In Syria, a sudden reminder of a war that never ended

A tank left behind by regime forces in the northwestern Syrian Idlib province, Dec. 1. (Omar Haj Kadour/AFP)

Syria’s smoldering civil war has roared back onto the world stage. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist militant group, launched a lightning strike from its northwestern redoubt late last week to capture most of Aleppo, the country’s largest city, and advance south toward the central city of Hama, as my colleagues have reported. Videos posted by HTS appeared to show its fighters raising a flag near Aleppo’s historic citadel and setting up checkpoints in and around the city.

A decade ago, Aleppo was the charnel house of Syria’s civil war — the nation’s economic capital was torn asunder by brutal regime crackdowns, Russian bombardment and the predations of the jihadists. Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with support from Russia and Iranian proxies, reclaimed the city in 2016. The victory came at a hideous cost to the Syrian people and seemed to underscore Assad’s wider success in staving off the 2011 pro-democracy uprising that he’d turned into a sprawling, years-long series of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. A tangled set of factions and outside powers drove the conflict, which left roughly half a million Syrians dead and forced some 5 million more to flee the country.

Assad lost control of the northwestern province of Idlib, where HTS and other Turkish-backed rebel militias rule, and some areas in the northeast, dominated by a predominantly Kurdish faction that was once closely allied to the United States. The extremist militants of the Islamic State are still operating in the Syrian desert. The ruin of the Syrian state has allowed the emergence of a flourishing regional trade in the synthetic drug Captagon. Yet Assad found comfort in the relative quiet, and numerous Arab countries, including the Middle East’s wealthy Gulf monarchies, have worked to mend fences with a regime they once shunned.

The dramatic unraveling of the past days might show how hollow Assad’s supremacy was. Regime forces seemed to melt away before the HTS onslaught. As pro-government battalions prepared a counteroffensive, the old, bloody contours of the civil war reappeared: Regime and Russian airstrikes pummeled towns in Idlib province; civilians fled; Turkish-backed rebel militias clashed with Kurdish units in a replay of the battles that flared parallel to the regime’s struggles; foreign governments, including the United States, put out limp statements urging de-escalation.

The current developments are connected to conflicts raging elsewhere. The Kremlin’s capacity to protect Assad has probably been limited by its costly invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, whose ground forces turned the tide of the Syrian civil war in Assad’s favor, has been hammered by Israel. Over the past year, Israel has pummeled targets across Syria linked to Hezbollah and Assad’s Iranian allies. The scale of that bombardment led a U.N. official in October to warn about “a military, humanitarian and economic storm breaking on an already devastated Syria” that would pose “dangerous and unpredictable consequences.”

Then came last week’s cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, a détente that appears to have given groups such as HTS and a coalition of militias supported by Turkey the impetus to press their advantage against an enfeebled regime. “It’s a tectonic shift,” Andrew Tabler, who served as Syria director in the Trump White House, told the Wall Street Journal. “Regional and international powers intervened in Syria over a decade ago, and now the conflicts of Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon all come together and overlap in Aleppo.”

For some onlookers, Assad’s apparent frailty has carried a bitter lesson. “With [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s army being decimated in Ukraine, he likely can’t spare sufficient forces to save Assad,” Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s former foreign minister, posted on social media.

Kuleba stressed that Aleppo’s fall to the regime in 2016 “was a grim prelude” to the Russian invasion and subsequent massacres of Ukrainian civilians in 2022. “It was in Syria that Russian pilots learned how to raze Ukrainian cities to the ground,” he wrote. “The world’s failure to stand up to Putin and Assad back then became an open invitation for Putin to invade Ukraine.”

The rebel advance has put a spotlight on HTS. The group claims to have forsworn its affiliation with al-Qaeda. In the territories it captured, the outfit urged calm and promised fair treatment of religious and ethnic minorities. The State Department has designated HTS an “entity of concern” for the group’s violations of the religious freedoms of communities in its midst.

It’s not immediately clear whether its gains are a reflection of its strength, the Assad regime’s weakness, or both. “Thanks to Turkey, they’ve had time and space in Idlib to organize and prepare for this,” Sam Heller, a fellow at the Century Foundation who studies the Levant, told me. “And HTS’s governing project in Idlib hasn’t just been an exercise in state-building and political legitimation — it’s also a revenue-generating enterprise, and HTS seems to have invested some of the funds it has accrued into developing this military capability.”

Though he knew the Syrian government “has been drained and depleted economically over the past several years,” Heller said, he was surprised that “the Syrian army and auxiliary forces weren’t prepared to mount a defense in depth” around Aleppo and instead collapsed in “a chaotic rout.”

Analysts have long understood the inherent fragility of Assad’s regime, noted Emile Hokayem, a Middle East scholar at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. But they did not foresee this apparent turning of the tide and “the renewed strength of the rebellion and its ability to organize, train, plan and conduct such an incredible campaign.”