The Islamists’ offensive across western Syria has accelerated substantially in the past few days, and now Reuters is reporting that the Syrian Army Command is telling officers that the era of President Bashar al-Assad’s rule has ended.
The apparent regime change is the culmination of just two weeks of offensives by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and allies. HTS is run by Abu Mohammad al-Julani, and has had considerable ties to al-Qaeda.They held only a portion of the Idlib Province at the beginning, which they had held for years as the Syrian Civil War had mostly stalemated.
HTS took the major city of Aleppo in just a few days, and the Syrian Army promised a counterattack that ultimately never came. The HTS offensive continued southward, seizing Hama then, within 48 hours, taking both Homs and Damascus as well.
The current situation leaves the HTS in control of the four largest cities in Syria, along with much of the country’s southern frontier with Israel and Jordan. Celebrations have been reported in Damascus, but there is also substantial uncertainty over what is going to happen next.
Other parts of Syria remain divided, with the Kurdish SDF, backed by the US, holding the northeast. The SDF has also seized other towns and villages in recent days, as the Syrian government was unable to defend them.
Further west, along the Mediterranean coast, there is no word on who is in control of cities like Tartus. The Russian Navy, however, has reportedly withdrawn from the Tartus port, which was Russia’s lone warm-water port up until now.
The HTS hasn’t addressed what will happen to the port, but with numerous reports of them receiving arms from the Ukrainian government, it seems likely they will look to expel Russia on a permanent basis.
It’s not clear that the HTS offensive is actually over with the fall of Damascus either. Over the past several days it’s been reported that HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani was keen to take over not only Syria, but Lebanon as well, and had offered to allow Israel to open embassies in both Damascus and Beirut after they take them.
Turkey has been openly backing the HTS offensive, and Turkish-allied rebel factions participated in the fighting. Israel and the US have been a little less outspoken in their support of the al-Qaeda-linked HTS, but both expressed a preference for HTS over the Assad government. US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has said the US “won’t cry” about the ouster of Assad in favor of the al-Qaeda-aligned faction.
Still, it’s not clear a Sunni Islamist government with such strong historic ties to al-Qaeda will end up being particularly friendly to Israel in the long run. The US may also quickly find the HTS becoming an enemy once again when the faction decides to attack the SDF. HTS hostility to the Kurdish SDF is long-standing issue, and likely a big part of why the Turkish government has been supporting them.
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. Jabhat al-Nusra was effectively the Syrian wing of al-Qaeda, though it broke with al-Qaeda publicly in 2016. Despite that, HTS maintains much of the underlying rhetoric of al-Qaeda.
Exactly what the results of this offensive will be is still unclear, even if the indications are that Assad is out. It seems unlikely that the HTS will be broadly embraced across Syria, and the Syrian Civil War may not be completed after over a decade of territory trading hands back and forth.