After years of being frozen, the conflict in Syria has been reactivated with an insurgent offensive in the northwest that even surprised the Islamist factions that are leading it because of how quickly the Syrian Army collapsed upon reaching the city of Aleppo. This “success” has given the opposition a “new confidence” that can change “the direction” of thirteen years of war.
“I think the objective was limited at first, and they didn’t necessarily think they were going to capture Aleppo, but that’s what happened, and the insurgents were surprised by the speed of the collapse of the front lines of the Syrian government forces. Now they are trying to take as much territory as possible,” says Syria expert and researcher at the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia, Aymenn Jawad Al Tamimi.
On Wednesday, a coalition led by the Levant Liberation Organization, a Turkish-backed group created in 2016 after splitting from the al-Nusra Front, the former al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, launched an offensive against positions of the army loyal to the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
In just a few days, they have already controlled the entire province of Idlib - an opposition stronghold - and have entered Aleppo - the country's second largest city - and the north of Hama province.
The objectives and “success” of the offensive
Broderick McDonald, a research associate at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King's College London, says the initial aims of the offensive were to “expand the buffer zone on the outskirts of western Aleppo and reduce the Assad regime's bombardment of Idlib.”
But the rapid advances of the Levant Liberation Organization (Hayat Tahrir al Sham or HTS, in Arabic) and its allies in the city of Aleppo "have given them impetus to continue advancing south to the outskirts of Hama."
This “success” of the offensive has given the armed opposition “new confidence that it can meaningfully challenge the regime and break out of northwestern Syria, significantly changing the direction of the Syrian civil war, which has seen fronts largely frozen over the past five years.”
The seizure of that territory has also given them “a boost that could change the course of the civil war in the future,” McDonald said.
During this more than a decade of conflict, there have been different offensives, the last between 2019 and 2020: a Turkish one against the Syrian Kurds - enemies of Turkey - in the north of the country and another by the Syrian Army - supported by Russia and Iran - against opposition strongholds in the northwest of the Arab country.
Green light from Türkiye?
According to both analysts, HTS had been preparing this offensive for some time.
But has Turkey given the green light? For Natasha Hall, a senior fellow at the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), “Ankara has not directly intervened or stopped the rebel offensive. It may have initially given the green light to the military offensive to put pressure on Assad in the negotiations, but everyone was probably surprised by the success of the offensive,” she says.
Al Tamimi said: “I think Ankara approved the idea of an offensive to put pressure on the Assad government because talks on normalisation have stalled.”
However, the Turkish government has distanced itself from this military campaign.
Experts have pointed to Turkey seeking to restore relations with Damascus, but Assad has demanded the withdrawal of Turkish troops from northern Syria and an end to its support for opposition groups that his government and Russia call “terrorists,” so all dialogue has come to a standstill.
Assad, will he fall?
All three analysts agree: this will not be the end of the Assad government.
"As long as Iran and Russia support the (Syrian) government, it will not fall. And I don't think the insurgents will capture the capital Damascus," says Al Tamimi.
Hall notes that “numerous foreign actors have an interest in the regime remaining in power, including those perceived as its enemies. I therefore highly doubt that this offensive will lead to the overthrow of the Assad regime.”
McDonald said that HTS is also “a designated terrorist entity, currently on the lists of the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, Canada, Japan and others.”
It is therefore “hard to imagine” that “he could come to lead all of Syria, given the opposition he faces from ordinary Syrians and the international community,” he concludes. EFE