On Thursday, Islamist militants captured the major city of Hama, meaning they had taken two of the four biggest cities in Syria. Just two days later, their territorial gains have expanded markedly, and they’re now in the process of seizing one of the last two, and say they’re in the process of encircling the other.
The obvious next step after the fall of Hama was to advance southward and attack the city of Homs. They did, but other forces with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) forces have so gone around Homs and further south yet. The HTS is a merger of Sunni Islamist factions with historic ties to al-Qaeda.
It was only Saturday morning when the first HTS fighters reportedly entered Homs itself. The city is heavily defended, so a lot of fighting is expected, and thousands of residents from Homs have fled in anticipation to major conflict.
Perhaps the more significant aspect than the advance on Homs is that HTS forces have taken provinces further south. They say they have taken the Quneitra Province, which borders the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The southern cities of Deraa and Suwayda, near the Jordanian border, have also fallen.
Turkey has been increasingly public about their backing of the HTS with an eye toward regime change. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been saying Damascus is the goal for the extremist movement. The HTS has also reportedly been courting Israel for support.
Israel seems to be supportive of the idea of Islamist jihadists taking over a country on their border, though they have shored up their forces along the Golan Heights. Israel is said to be preparing for the collapse of the Assad government. They’ve also warned Iran against sending arms to the Assad government. Iran has reportedly begun evacuating some of their personnel from Syria in the event the fighting worsens.
The US official position is that they prefer HTS to Assad, with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan saying the US “won’t cry” if Syria is taking over by al-Qaeda linked militants. The US has also sought to use it for an opportunity for the SDF to seize territory further east.
Though the US still considers HTS a terrorist organization, they seem increasingly comfortable with them. Historically, they have funded multiple of the organizations which eventually merged into the HTS, with billions of dollars spent arming and training them with the ultimate goal of regime change. This admission that they prefer HTS to Assad, then, isn’t so much a change in US policy as a long-standing US policy that they used to not be willing to so publicly state.
The recent fall of southern cities and provinces clearly isn’t just about taking border areas. The HTS is being very public about their intention to encircle the capital city of Damascus. HTS reports suggested they were as near as 20 km from Damascus on Saturday, and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put them as close as 10 km.
Damascus is unlikely to imminently collapse in the face of the major rebel offensive, there is a massive battle looming here, and indeed a massive battle that is just getting under way in Homs. The Syrian Civil War continues, though the fighting is a lot more intense now than it’s been in recent years.
HTS formed in early 2017 as a merger of several Islamist militant groups, centering initially around fighting Jabhat al-Nusra but ultimately merging with them as well. Jabhat al-Nusra was effectively the Syrian wing of al-Qaeda, though they broke with them publicly in 2016. Despite that, HTS maintains much of the underlying rhetoric of al-Qaeda.
HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who was previously al-Qaeda’s top official in Syria, has tried to distance himself from the organization recently, in an effort to make himself and the HTS more palatable to the West. In practice, their ideology is still strongly the same as it was.