Syrian rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, launched a surprise offense in Idlib province on Thursday.
The regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad and his patrons in Russia responded with airstrikes, but were unable to prevent the insurgents from breaching Aleppo, Syria’s second-most important city.
Turkish media on Friday broadcast footage of HTS fighters entering Aleppo with uniformed soldiers and armored fighting vehicles. Residents of the city told foreign media they could hear missiles striking the outskirts of the city.
Four civilians, including two students, were killed on Friday when bombs struck a student dormitory in Aleppo. Syrian state media blamed the deaths on HTS artillery fire.
The assault on Aleppo began with two car bombings and quickly escalated to skirmishes between the rebels and government troops. Syrian state media claimed a “major offensive” was repelled, while Turkish media said the rebels were able to reach the city center.
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Syrian government warplanes conducted at least 125 airstrikes across Idlib and western Aleppo since the offensive began three days ago. At least 12 civilians were killed and 46 wounded in these strikes, which forced 14,000 people from their homes.
As of Friday morning, HTS said it controlled dozens of towns in Idlib and western Aleppo, adding four more to its total in the past 24 hours of fighting.
International observers were surprised by the success of the offensive, which saw the rebels recapture territory they lost to Assad’s forces almost nine years ago.
“The regime’s lines of defence have crumbled, I think they were taken aback. No one anticipated how fast the rebels would reach towards the edge of Aleppo,” Dareen Khalifa of the International Crisis Group told the UK Guardian on Friday.
Khalifa said two major factors in the sudden resurgence of the Syrian civil war were Israel’s powerful offensive against Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, which crushed a force Assad was relying upon for help against the rebels, and Russia’s war in Ukraine, which drained much of the strength Russia was using to support Assad.
“The Russians are distracted in Ukraine. They are less invested politically, if not militarily, in Syria,” she said. “It’s difficult to tell what the result of this offensive is going to be. The rebels think the other side is vulnerable, and they have leverage.”
“Russia is not a bystander, but we are likely witnessing the limits of the Russian military. The two-day performance of Russia indicates that much of its air force capability has been redeployed to Ukraine,” Atlantic Council senior fellow Omer Ozkizilcik said on Friday.
HTS said it had no compunctions about targeting Iranian forces supporting the Syrian military and, according to Iranian media, at least one officer of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Brig. Gen. Koumars Pourhashemi, has already been killed in the fighting. Iranian media claimed his killers were “terrorists linked to Israel.”
Rebel leader Lt. Col. Hassan Abdul Ghani told Middle East Eye (MEE) on Thursday that the offensive was a response to Syrian regime aggression against areas held by HTS and its allies. Insurgent leaders are calling the offensive “Operation Response to the Aggression.”
Ghani said his forces have seized several “highly strategic” areas held by both Assad’s forces and Iranian troops.
“These areas were Iranian and Syrian military bases used to launch aggression against our areas, killing civilians and forcing them to leave their homes,” he said.
“Our forces have destroyed 12 enemy tanks, and the operation will continue until we eliminate the forces targeting our land,” he vowed. “Our operation aims to liberate our land from the Syrian and Iranian forces and allow its people to return to their homes safely.”
MEE cited reports that forces linked to the Syrian National Army (SNA), a militia aligned with Turkey, have joined Operation Response to the Aggression, but have thus far remained out of heavy fighting. This would seem to support speculation that Turkey is a player in the sudden effort to destabilize the Assad regime.
Turkish security sources told MEE they tried to prevent the offensive through diplomatic channels, using deconfliction hotlines established in the final months of the Syrian civil war, but their efforts came to nothing once the rebels saw how little resistance Assad and his Russian and Iranian patrons were putting up.
“What was initially planned as a limited operation expanded as regime forces began fleeing their positions,” the Turkish source said, adding that Turkey’s preferred outcome for the current conflict would be to recreate the “de-escalation zone” protecting Turkey’s border with Idlib province.
On the other hand, an SNA leader told MEE the Turkish-supported militia saw the collapse of Hezbollah in Lebanon as a “golden opportunity” to seize more territory, and perhaps even land a knockout punch on the regime in Damascus.
“There is an international situation that favours this battle and chaos between Assad and his supporters, and we seized this opportunity. Without their allies, the Syrian troops are nothing. We are capable of changing the equation, restoring our land, and securing a safe path to facilitate the return of displaced people to their homes,” the SNA source said.
“Our eyes are on Aleppo, and the future developments will determine the outcome. The nature, timing, and scale of the operation will determine its scope,” he added.
Iran and Russia both contacted Assad on Friday to offer their support. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Arahchi emphasized Tehran’s “continued support for the government, nation, and army of Syria in their fight against terrorism,” while Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denounced the Aleppo offensive as “an infringement on the sovereignty of Syria.”
“We are in favor of the Syrian authorities bringing order to the area and restoring constitutional order as soon as possible,” Peskov said, without elaborating on how much help Moscow might be willing to provide.
Peskov refused to comment on reports that Assad has flown to Moscow for consultations with Russian President Vladimir Putin – reports that left some observers wondering if the Assad regime was already crumbling.
Former U.S. defense intelligence officer Rebekah Koffler told Fox News Digital on Thursday that Putin might have initiated the chaos in Aleppo by ramping up attacks against rebel forces and civilians in the region, doubling down on his support for Damascus in response to the United States authorizing Ukraine to use its long-range missiles against targets in Russia.
Koffler described Putin’s strategy as “lateral escalation” and suggested he might have miscalculated the intensity of the insurgent response, or overestimated the ability of Assad’s forces to handle it.
“With Russian air forces joining Syrian airfare bombing rebel-held northwestern Syria, [Putin] is also moving laterally on the escalation ladder, to out escalate the United States, unbalance Biden, and create as much negotiating leverage on Ukraine for himself before President Trump begins his second term,” she said.
“I would not be surprised if Assad strikes the rebel-held territories with chemical weapons again,” she added.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi denounced the Aleppo offensive as “Takfiri terrorism” (that is, phony terrorism directed by Western powers to make Muslims look bad) and said the attack was “an American-Israeli project.”
Araghchi amusingly claimed Israel was defeated by Hezbollah in Lebanon, rather than nearly wiping the Iran-backed terrorists out, and arranged the assault on Aleppo as a distraction from its “defeats at the hands of resistance movements.”
