In Syria, Islamic Jihadis Reemerge

Bashar Assad has been convinced since 2020 that his forces had crushed the insurgency — or insurgencies — that had been plaguing his regime since 2011. Now the Islamic wing of that insurgency has reemerged, much to Assad’s surprise, in the northwest, seizing dozens of villages and, by Saturday, taken control of half of Aleppo, Syria’s second city. In 2016, Assad managed to take the city back from rebels with the help of Iran and Russia. But Iran is now preoccupied with defending itself against the IDF, and has no troops or weapons to spare. Russia is similarly engaged in its war with Ukraine, and has even needed to replenish its ranks with soldiers from North Korea’s army. It has started to bomb rebel-held parts of Aleppo, but that is a far cry from the massive help it gave Assad in the past. And Hezbollah, whose troops had been helping to guard Aleppo against insurgents, recently had to pull its troops out of Syria and back to Lebanon, where they have been more urgently needed to fight against the IDF.

More on this latest outbreak of hostilities in Syria can be found here: “In a shock offensive, insurgents breach Syria’s largest city for the first time since 2016,” by Sarah El Deeb, Associated Press, November 29, 2024

Insurgents breached Syria’s largest city Friday and clashed with government forces for the first time since 2016, according to a war monitor and fighters, in a surprise attack that sent residents fleeing and added fresh uncertainty to a region reeling from multiple wars.

The advance on Aleppo followed a shock offensive launched by insurgents Wednesday, as thousands of fighters swept through villages and towns in Syria’s northwestern countryside. Residents fled neighborhoods on the city’s edge because of missiles and gunfire, according to witnesses in Aleppo. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the country’s unresolved civil war, said dozens of fighters from both sides were killed.

The attack injected new violence into a region experiencing dual wars in Gaza and Lebanon involving Israel, and other conflicts, including the Syrian civil war that began in 2011.

Aleppo has not been attacked by opposition forces since they were ousted from eastern neighborhoods in 2016 following a grueling military campaign in which Syrian government forces were backed by Russia, Iran and its allied groups.

But this time, there was no sign of a significant pushback from government forces or their allies. Instead, reports emerged of government forces melting away in the face of advances, and insurgents posted messages on social media calling on troops to surrender.

Robert Ford, who was the last U.S. ambassador to Syria, said the attack showed that Syrian government forces are “extremely weak.” In some cases, he said, they appear to have “almost been routed.”

Over the course of the civil war, the Syrian army lost nearly 200,000, men, and an equal number were wounded, many so severely as to be unable to fight. From 2016 on, Assad relied heavily on the Russians and Iranians for military support — both soldiers and weapons. But he cannot rely any more on either Russia or Iran. Both are otherwise engaged. As of Saturday, a handful of Russian planes have bombed sites in Aleppo, but that is nothing like the military help, including soldiers on the ground, that Russia once provided. And Hezbollah fighters that had been manning a garrison in Aleppo have been called home to fight the IDF.

This week’s advances were among the largest in recent years by opposition factions, led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, or HTS, and represent the most intense fighting in northwestern Syria since 2020, when government forces seized areas previously controlled by the opposition….

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is not the democratic opposition to Assad’s despotism, but an Islamic jihad group.

Instead of foreign powers helping Assad, as Iran and Russia previously did, the foreign intervention in Syria now comes from Sunni Turkey, which supports the Sunni jihadis in their fight against the Alawite-dominated regime of Bashar Assad. The Alawites are a sect of Shi’a Islam and thus despised by many Sunnis — sometimes murderously so. It’s unclear if this latest upsurge by the jihadis in Syria has been aided by Turkey providing drones and other weapons, but it would not be surprising if Erdogan had chosen to do so. A weakened Syrian state would be unable to press its territorial claim against Turkey, which in 1939 seized the Syrian province of Hatay, and Syria wants it back.

The Syrian government did not comment on insurgents breaching Aleppo city limits.

The Kremlin said Friday that it considered the attack an encroachment on Syria’s sovereignty and that it supported the quickest possible establishment of constitutional order in the region.

“Of course, this is a violation of Syria’s sovereignty in this region,” Russian presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a press briefing….

Yes, we all know how deeply concerned Russia is about “violations of sovereignty.”

In a phone call with his Syrian counterpart, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi described the insurgent attacks in Syria “as a plot orchestrated by the U.S. and the Zionist regime following the regime’s defeat in Lebanon and Palestine.”

There is no US or Israeli plot behind these attacks. The Syrian insurgents are not the democratic opposition to Assad, but jihadis, just as opposed to both the US and Israel as to the Syrian regime itself. Those Sunni insurgents have no doubt been planning the latest move for many months, having recognized that both Iran and Russia — that had helped Assad win back Aleppo in 2016 — were no longer in a position to help. The insurgents were also well aware that Hezbollah had been forced to pull back its combatants from Aleppo, where they been stationed to help secure the city for Assad, back to Lebanon, to join the fight against the IDF. For the insurgents, this was the moment they had been waiting for.

By Saturday, the jihadis controlled half of Aleppo. Assad, without the kind of help from Iran or Russia or Hezbollah he could previously count on, will have a difficult time taking back Syria’s second city. As of late Saturday, the Russians have been bombing jihadis in Aleppo. But Syria will still have its hands full, even if it manages to take back Aleppo, to suppress the insurgency that has so suddenly reappeared over a wide swath of territory. Syria won’t want to risk more attacks on its military bases by the IDF, so will likely refrain from acting as a conduit for Iranian weapons to be transferred to Hezbollah. That terror group was no doubt hoping, despite the “ceasefire” with Israel, to quietly rearm. So this insurgency in northwest Syria will be one more way to harm Hezbollah and Iran. Israel thus becomes the unintended beneficiary of Sunni rage at being ruled by an Alawite — Shi’a —despot.