Syrian Sunni Islamist fighters are continuing to consolidate their gains in Syria’s Aleppo province. Almost the entirety of Aleppo city, sometimes called the capital of Syria’s north, is now in the hands of the Turkey-backed fighters. Russian and Assad regime airstrikes have begun in earnest on opposition-held parts of the country’s north west.
The lightning advance of the insurgents has now slowed down. Fresh from their triumph in Aleppo, the Sunni fighters sought to push into Hama province further south. Elements of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS – or the ‘Organization for the liberation of Syria/the Levant’), which is spearheading the push south, entered the suburbs of the city but were quickly expelled. HTS is currently contesting areas of the Hama countryside with regime forces.
The rebellion, it should be noted, never took the city even at the height of the Syrian civil war of the previous decade.
Significant reinforcements for Assad’s beleaguered soldiers have now arrived from Iraq, in the form of Iraqi Shia fighters from the Ktaeb Hezbollah and Afghan Shia Fatemiyoun organisations. These fighters entered Syria yesterday via the Iranian/militia-controlled border crossing between Iraq and Syria at Albukamal. They are set to participate in what will likely be a regime attempt at a counter offensive in the coming days.
So what are the key lessons to be learned so far from the dramatic events of recent days? And what may lie ahead?
The taking of Aleppo city represents a dramatic and significant moment in the unresolved conflict. Aleppo is one of the Middle East’s great historic cities, and a vital commercial hub for Syria’s north. The rebellion, it should be noted, never took the city even at the height of the Syrian civil war of the previous decade.
I reported inside Aleppo in the summer of 2012 when the rebels had just erupted into the city. The fighting was intense, the noise in the city deafening. Assad’s air force reaped a heavy toll of both insurgents and civilians in the city’s east, which the insurgents held. The talk among the rebel fighters was of reaching the citadel, a fortified palace at the city’s heart dating back more than a millennium. The insurgents didn’t succeed, though they held on to the eastern part of Aleppo for four years. They were expelled from Aleppo in its totality by regime forces with heavy Russian help in 2016.
I visited the city again a year later, accompanying a pro-regime delegation. The damage wrought by Russian air power to the formerly rebel east Aleppo was awe inspiring. Little of the city’s basic infrastructure remained. The formerly insurgent-held neighbourhoods were in rubble.
Anyone who at that time would have predicted that within a decade the city would once more be in insurgent hands would have sounded like a lunatic. And yet here we are, seven years later, four years after the Syrian civil war effectively ground to a halt, was eulogised and then largely forgotten by western observers.
I visited the city again a year later, accompanying a pro-regime delegation. The damage wrought by Russian air power to the formerly rebel east Aleppo was awe inspiring.
For the first time, the city is now in the hands of the insurgents in its entirety (with the exception of a Kurdish neighbourhood, Sheikh Maksoud, still held by the fighters of the Kurdish YPG, but isolated and cut off).
The insurgent blitzkrieg is testimony to the extreme weakness and disarray of the Assad regime’s own armed forces. The regime, or the ‘Syrian government’ as it calls itself, is largely a shell. It was saved from destruction by the entry of Iran-linked militias to the country in 2013, and by the deployment of Russian air power in late 2015.
But the price for being saved was the effective ceding of sovereignty. In the roughly 60 per cent of Syria which the regime nominally controls, the key forces are Russia in the west and south west and the Iranians in the south east. Outside of a couple of ‘elite’ units, the official Syrian Arab Army is barely fit for purpose. It consists of poorly equipped, poorly paid and poorly motivated conscripts, many of whom see little reason as to why they should be under arms when the civil war, until this week, seemed largely concluded.
In 2019, when the Turkish Army launched a large scale incursion into Syria’s north east, I had the opportunity to spend time with a unit of Assad’s army which had been sent up to deter the Turks from further advances. I recall that the battalion’s doctor was reduced to petitioning a pro-Kurdish American NGO for medications for his soldiers. The troops themselves, meanwhile, similarly begged the Kurdish SDF for food, since their own army had failed to supply them with sufficient provisions.
It appears to have been units of this type which the well-armed and motivated Turkish-supported HTS and its allied Syrian National Army (SNA) have been facing and cutting through in recent days. It would be quite wrong, though, to assume from the events of recent days that Assad is doomed, and HTS will now fight its way through to the presidential palace in Damascus.
It does not, though at this stage presage Assad’s imminent collapse. Still less does it signify the complete eclipse of the currently beleaguered Iran-led regional bloc.
The advance of the Sunni Islamists seems largely to have peaked. As of now, at least, no major disturbances in support of the insurgents elsewhere in Syria have broken out. In the absence of these, and with the rushed entry of Russian and Iranian elements into the country, Assad is likely to hold onto his admittedly hollow crown for a while longer.
The episode constitutes an opportunistic and bold attempt by the Turkey-aligned and Sunni Islamist element in Syria to capitalise on the current disarray of the Iran-led regional axis. Lebanese Hezbollah, traditionally the most proficient ground element available to this alliance is currently in disarray, with its leadership decimated by Israel in recent months and thousands of fighters and operatives removed.
The Russians are busy with their ongoing grind forward in Ukraine’s Donbas region. Iran, meanwhile, is awaiting with concern the return of Donald Trump to the White House and contemplating how to respond to Israel’s destruction of its air defences on 26 October. With these more powerful elements busy elsewhere, HTS calculated that it could make rapid gains against Assad’s pitiful forces – and has done so. This represents a significant shift in the balance in Syria. It does not, though at this stage presage Assad’s imminent collapse.
Still less does it signify the complete eclipse of the currently beleaguered Iran-led regional bloc.
