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It was not Kyiv that fell in three days, but Aleppo. A surprise offensive launched by Syrian rebels in the country’s northwest last week reignited a dormant conflict — and revealed a shift in the balance of power caused by not one but two close wars, in Ukraine and Lebanon and the Middle East.
Aleppo was the scene of fierce and destructive fighting between 2012 and 2016, when the Syrian civil war was at its height. Rebel groups were forced out as Syrian government forces backing President Bashar al-Assad managed to capture the country’s second city with the help of Russia and its air force.
The Idlib region of Syria in the northwest, with a population of about 5 million, however, remained beyond Assad’s grasp. Turkey intervention in 2020 supported the position of Hei’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni jihadist group that broke away from al-Qaeda in 2016 but remains banned by the UK and other Western countries.
The truce was in effect from March 2020, but Assad’s supporters were weakened, and with it the Syrian regime. An attack that began on Wednesday forced government forces into a rapid retreat, and by Saturday the city appeared to be in rebel hands, a reminder of the rudimentary military effectiveness of surprise.
The question is why Assad’s forces were so suddenly vulnerable when, four years ago, they seemed close to crushing HTS in Idlib. The answers are not hard to find. Russia is not the force it was in Syria for the past decade because Moscow has shifted its military focus and resources to its invasion of Ukraine.
As the Institute for the Study of War noted on Saturday, S-300 missile systems have been withdrawn from Syria for the 2022 war in Ukraine. and Russia’s presence was generally reduced. Moscow’s ability to provide sustained support for Assad will inevitably be limited in the long term.
Russia has launched a series of airstrikes in Aleppo, Idlib and surrounding areas from its Hmeimim air base, killing at least 200, but they appear to have had little or no impact on rebel advances so far. The apparent Russian bombing of Aleppo University Hospital on Sunday, which killed 12, apparently has no military value either.
The second change was prompted by Israel’s attacks on Iranian proxies in Syria, with Hezbollah in Lebanon, both of which were decimated by more than a year of bombing by the Israeli Air Force. It is almost certainly no coincidence that the day the Israeli-Hezbollah ceasefire was announced, the HTS offensive began.
“Iran’s proxies have been significantly degraded and this has an undeniable impact” on the Assad regime’s ground forces, said Burku Özçelik, a Middle East expert at the Royal United Services Institute think tank. But she also reflected that Iran itself, which has performed worse in its direct military exchanges with Israel, may also be more wary of intervening or allowing its proxies to intervene as well.
“The real challenge for Syrian regime forces is the lack of willingness so far on the part of Iran, as Hezbollah’s patron, and Russia to deploy military assets and air power to rescue the regime, as they have done in the past,” she added. Open intervention by Iran in support of Assad could also provoke further bombing by Israel.
Experts who have followed the situation in northwest Syria know that this is a conflict that has never been resolved and that HTS, a group motivated by religious conflict, has been planning a future attack. In narrow military terms, his timing appears to have been shrewd, although he was probably surprised by how quickly his initial attack succeeded.
There is a bitter irony to the Middle East, however, that when one conflict ceases, another begins again. Given the existential threat the rebels suddenly pose to the Assad regime, it’s not likely to end anytime soon either.
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