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Rebel factions successfully seized control of the city of Aleppo, Syria, on November 30, 2024, after intense clashes and fierce battles with Assad regime forces.
Syrian rebels reignite war, make advances in Aleppo
Anti-government forces opposed to Syrian President Bashar Assad launched a shock attack on the largest city, Aleppo, on Saturday. Amid the ongoing fighting, rebels have seized the city’s airport and military academy and struck the entrance of Aleppo University Hospital,killing 12 civilians and injuring 23 others. Led by the Salafi jihadi group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — a terrorist organization with past ties to al-Qaida, now often but not always backed by Turkey – insurgents claim to control territory across Hama, Idlib, and Aleppo provinces. They are demanding that US-aligned Kurdish forces retreat from neighborhoods they hold in Aleppo.
Assad has ordered his forces to counterattack and met with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Damascus on Sunday. Russia also expressed support for its ally and claimed its forces in Syria had engaged with the rebels.
Why now? Israel’s destruction of Hezbollah in Lebanon seems to have helped tip the balance, according to Eurasia Group expert Emre Peker.
“HTS has been observing the shifting regional dynamics and agitating to take advantage of Assad’s relative weakness for months. With Russia preoccupied with Ukraine and Iran and its proxies effectively targeted by Israel, HTS felt the time was ripe to strike,” he said.
Peker elaborated that Ankara will back the rebels as long as their offensive also serves Turkish interests, whileRussia has lent what military support it can to Assad. “Erdogan will not want to oust Assad, rather to weaken him to both normalize Turkey-Syria relations and pave the way for a settlement to the 13-year-old Syrian civil war,” he said.
What about the US? The conflict creates a dilemma for Washington which under President Barack Obama supported rebel groups fighting Assad’s brutal dictatorship, but HTS’s fundamentalist roots are cause for concern. Asli Aydintasbas, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, noted the quandary: “Should [the US] be cheering the opposition taking over Syria’s second-largest city Aleppo, or should they actually worry about the city falling under Islamist rule?”
So far,the Biden administration has distanced itself from the offensive, calling for de-escalation and a political solution – but we’re watching how long Washington can stay on the sidelines if the conflict escalates.
Syrian rebel forces take Aleppo
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take, post-run, on a Sunday because the news does not wait for us to get back from our extended Thanksgiving weekend.
I want to talk about a new front in the Middle East war that has just opened up in Syria, a country that is far from stable and not really a country, really a patchwork of different controls in the best of times. But now we have active war fighting, a new front opening up with lots of territory being taken from Bashar al-Assad, his dictatorial regime from Syria Rebels, particularly a group called HTS, which is the most powerful of the military opposition groups in the country. They have swept, in a matter of hours, through the country, taking over Aleppo, the major city, and moving towards Hama. There is lots of humanitarian concern here. Not a surprise. You don't have hospitals functioning in Aleppo. You've got all sorts, thousands and thousands of people fleeing and nowhere obvious to go.
This should not be an enormous surprise in the sense that HTS has been agitating the Turkish government who support them to march on Aleppo for months. And in the same way that the Iranians had been green-lighting support for all of their proxies across the region to engage in strikes against the United States, against Israel, against shipping, all of that, Turkey did not want to do that. They didn't want to back and offensive. They were pretty split on it. The hawks inside Erdogan's government in Turkey, like the idea in order to expand opposition, put more pressure on a side, facilitate the return of more Syrian refugees from Turkey back into Syria, and also strengthen Erdogan's hand in bringing Assad back to the negotiating table for a normalization of ties under Turkey's terms. But a lot of people inside Turkey were saying that Russia would carpet bomb Turkish-backed forces and Turkish forces on the ground in Syria, of which there are thousands, which would humiliate Erdogan and cause broader tension with Russia that could well have major economic implications. We've seen that before, and this is a time when Turkey doesn't really want to afford that. They're trying to rebuild their economy from what has been a lot of damage.
It looks like now Ankara has given the go ahead to these militants in Syria, in part because the geopolitics of the region is changing. The Russians, of course, are themselves very distracted, not just with an ongoing war in Ukraine, which has been happening for three years now, but specifically because they've got two months to take as much land as possible, put the Ukrainians in the worst possible position before Trump is president and says he wants to end that war. So in other words, everything they have, they're really now putting into that fight against Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the Iranian-supported proxies across the region are getting utterly hammered, as we've seen from the United States, and more importantly from Israel and the successful war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. So in that regard, the changing of the geopolitics has really given the upper hands of the hawks in Turkey to tell HTS, "Go for it. This is an opportunity, unique time to improve your position." Still, they're not fully backing the offensive. They're not backing it directly militarily, nor are they fully backing it diplomatically as they did, for example, with the Free Syrian Army, the FSA, with number of cross border operations in Northern Syria in the past decade.
Now, Russia has been humiliated on the ground. These Syrian troops in Aleppo folded and ran away immediately. The Russians have sacked senior soldiers in charge of operations on the ground, and it looks like they are preparing to send troops into Syria directly in the next 24 to 48 hours to shore up Assad. There's a lot of land that HTS would have to take before they were a direct threat to regime. Hard to imagine they're going to be able to overthrow him. Also, the Iranians are providing support. We already see that Islamic Revolutionary Guard Core, aligned militias across the region, are saying they will enter Syria to engage in the fight against HTS in favor of the Assad regime. I expect you'll see significant numbers of actual IRGC advisors showing up as well.
So it doesn't look like this is the end of Assad, and frankly, it's hard to imagine that Turkey itself even wants to have Assad out because filling the void completely left by a weakened Iran would be challenging for Turkey and would also lead to more conflict with the Russians, rather, who importantly have a military base, a port in Tartus that is very important for them having influence in the Mediterranean. Rather, Turkey is trying to use this space to try to shape regional events to their benefits. It's very positive what's happened so far in the last 48 hours for Turkey. It weakens Assad, makes him more open to a bad deal with Turkey than he has been before, and further, HTS is also moving farther away from Turkey's border, which is a good thing because Ankara doesn't have full control over them. Again, like Iran with its proxies, a lot of weapons, a lot of diplomatic support, but that's very different from operational control on the ground. And I expect that Erdogan sees this as an opportunity for Trump where he says, "We'll, cut a deal with you. You, Trump, get to exit Syria." Still with American troops on the ground there, yet one more place you can say that the Americans don't need to be, don't need to fight and have an America First policy and one more war that you get to formally not be a part of. And we, Turkey will make sure that there's no ISIS-affiliated organizations on the ground, that the region is more stable, that Iranian influences curtailed, and the Shia crescent is severed."
So if it works, one stone, lots of birds for Erdogan. The danger of course is that it doesn't work and that the war expands and that we end up with Russia versus Turkey in a proxy war that can become direct between the two. Wouldn't be the first time that we've seen that kind of confrontation. That'd be a lot more problematic. But at this point, the one thing I can say is that this is much more about the proxies fighting in a vacuum with a changing geopolitical balance than it is about the likelihood that Assad is about to be out. He wasn't out when Obama said, "Assad must go." He's not likely to be out right now.
Okay, that's it for me. We'll keep following this and I'll talk to you all real soon.