A coalition of opposition groups in Syria, headed by the Islamist faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has upended Syria’s civil war after a long stalemate. Their lightning offensive, taking over several key cities in the space of days, is the most direct challenge to president Bashar al-Assad’s power in years and may signal the end of his 24-year rule.
The Syrian civil war started 13 years ago, during the Arab Spring, and escalated into a bloody, multifaceted conflict involving domestic opposition groups, extremist factions and international powers, including the United States, Iran and Russia. More than 500,000 Syrians have died, and millions more have fled their homes.
What is the situation on the ground?
In just over a week, Syrian rebel forces seized much of Syria’s northwest from the government in a fast-moving attack. First, the rebels seized Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, then days later blazed through Hama and the strategic city of Homs. On Sunday, they reached Syria’s capital, Damascus.
Who is fighting?
The Syrian government, led by Assad, was central to the protracted and devastating civil war that began in 2011. Assad, who took power in 2000, is part of the family that has run Syria since a 1970 coup. They are Alawites, a minority sect that is an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
Assad initially portrayed himself as a modern reformist, but he responded to peaceful protests during the Arab Spring with brutal crackdowns, sparking a nationwide uprising.
After several years of war, the Assad government clawed back much of the territory it lost to rebels with the help of Iran, Russia, and Lebanon’s Hizbullah militia. But those allies have recently been decimated or distracted by other conflicts.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), whose name means Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant, began to form at the beginning of Syria’s civil war, when jihadis formed the Nusra Front to fight pro-Assad forces with hundreds of insurgent and suicide attacks.
The group had early links to the Islamic State group, and then to al-Qaeda. But by mid-2016, the Nusra Front tried to shed its extremist roots, banding together with several other factions to establish HTS. The United States and other western countries still consider it a terrorist group.
The group’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has said his primary goal is to “liberate Syria from this oppressive regime”. He has tried to gain legitimacy by providing services to residents in his stronghold of Idlib.
Publicly, US officials have been cautious about HTS. But inside the US government, some officials believe the group’s turn toward pragmatism is genuine, and that its leaders know they cannot realise aspirations to join or lead the Syrian government if the group is seen as a jihadi one.
Kurdish Forces, from a Syrian ethnic minority, became the United States’ main local partner in the fight against the Islamic State in Syria, under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces. After the extremist group was largely defeated, Kurdish-led forces consolidated control over towns in the northeast, expanding an autonomous region they had built there. But Kurdish fighters still had to contend with their long-time enemy, Turkey, which regards them as being linked to a Kurdish separatist insurgency.
There are also many other Syrian militias fighting with their own agendas and allegiances.
Are foreign powers involved?
Since the beginning of the civil war, Turkey’s military has launched several military interventions across the border into Syria, mostly against Syrian Kurdish-led forces. Turkey now effectively controls a zone along Syria’s northern border.
Turkey also supports factions such as the Syrian National Army, a coalition of armed Syrian opposition groups. Analysts say it probably gave tacit approval to the offensive led by HTS.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday issued a qualified approval of the rebel advance. “Idlib, Hama, Homs, and the target, of course, is Damascus,” he told reporters in Istanbul, according to Turkish state media. “The opposition’s march continues. Our wish is that this march in Syria continues without incident.”
Throughout Syria’s civil war, Russia has been one of Assad’s most loyal foreign backers, sending Russian troops to support his forces and jets to bomb his enemies. It has maintained a strategic military presence in Syria with air and naval bases, which it uses to support military operations in the region.
Because of the grinding war of attrition in Ukraine, analysts say Russia has been unable to support Syria’s government as forcefully as it has in the past. Russian air strikes that attempted to slow the rebel advance have been relatively sparse.
Syria is a core part of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” a network of countries and groups that includes Hizbullah, Palestinian militant group Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen that hopes to destroy Israel and reduce American influence in the Middle East.
Iran smuggles weapons to Hizbullah across Iraq and Syria. Iran and Hizbullah have repaid the favour by sending thousands of militants to fight on Assad’s side during the civil war. On Friday, Iran began to evacuate its military commanders and personnel from Syria, according to regional officials and three Iranian officials, in a sign of its inability to help Assad hold power.
The US role in the Syrian civil war has shifted several times. The Obama administration initially supported opposition groups in their uprising against the government, providing weapons and training, with limited effect.
After the rise of the Islamic State group in 2014, US forces fought the terrorist group with air strikes and assistance to Kurdish forces, and then stayed in northeastern Syria to prevent a resurgence. In 2019, then-president Donald Trump withdrew many of those forces, but the US still maintains about 900 troops, based in Kurdish-controlled oil-drilling areas in the northeast and a garrison in the southeast near Syria’s borders with Iraq and Jordan.
Israel’s military activities in Syria have been mostly focused on air strikes against Hizbullah and Iranian targets, especially senior military personnel, weapons production facilities and the transport corridor that Iran uses to send weapons to Hizbullah.
An Enduring Conflict
The Syrian war began in 2011 with a peaceful uprising against the government and spiralled into a complex conflict involving armed rebels, extremists and others.
The conflict began when Syrians rose up peacefully against the government of Assad. The protests were met a violent crackdown, while communities took up arms to defend themselves. civil war ensued.
Amid the chaos, Syria’s ethnic Kurdish minority took up arms and gradually took territory it saw as its own. The Islamic State group seized parts of Syria and Iraq in 2014 and declared that territory its “caliphate,” further destabilising the region.
Assad has received vital support from Iran and Russia, as well as Hizbullah. The rebels were backed by the US and oil-rich Arab states such as Saudi Arabia. Turkey also intervened to stop the advance of Kurdish militias.
The war has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions. Forces loyal to Assad have committed by far the most atrocities. The regime has turned to chemical weapons, barrel bombs and starvation to force Syrians into submission.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
2024 The New York Times Company