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Rebel forces seized Mengh Airbase and the city of Tel Rifaat in the Aleppo countryside on December 1, 2024, following clashes with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Syrian regime forces.
Syrian rebels clash with Kurds as Assad’s backers spring into action
In case anyone has forgotten just how complicated Syria’s civil war always was, the recent drama around Aleppo escalated on Monday as the Syrian National Army, a group backed by Turkey, attacked US-backed Kurdish groups near the city.
Meanwhile, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, the formerly al-Qaida-linked Islamist group at the forefront of the recent rebel offensive in Aleppo, has reportedly ordered Kurdish militias to leave the area altogether and go eastward to Rojava, a de facto autonomous Kurdish area in northeastern Syria.
Aren’t the Kurds against the Assad regime, too? Yes, but that’s not the beef. HTS works with the Turkish proxies and relies on Ankara for political support in high-level negotiations to end the war. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is angling for an advantageous position on the war’s aftermath and said his “greatest wish” was “for the instability that has been going on for 13 years to end.”
For Turkey, that means both weakening Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and cutting the Kurds down to size, as it has long-standing problems with Kurdish separatists at home.
Don’t forget, Turkey is also a US ally — a NATO member, in fact — so urging its proxies to fight US proxies in a theatre where Russian forces also actively operate causes headaches in Washington. Russian warplanes bombed rebel-held areas of Aleppo on Monday, not far from where Turkish F-16s shot down a Russian Su-24 that strayed over the border in 2015. Quite an explosive position for a lame-duck US president.
Speaking of proxies… Iran-backed militias crossed into Syria from Iraq to help shore up Assad’s counterattack as well. Assad will be glad for that help as the Lebanon-based Iranian proxy group Hezbollah, once a major pillar of support for Assad’s regime, said Monday it would not deploy fighters to Syria right now. The group is still regrouping after getting mauled by Israel and is warily watching as last week’s ceasefire in that conflict appears to be breaking down already.
Where is the US in all this? Washington had reportedly held talks before the Aleppo offensive with the UAE about lifting sanctions on Syria in exchange for Assad distancing himself from Iran and Russia. That seems unlikely now that Assad’s back is against the wall and he needs all the help he can get. Beyond milquetoast calls for de-escalation, Washington has thus far kept its cards close to its vest.
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.
Plane descends through air strike smoke to land at airport in Beirut, Lebanon in this screengrab obtained on October 1, 2024.
Israel broadens the battlefield
The world still awaits Israel’s retaliation against Iran for Tehran’s brazen missile attack last Tuesday. But in the meantime, Israeli forcesconducted further airstrikes in Syria, hitting a weapons depot south of Homs and a rocket depot in the eastern countryside on Sunday. The strikes – which apparently aimed to stem the flow of weapons from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon –caused “material losses,” according to Syrian state media. They came two days after Israel launched rocket attacks near a Russian airbase in Syria, where Russian forces were reportedly “confronting” the missiles for over 40 minutes, raising concerns that Russia — an Iranian ally – could become embroiled in the escalating regional war.
Meanwhile, on Sunday night, Israel resumed bombardment of targets in Beirut while Hezbollah rockets struck the Israeli port city of Haifa. This followed a weekend of intense Israeli bombardment of Hezbollah targets in suburban Beirut, which took the lives of 23 people, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
Key leaders targeted. The Israeli foreign ministry claims that its air force killed Hezbollah commander Hader Ali Taweel on Sunday. Iran’s Quds Force commander Esmail Qaaniis also missing after Israeli strikes on Beirut last week, though it is unclear whether he is dead or wounded. The Quds Force oversees dealings with militias allied with Tehran across the Middle East, including Hezbollah, and confusion about Qaani’s fate is reportedly causing panic among the troops. The strike was in fact targeting senior Hezbollah figure Hashem Safieddine, who is also unaccounted for, and who was seen as a possible successor to Hezbollah’s former leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
But is Hezbollah the real target? Israel’s increased military operations have led observers to speculate that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expanding operations to target Iran – and drag the US into the conflict. Bibi is also suspected of seeking to torpedo a cease-fire in Gaza to harm the Democrats’ chances in the upcoming US election while boosting his own favorability at home. His poll numbers have climbed since the war with Hezbollah heated up but not far enough to allow him to form a majority government if an election were held today.
When asked on Friday whether Netanyahu was attempting to influence the US election, a frustrated US President Joe Biden said “I don’t know” before adding, “No administration has helped Israel more than I have … And I think [Netanyahu] should remember that.”Smoke rises from an explosion in Gaza, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, near the Israel-Gaza border, as seen from Israel, September 9, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Oct. 7 Edition
1,200: Hamas launched terror attacks inside Israel and killed 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023 – making it the deadliest day in Israel’s 76-year history. The kibbutz of Be’eri, near the Supernova music festival, suffered the highest death toll with 332 lives lost. The militants targeted the festival, 19 kibbutzim, and five cooperatives, among other targets.
251: Hamas militants took 251 people, including civilians and Israeli security personnel, hostage on Oct. 7, taking them into Gaza. As of Sept. 1, 2024, 101 hostages remained in Gaza, according to Israeli sources cited by the UN. Sixty-four are believed to be alive, while 33 are confirmed dead (four of the hostages were taken before Oct. 7).
41,870: The number of Gazans killed in the war between Israel and Hamas now stands at 41,870, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. The number has been disputed by groups that peg it as either higher, due to an inability to locate people under the rubble, or lower, due to the inflation of numbers. The GHM also does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. According to Israeli authorities, as of Sept. 1, the number of dead includes 17,000 Hamas terrorists.
1,664: Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, 1,664 Israelis have been killed, including 706 soldiers, according to a report by the Institute for National Security Studies.
1,900: At least 1,900 Lebanese, including civilians, medics, and Hezbollah terrorists, have been killed since Oct. 8, 2023, according to Lebanese officials, and several thousand have been wounded.
1.9 million: UNRWA says 1.9 million people have been displaced in Gaza due to the war instigated by Hamas. 143,000 people have been displaced in Israel due to Hezbollah rocket bombardment, according to an INSS report, including 60,000 evacuated from the border with Lebanon.
1.2 million: Just over 20% of Lebanon’s 5.4-million-strong population – a whopping 1.2 million people – have been driven from their homes by the recent Israeli offensive, according to Lebanese officials.
38: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s popularity has risen since Israel launched its offensive against Hezbollah. According to Israel’s Channel 12, Netanyahu is the preferred candidate for prime minister over the centrist opposition leader, Yair Lapid, at 38% to 27% support. The latest poll gives his Likud Party a possible 25 seats, but that would not be enough to form a government with its current coalition partners.
Homes are leveled in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Horseshoe Beach, Florida, U.S., September 27, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Helene hits hard, Zuckerberg enters the big leagues, US strikes Islamic State in Syria, Majority of Argentines live in poverty
90: At least 90 people across the southeastern United States are dead in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which made landfall as a category 4 storm on Thursday. The high winds and storm surge destroyed an unknown number of homes and caused power outages for millions. The White House declared major disasters in Florida and North Carolina, allowing federal emergency management resources to flow to those states.
201 billion: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly amassed a net worth of $201 billion, making him the fourth wealthiest person in the world after Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bernard Arnault, whose assets all surpass $200 billion. For context, if you made $10,000 an hour, every hour for the last 2,024 years, you would still fall short of the mark with $177 billion.
37: US Central Command said Sunday that it had killed 37 Islamic State-linked operatives in two separate strikes in Syria this month. The first strike, on Sept. 16, killed 28 militants at an IS training ground in central Syria, while the second killed nine IS-affiliated militants in the northwest last Tuesday.
52.9: According to new government data, more than half of Argentines – a whopping 52.9% – lived below the poverty line during the first half of the year, the highest level in two decades. That’s up from 41.7% in the last half of 2023, with a 237% annual inflation rate driving much of the increase. President Javier Milei has managed to bring inflation somewhat more under control, but he is making unlikely promises to bring the rate down to 18% by the end of 2025.A poster depicting Syria's President Bashar al-Assad is seen at a damaged area in the aftermath of what Syrian state media reported was an Israeli strike in Hama, Syria September 9, 2024.
Do strikes on Syria signal a bolder Netanyahu?
Israeli strikes in Syria overnight on Sunday killed at least 18 people and wounded dozens more. The main target appears to have been a facility reportedly used in the development of chemical weapons.
Israel has not confirmed its involvement, but it has routinely carried out attacks in Syria – targeting Syrian government forces and Iran-backed militias – in recent years. The Jewish state generally does not publicly comment on such operations.
These strikes led to a larger death toll than previous attacks and came in the face of rising tensions between Israel and Iran amid the war in Gaza. Israel has been bracing for an attack from Iran in recent weeks, following the late July assassination of a top Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. It was thought that Iran would respond harshly and swiftly to that attack, but it’s held off so far.
What’s Israel playing at? Israel probably feels somewhat emboldened given the lack of a quick, significant Iranian response to Haniyeh’s assassination — and the Jewish state is likely to continue to take action against threats in the region “where Israel knows that the risk of retaliation is not great,” says Eurasia Group senior analyst Omar Monieb.
The strikes also came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces rising domestic calls to secure a cease-fire deal with Hamas to bring hostages home – and they could be an attempt to ease that pressure. They help Netanyahu’s government show that even if it’s “not successful in striking a deal, it is successful in eliminating threats” to Israel elsewhere, says Monieb.
Iran attacks Israel
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here, and a Quick Take on a Sunday, which usually means something is not going well, and that is certainly the case in the Middle East, where you had unprecedented strikes by Iran and its proxies against Israel.
Now, on the one hand, clearly a very dangerous thing to do, on the other hand, could have been a hell of a lot worse. What do I mean by that? Well, it is not World War III. Americans warned Iran not to hit the United States, and the Iranians gave a heads-up, days in advance, through a number of actors, most importantly through Iraq. This reminds me very much of after the American servicemen and women, three were killed in Jordan, by an Iranian proxy. The Americans did not want a war to break out with the Iranians directly, waited about a week, gave a heads up through Iraq, of the kind of attack that the Americans were planning, waited four days, gave the Iranians a chance to basically prepare and get their own forces out, and warned them that if this were to happen again, there would be direct consequences, a direct strike on Iran itself.
In this case, you had the Iranian heads-up that gave the Americans and allies time to pre-position, to provide diplomatic support, both publicly and privately, to the Israelis. Send the head of CENTCOM to Israel, say that American support for Israel was ironclad, help ensure that the Israelis would be able to most effectively defend itself against the coming Iranian attack. That was, on the one hand, a really big deal by the Iranians that was meant to be a maximal display of force and a minimum likelihood of casualties. But still, there was a significant possibility of accident, that you could have a risk that would lead to a war directly between Iran and Israel. Something that the Americans desperately wanted to avoid because it would bring the US in. It would spike oil prices. It would probably mean the end of Biden's, potential of a second presidency. And it, of course, would also mean that Iran was going to get hit massively by the United States and Israel, something they wanted to avoid.
We saw hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles, many from proxies, but many from Iran itself, over 99% of which were taken down. And they were aimed solely at military targets in Israel. So again, lots of effort to try to reduce the risk but the potential that you would have had a number get through, accidentally hitting civilians or having significant military hit, that was a risk that the Iranians were prepared to take. So, it's a big deal, it’s a clear escalation, and it is certainly an effort by the Iranians to say, that if this is to happen again, that the likelihood that there will be a major war between Iran and Israel come what may, is very real. And the Iranians also said, and they said this before the missiles even hit their targets, or in the case of the vast majority of them were intercepted, said through the United Nations mission that this was directly in retaliation for the Israeli strike against an Iranian leader in Damascus, and that the matter, from Iran's perspective, should be considered closed.
In other words, no further attacks were coming. So, trying to in a sense, you know, reduce the likelihood of further escalation, in advance. And clearly, all of that kept the United States from responding directly. So, the US strategy here is do everything possible to show that you will get massive support for Israeli defense and national security in the event of an attack, any attack, but also to try to put maximum constraint on the Israeli government against a response directly against Iran, and that the Americans don't want to support Israel if they were to engage in offensive attacks against Iran at this point.
What are the Israelis going to do? I mean, the hope for the United States is that while Prime Minister Netanyahu wants to do more and suck the United States into a broader war against Iran, that he is going to be constrained from doing so. In part because he was so successful, they now have a major victory on their belt under his watch, being able to defend the Israeli people completely in response to an unprecedented Iranian attack. And there's also going to be a big distraction away from the war in Gaza. Doesn't mean that Israel suddenly loses its isolation or wins the PR war globally, I think that's certainly not going to happen, but, there's less pressure on the Israelis, on the prime minister, in terms of Gaza right now as a consequence of what Iran has done. And there's also less pressure for Netanyahu to be forced out domestically in the near, in the immediate future.
Further, if he were to try to go considerably farther than Benny Gantz wants to, and the war cabinet wants to, in a response against Iran, then Netanyahu risks that they would bolt from the war cabinet and that his government would then fall apart. That's certainly a proximate risk that contains what the Israelis are likely to do. I don't think they'll sit on their hands and do nothing. At the very least, I think there'll be more significant strikes against Iranian proxies in the coming days. And the Israelis will also continue to engage in strikes against Iranian targets as they see them, as is opportune, in proxy states going forward. This is the problem, of course, is that, even though you have averted major escalation in a very dangerous period over the weekend, the Israelis and the Iranians haven't accomplished anything to stabilize their relationship longer-term.
Israel has shown that they are capable of taking out Iranian leaders in Syria, and Iran can't defend them. Iran has no intention of suddenly leaving those proxies to fend for themselves. And further, the likelihood that Israel now gets a breakthrough agreement on hostage release by Hamas, and that leads to a ceasefire, has gone down, at least in the near-term. The other side of that is the likelihood that the Israelis proceed with at least some form of ground attack into Rafah, which the Americans have warned them not to, also has gone up.
So the Hamas war with Israel is nowhere close to ending, the likelihood of continued Palestinian civilian casualties continues to grow, and the potential for further military engagement, both vis-a-vis proxies, including the Houthis in the Red Sea, the fact that the Iranians have also boarded an Israeli linked vessel in the Red Sea and that there is no effective deterrent in place right now between Israel and Iran, despite all sorts of other actors not wanting this to expand into a broader war, that all makes the Middle East right now, more dangerous.
So, I mean, none of us know, what the next shoe is going to be to drop. But if you are looking ahead over the next, let's say, six months, a couple things I think you can say. First, it is more likely that the present Israeli government is going to be in place for longer, and that the war in Gaza is going to continue without a serious effort at stabilization, or at least not one that's consequential.
That's problematic for Biden as you look ahead to the election in November. The potential that this war expands and eventually does drag in the United States and Iran more directly, is also going up. It's not imminent but it is certainly reasonably plausible, and the guardrails on that war are becoming, they are eroding as both sides are taking shots against each other.
So, a dangerous environment. A second war that is not going the way the Americans or anyone else in the world would like it to. And that's how we're kicking off our week.
That's it for me and I'll talk to you all real soon.
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