that crippled Iran’s air defenses and some of its most important weapons-production facilities. It left Iran virtually defenseless against further Israeli air strikes and inflicted a blow to Iran’s political prestige and deterrence capabilities alike.
Similarly, after almost three years of air warfare against Ukraine, Russian air power, which had long been essential in providing Syrian troops with air support, has also been significantly reduced with the loss of an estimated 117 of its warplanes.
According to Hokayem and other analysts, Turkey’s leaders probably approved of the rebel operation but did not provide it with direct supervision or planning support. “They probably didn’t realize how brittle the [Assad] regime’s front lines and forces were,” Hokayem said. “They were on board with a limited operation — but now they see there is a bigger prize.”
THE ENEMIES OF ASSAD ARE NOT NECESSARILY ISRAEL’S FRIENDS
While Israel has long viewed Assad as a mortal enemy, the rebel leaders who captured Aleppo and are seeking to overthrow his government are no more friendly to Israel than Assad himself. The rebel leaders have also made it clear that once Syria is liberated from Assad’s rule, they, too, will seek the destruction of Israel and the Arab conquest of the Har Habayis.
On the other hand, Nadav Pollak, a former Israeli intelligence official who teaches at Reichman University in Israel, believes that the rebel conquest of Aleppo is still “a net positive for Israel,” because “this adds another significant blow, which forces all members of the [Iran-Hezbollah-Syria] axis to focus on another theater [of war] that is not Israel.”
Jihad Yazigi, the editor of the Syria Report, said the rebels may not have originally thought they would reach as far as Aleppo. But they “certainly knew that the regime was weaker. . . and they wanted to seize this opportunity” to expand the areas they controlled.
According to Yazigi, signs had been growing for years that key constituencies — including the Syrian army, the Syrian business community, and the government’s “loyalist base” — were ailing or dissatisfied with Assad.
ATTACK ON ALEPPO WAS TIMED FOR AFTER THE CEASEFIRE IN LEBANON
Yazigi also said that the timing of the rebel offensive, coming just after a ceasefire took effect in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, was very deliberate. It was an effort by the rebels in Syria to ensure they were not seen to be coordinating “in any way with the Israelis,” he said.
On the other hand, Yazigi expressed doubts about whether Iran would be moved to take immediate action to drive the rebels out of Aleppo. While the Iranians had “invested a lot in Aleppo” because of the weakness of government forces there, Iran’s top priority — and the Syrian government’s — would be on securing control of the capital, Damascus, as well as Homs, which are the gateways to Lebanon and strategic coastal areas, and therefore more important to Assad and the Iranians than Aleppo, Yazigi said.
According to Robert Ford, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Syria during the Obama administration, “The [HTS] militants have been ready [to attack] for a while. And my guess is it’s the Turks who have been holding them back. But now, once the Lebanon ceasefire is done, the attack on Aleppo no longer looks like Turkey fighting an enemy of Israel.”
After taking Aleppo, rebel forces pushed south toward the city of Hama, another important population center. The New York Times reported that Syrian government military vehicles could be seen all over the roads outside Hama, which were abandoned by fleeing Syrian troops after they ran out of fuel. The rebels now control a broad expanse of land across the provinces of Hama, Idlib, and Aleppo, in the west and northwest of Syria. If the rebels succeed in pushing even further south, they could cut off the Assad regime’s access to the Mediterranean coast, as well as several strategic air and navy bases.
Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the commander of HTS, had long promised that rebel forces would return to the city. Jolani said in a speech in May last year, “The Syrian revolution is in its best shape since 2012. It won’t be long until we reach Aleppo. As I see you sitting before me now. . . I’ll see you in Aleppo.”
The Assad regime has also been weakened by a severe economic crisis in its major trading partner Lebanon, which began in 2019. As a result, the value of the Syrian pound has fallen sharply on international monetary markets, undermining the Assad government’s ability to provide services and pay its own soldiers.
U.S. DENIES ANY ROLE IN THE SYRIAN REBEL ATTACK
While the U.S. does maintain a force of several hundred troops in Syria to continue fighting the remnants of ISIS, they are stationed far to the east of Aleppo. According to a spokesman from the White House Security Council, “the United States has nothing to do with this offensive” led by HTS and is not directly involved or impacted by it.”
“Keep in mind that for many years the Syrian government has been engaged in a civil war backed by three main players: Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah. All three of those players have been distracted and weakened by conflicts elsewhere,” U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said during an interview with NBC.
“So, it’s no surprise that you see actors in Syria, including the rebels, try to take advantage of that,” he said. “And that’s exactly what they’ve done over the last several days.”
In a separate interview with CNN Sullivan said that HTS “took a look at three actors who had been pummeling them for years: Iran, Russia, Hezbollah. They had seen them weaker and more exposed than before, and they tried to take advantage of it.”
Sullivan also said, with regard to HTS, which was designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization in 2018, that the U.S. has “real concerns about the designs and objectives of that organization.”
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan about the “need for de-escalation and the protection of civilian lives and infrastructure,” but stopped short of accusing Turkey of involvement in the rebel attack.
Firas Maksad, a senior fellow with the Middle East Institute in Washington, agreed, saying that the rebel advance in Syria is occurring at a time when “Iran is perhaps. . . the weakest it’s been in decades.”
Maksad noted that Hezbollah troops in combination with Russian air power had played a “significant” role in preserving the Assad government a decade ago. “What’s crucial this time around is that the ground forces that made the difference before are not there.”
ASSAD’S REGIME IS NOW IN JEOPARDY
“The components that held back the rebel forces a few years ago are no longer there and that puts the Assad regime in jeopardy,” Maksad added.
In addition to his recent losses in the Aleppo region, Assad has also lost control of another zone in the north held by Turkish-backed militants as well as a swath of Syria east of the Euphrates River that is currently held by U.S.-backed Kurdish militias.
Historically, Syria’s civil war, though primarily fought between Assad’s army and an array of domestic opposition forces, resembles a chess board of geopolitical interests, with Iran and Russia backing the government, and Turkey supporting some rebel groups. Over the course of the long Syrian civil war, the United States, as well as the Persian Gulf monarchies, have, at times, backed certain rebel factions, but their efforts at support were late and largely ineffective, which enabled the original pro-democracy Syrian rebels to be displaced by violent Islamic terrorist groups.
With less than two months in office remaining, the outgoing Biden administration certainly does not have any intention now of getting involved in the Syrian civil war. It is far more interested in shoring up the ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel in Lebanon, and perhaps making one last diplomatic effort to bring an end to the war in Gaza, and the return of the remaining hostages, both alive and dead.
As for the ultimate fate of the Assad regime, as Jake Sullivan, the Biden White House’s National Security advisor has said, “We don’t cry over the fact that the Assad government, backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, are facing certain kinds of pressure.”
