Bowen: Syria’s rebel offensive is astonishing – but don’t write off Assad

The reignited struggle in Syria is the most recent fallout from the turmoil that has gripped the Middle East because the Hamas assaults on Israel on 7 October final yr.

The assaults, and Israel’s response, upended the established order. Events in Syria in the previous couple of days are extra proof that the struggle gripping the Middle East is escalating, not subsiding.

During a decade of struggle after 2011, Bashar al-Assad’s rule survived as a result of he was ready to interrupt Syria to save lots of the regime he had inherited from his father.

To do this he relied on highly effective allies, Russia, Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah. They intervened on his facet in opposition to insurgent teams that ranged from the jihadist extremists of Islamic State to militias supported by the US and the wealthy Gulf monarchies.

Now Iran is reeling from extreme blows inflicted by Israel, with US assist, on its safety within the Middle East. Its ally Hezbollah, which used to ship its finest males to combat for the Assad regime in Syria, has been crippled by Israel’s assaults. Russia has launched air strikes in the previous couple of days in opposition to the insurgent offensive in Syria – however its army energy is nearly totally earmarked to combat the struggle in Ukraine.

The struggle in Syria didn’t finish. It dropped out of the place it used to occupy in headline information, partly due to turbulence throughout the Middle East and past, and since it’s virtually not possible for journalists to get into the nation.

In locations the struggle was suspended, or frozen, however Syria is stuffed with unfinished enterprise.

The Assad regime has by no means regained the ability it had used to manage Syria earlier than 2011, the yr of the Arab uprisings, although it nonetheless stored a gulag of Syrian prisoners in its jails.

Even so, till the previous couple of days, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad managed the most important cities, their surrounding countryside and the primary highways connecting them.

Now a coalition of insurgent teams, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has damaged out of Idlib, the province alongside the border with Turkey that it controls, and in just a few days since 27 November swept away Syrian troops in a sequence of “astonishing” occasions, as one senior worldwide diplomat advised me.

Two days into the offensive, they have been posting images of fighters who had taken the traditional citadel of Aleppo, which had been an impregnable base for presidency troops between 2012 and 2015, when town was divided between rebels and regime forces.

The ambiance in Aleppo appears calm after the rout of presidency troops. One photograph on social media confirmed uniformed and armed insurgent fighters queuing for fried rooster at a fast-food outlet.

HTS has roots in al-Qaeda, although it broke with the group in 2016 and at occasions has fought its rump loyalists. But HTS continues to be designated as a terrorist group by the UN Security Council and international locations together with the US, the European Union, Turkey and the UK. (The Syrian regime calls all its opponents terrorists.)

The chief of HTS, Abu Mohammad al-Jawlani, has a protracted historical past as a jihadist chief in Iraq and Syria. In current years, although, he has moved away from strict jihadist ideology to attempt to broaden the attraction of his group.

The rebranding can also be getting used to draw assist for the offensive, which HTS calls Operation Repelling the Aggression. That title, and its official bulletins, keep away from jihadist language and Islamist references.

Neutral language, based on Mina al-Lami, the jihadist media specialist at BBC Monitoring, is designed to distance what’s taking place from the jihadist previous of HTS and current the offensive as a joint insurgent enterprise in opposition to the regime.

Syrians are typically repelled by excessive spiritual rhetoric. As jihadist teams got here to dominate the rebel after pro-democracy demonstrations have been crushed after the primary yr or so of struggle after 2011, many Syrians both stayed impartial or sided reluctantly with the regime as a result of they feared the murderous jihadist ideology of Islamic State.

The offensive led by HTS comes out of the splintered political panorama of northern Syria. Much of the north-east is managed by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a gaggle led by Kurds and supported by the United States, which stations round 900 troops within the space.

Turkey is an enormous participant, controlling borderlands the place it has deployed its personal common troops in addition to the militias it sponsors. Sleeper cells drawn from the remnants of Islamic State typically mount lethal ambushes on roads by means of the Syrian desert.

Reports from Syria say that the insurgent forces have captured vital provides of army tools, together with helicopters, and are urgent on in the direction of Hama, the subsequent vital metropolis on the highway to Damascus.

Without a doubt the regime and its allies can be working to regular themselves and to hit again, particularly with air energy. The rebels should not have an air pressure, although in one other signal of the way in which that unmanned aerial autos are revolutionising warfare, there are experiences that they used a drone to kill a senior regime intelligence official.

The renewed preventing in Syria is inflicting worldwide alarm. The UN envoy to Syria, Geir Pedersen, issued an announcement saying that “the latest developments pose severe risks to civilians and have serious implications for regional and international security… No Syrian party or existing group of actors can resolve the Syrian conflict via military means”.

Pedersen added that there had been “a collective failure to bring about a genuine political process” to implement UN Security Council decision 2254, which was handed in 2015. That laid out a roadmap for peace, with the precept within the textual content that “the Syrian people will decide the future of Syria”.

The goal was a future formed by free elections and a brand new structure. But that meant Assad and his household giving up a rustic that they handled for years as their private fief. More than half one million useless attest to their willpower to not let that occur.

It is just too quickly to write down the Assad regime off. It has a core of real assist. Some Syrians see it because the least unhealthy choice – higher than the jihadists who got here to dominate the rebel. But if different anti-Assad teams – and there are a lot of – stand up, his regime will as soon as once more be in mortal hazard.