Aleppo was never meant to fall.
A stunning offensive waged by two Turkish-backed forces over the space of the last five days has resulted in the conquering of Syria’s second-largest city and industrial hub, doing in under a week what more numerous and well-resourced anti-Assad rebels never managed. Yet Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Syrian National Army (SNA) found themselves the beneficiaries of neighboring conflicts, an opportunistic patron in Ankara, the recent election in the United States and a dynastic dictatorship in Damascus weakened by civil war, sanctions and corruption.
HTS and the SNA had been training to take over more of Aleppo, with the hope of carving out further regime areas and securing their enclave in Idlib from Syrian Air Force bombardment.
There were two concurrent battles that started last Wednesday: The first, named “Repelling Aggression,” was led by HTS, and the second was the “Dawn of Freedom,” launched by the SNA, a collection of Islamist insurgents and former Free Syrian Army factions now refashioned into Turkish janissaries. The SNA managed to seize strategic military positions, such as the Kuweires Air Base; the Aleppo thermal power station, a key source of electricity located 15 miles east of Aleppo; and the defense factories at a military-industrial complex southeast of Aleppo. They swept in all but uncontested, barely any shots fired.
Coinciding with the dramatic takeover of Aleppo was a push by HTS into the countryside of northern Hama, a sweep of 39 villages in the space of 48 hours, and a similar Syrian troop withdrawal from the town of Maaret al-Numan, south of Idlib. HTS practically controls all of Idlib, and large parts of Aleppo, Syria’s largest governorate. HTS fighters briefly entered Hama City, but the takeover of yet another provincial capital appears to have been a diversion, aimed at delaying the arrival of regime reinforcements in Aleppo so that HTS could consolidate its hold there.
Overall, the regime suffered a complete breakdown in command and control and morale, leaving it unable to regroup or mount a counteroffensive. HTS overshot its own mark in a blitzkrieg that Western analysts see as a “catastrophic success.”
Turkey allowed the operation to happen owing to a unique concatenation of circumstances. First, the failure of attempted negotiations over reconciliation and normalization with Damascus. Second, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s desire for greater bargaining power with the incoming White House, given the expectation that Donald Trump will inevitably withdraw U.S. forces from northeastern Syria, as he’s long said he intends to do. Third, the prospect that Kurdish militias dominated by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, operating under the umbrella of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, will no longer pose a significant threat on Turkey’s southern doorstep so long as they aren’t protected by American F-16s from above and U.S. commandos from below. Fourth, the dilapidated state of Bashar al-Assad’s main ground forces, a consortium of militias assembled by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has been given a drubbing by Israel over the past year. Fifth, Russia’s redeployment of assets to Ukraine and its desire to see a “peace dividend” in Syria, beginning with the lifting of Western sanctions.
When HTS reached the outskirts of Aleppo City, the main regime defense, Regiment 46, simply collapsed. The provincial capital, 20 miles away, thus became an easy and enticing target to overrun.
Rebel sources have told New Lines that there were several factors behind the regime’s implosion in Aleppo. One was the penetration of a high-level security meeting in Aleppo, during which an Iranian brigadier general and several Syrian officers were killed. The result was chaos in the city’s security operations and fear among officials in the city. Another was the use of sleeper cells inside Aleppo, which coordinated with the rebels, ensuring the further disruption of efforts to mobilize a garrison from an intact fallback position. Yet another was that rebels chose their targets wisely, bypassing more fortified locations such as the Military Academy and Artillery College — strongholds located approximately 4 miles southwest of the city — where they might have been mired in static fighting. But even they were shocked at how phantasmic their enemy turned out to be.
Assad crumbled not just because of a well-planned jihadist campaign but because 13 years of civil war have left his army a husk, and his soldiers demoralized. When the Syrian Arab Army fought for Aleppo in 2016 against a hodgepodge of anti-Assad forces — including HTS in its earlier incarnation — it felt itself on the cusp of a glorious national victory, one that would restore Syria to prewar sovereignty. Instead, the nation was balkanized by competitive and contradictory Turkish and American protectorates in the north and east of the country and elsewhere mortgaged to Iran and Russia, which did the heavy lifting in retaking Aleppo and defeating Western-backed rebels in southern Syria. Shiite militias built or imported by Iran’s Quds Force, or Hezbollah or their Iraqi confederates, eclipsed the role played by conventional Syrian soldiers, whose rank and file are mostly Sunni. But those militias have been preoccupied with fighting new wars in the region, and so, faced with a dizzying prospect of squaring off against an army of jihadists, the Syrian soldiers just ran away.
The Turkish-backed operation coincided with the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire, meant to end the long Israeli bombardment of Lebanon. Hezbollah’s decision to enter a war against Israel led to Israel’s assassination of its senior leadership, including its long-serving secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah; the neutralization of its middle cadres via exploding pagers; and the destruction of as much as 80% of its arsenal. With a depleted Party of God on the Syrian battlefield, and Iran too preoccupied picking up the pieces of its shattered project in the Levant, Turkish-backed rebels found the perfect moment to strike.
Russia, too, has been busy elsewhere and could put up no real countermeasures. Vladimir Putin is now months away from entering the fourth year of a war in Ukraine that was meant to be over in two weeks. He has grown dependent upon North Korean, Cuban, Indian and Houthi auxiliaries to compensate for Russian military losses, thought to be in excess of 700,000. Since February 2022, the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has somewhat reduced its footprint in Syria. This includes eliminating the role of the mercenary Wagner Group following its mutiny in Russia a year ago, relocating some combat aircraft to Ukraine and removing some of its most advanced air defense platforms. All this as Washington idles through a changing of the guard between the outgoing Biden administration and Trump’s second term.
HTS had been spoiling for a big fight in Aleppo. What it got was its own changing of the guard. There were no Syrian troops inside the city, only security and police, who withdrew immediately.
HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani’s tenure in the ranks of transnational jihadism is as long-standing as it is fraught with ruptures and reinventions. Known at the time as Jabhat al-Nusra, HTS broke with al Qaeda in 2016 and has since gone to war with its current affiliate in Syria, Hurras al-Din. Prior to that, Jolani, the leader of HTS, was dispatched to Syria by the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in 2011, on the order of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the now-deceased “caliph” of the Islamic State group, who saw an opportunity to capitalize on the popular uprising against Assad by turning it into a jihadist takeover of Syria.
Jolani is best understood as a Syrian cut from the same cloth as the Assads: brutal, cynical and triangulating, with a tendency to always come out on top. He outsmarted the leaders of the world’s two largest terrorist organizations. Baghdadi and his deputies in Iraq never fully trusted their Syrian lieutenant when Jolani diplomatically ignored their instructions and created his own fiefdom in eastern and northern Syria in 2012-2013. Abu Ali al-Anbari, Baghdadi’s top aide at the time, after weeks of his own field investigation in Syria, reported back a scathing appraisal of Jolani: “He is a cunning person; two-faced; adores himself; does not care about the religion of his soldiers; is willing to sacrifice their blood in order to make a name for himself in the media; glows when he hears his name mentioned on satellite channels.”
In the spring of 2013, without consulting the Syrian branch of ISI, Baghdadi announced publicly that the two groups were now one — the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Jolani refused to go along with the scheme. Instead, he declared allegiance to al Qaeda to maintain the loyalty of his men. Most of them joined Baghdadi, especially the non-Syrians among them. Three years later, Jolani would pull off a sleight of hand with al Qaeda’s then-leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Initially, he convinced Zawahiri’s representatives to accept public severance of ties as a deception to convince the U.S. and the West not to target his insurgency in Syria. In time, however, the face grew to fit the mask and al-Nusra really broke with al Qaeda. It renounced transnational jihadism in favor of the nationalist variety and got down to the sort of state-building enterprise al Qaeda never managed. (Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has done the most granular analysis of this enterprise, which includes everything from regulating the local power grids to directing traffic and mounting a COVID-19 relief policy.) The organization later renamed itself, twice, ending up as HTS, which stands for the Levant Liberation Committee.
Its reinvention is part genuine evolution — a technocratic Salafism — and part public relations gambit to persuade external stakeholders it is no longer a threat to anyone save Assad and his saviors. Jolani followed events in Afghanistan closely and wants HTS to become a downier, more tolerant equivalent of the Taliban, complete with international acquiescence to, if not recognition of, his rule.
He will have noticed, for instance, that the Taliban leadership is now not only regularly hosted in Qatar and coordinates with the United States as per the conditions of the Trump-brokered Doha Agreement; it also routinely travels to Moscow, in spite of Russia’s proscription of the Taliban as a terrorist entity. Yet this policy is about to be lifted, as are complementary Russian sanctions, owing to dramatically changed facts on the ground in the wake of America’s withdrawal from its longest war. “Generally, we must proceed from the fact that the Taliban controls power in the country,” Putin said in July. “In this sense, the Taliban are certainly our allies in the fight against terrorism because any acting government is concerned with the stability of its administration and the state it governs.”
Much as HTS fights the Islamic State in Syria, the Taliban fights its Afghan offshoot, which has carried out a spate of grisly terrorist operations in Russia in recent months, including the shooting and arson attack on Crocus City Hall near Moscow in March, which killed 145 people. (Russia falsely claimed the secret hands of Ukrainian, British and American intelligence were behind that atrocity.) Jolani’s argument to the West and Arab states runs parallel to the Taliban’s: He is not only preferable to the terrorists who go abroad in search of innocent blood to spill; he is at war with them.
His post-Aleppo program now includes foreign policy toward neighboring states, such as Iraq, whose Shiite majority was declared apostate by the Islamic State, which wanted only to put them to the sword. Jolani says he has no quarrel with Baghdad so long as it keeps its militias at home.
Needless to say, the West isn’t buying any of this sales pitch. But within Syria, the story is more complicated.
Aleppines are naturally fearful of HTS’ fundamentalist designs and are well aware of its documented abuses against secular activists and political opponents. Yet in the midst of much dire forecasting (and plenty of misinformation being spread online), events so far suggest HTS is behaving pragmatically. Its militants were dispatched right away to safeguard banks from looting. On the first night of its occupation, HTS turned off the electricity for factories, thereby affording civilian residences 16 hours of uninterrupted power, something they haven’t enjoyed since 2012. Jolani has paid specific attention to reassuring Christian and Kurdish civilians now under his dominion, and has even offered safe passage of Kurdish militants out of Aleppo with their weapons.
It’s still early days. But if HTS seeks to administer a demographically diverse city, unlike a smaller, more culturally conservative hamlet in the northwest, it will have to accommodate its ideology to a more cosmopolitan local population. Turkey understands this. So does the regime.
When word reached Damascus of how HTS was behaving, rumors began to spread that it was all a feint to keep civilians inside Aleppo so that they could later be used as human shields by HTS when the real battles with pro-Assad forces started.
For most of the push across northern Syria, Assad was holed up in Moscow on a scheduled visit, as the city that Russian warplanes had helped him recapture in late 2016, over the space of over a year, gave itself over to an enemy within 72 hours. For Putin, the spectacle must have met with a mixture of contempt and schadenfreude. Kyiv was meant to fall in three days, not Aleppo. HTS and the SNA sacked not only Syrian military installations but also Russian ones, killing or capturing Russian soldiers and taking Kuweires Air Base in Aleppo. That said, this rout only underscores how weak and hollow Putin’s Levantine client is, and how wrongheaded it was for him to rely on Iranian militias, as opposed to a conventional military, to keep Assadistan together. Russia may be strategically wedded to Iran in Syria, Ukraine and Yemen, but that doesn’t mean it enjoys seeing itself as the junior partner in the relationship. Chatter among Russian military bloggers is heavily slanted toward castigating Assad for causing this mess, which they think he alone should clean up. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, similarly put the onus on the “Syrian government” for restoring security in Aleppo.
Russian jets only started pounding targets in the city — many of them characteristically civilian, including a Franciscan Italian church — within the last 48 hours. Idlib has been under constant Russian bombardment for years and that hasn’t changed. Otherwise, the cavalry isn’t coming; it’s retrenching.
Ukraine’s military intelligence service, the HUR, stated that Russian military officers and diplomats are leaving Damascus in a hurry. Other assets are said to be abandoning forward operating bases and relocating to the Russian air base in Latakia. Rebels captured an as-yet-unknown amount of Russian materiel from Khan Sheikhun, north of Hama. According to the HUR, one of Russia’s aerial sorties, waged on Dec. 1, was undertaken to destroy its abandoned kit. Among the professional scalps of this humiliation are Gen. Sergei Kisel, the commander of Russian forces in Syria, who was just dismissed by the Kremlin. Col. Vadim Baikulov, commander of a unit of Russian special forces in Syria, has been recalled to Moscow to account for the losses in manpower and military equipment in Aleppo.
One theory to explain Russia’s sluggish intervention is that Moscow may have shrugged off a limited rebel offensive as a way to force Assad into dealing with Turkey in earnest and making the sort of concessions and reforms needed as a prerequisite for Western sanctions relief. Putin and Erdogan are great power rivals, but their relationship is built around a common disdain for the U.S. and the West, and a mutual respect that only seems to increase the more one gets the better of the other.
Turkish armor and airpower have bested Russia’s allies in Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh. Turkish drones, sophisticated multiple launch rocket systems and cluster munitions (delivered in secret before America sent its own) have shredded Russian columns in Ukraine, a country whose NATO membership Erdogan endorses. In 2020, Russian and Syrian jets killed 36 Turkish soldiers in Idlib in airstrikes said to be targeting HTS positions in the village of Baylun. Erdogan responded by blaming Assad and annihilating the regime’s military infrastructure and hundreds of Syrian soldiers in Operation Spring Shield.
For all their disagreements forged in fire and steel, both Erdogan and Putin have a shared pastime of making the petulant pygmy in Damascus bend the knee.
Whereas the majority of Arab countries have normalized relations with Assad, Turkey has not. Reconciliation with the only NATO ally in the region would go a long way toward bringing the regime back from its pariah status and get sanctions lifted – something Putin could use to his advantage with the Gulf states and West. Damascus has remained intransigent on agreeing to terms with Ankara on the status of the Turkish-Syrian border and the resettlement of 3.2 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, whose presence over the past decade has caused populist political backlash to Erdogan’s majority and that of his Justice and Development Party.
Central to their dispute is the perennial Turkish national security priority: the PKK, whose Syrian branch is currently the United States’ main partner in countering the remnants of the Islamic State. Erdogan cut short his attendance at the BRICS Summit in Kazan in late October because of a terror attack at the Turkish Aerospace Industries outside of Ankara — one his government blamed on PKK-affiliated Kurds who had entered Turkey from Syria. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, formerly the powerful head of the MIT, the Turkish intelligence service, said around the same time that Assad was not interested in normalization. Fed up with talking, Ankara finally decided to do the other thing after months of keeping HTS at bay.
On Nov. 30, a Russian military airplane took off from the Hmeimim base in Syria to Antalya, Turkey. Its cargo was a Syrian security delegation en route to meet with Erdogan’s representatives on their turf. In previous talks, the Syrians had refused meeting on Turkish territory but insisted on the talks taking place in Russia or neutral territory. Here, already, is Assad’s first concession after Aleppo came under new management.
Negotiations are presently underway, and they aim at achieving what matters most to Turkey. These are eliminating the Kurdish presence on the Syrian border, along with all elements of statehood set up by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF); returning Syrian refugees from Turkey without harassment or arrest by Syrian authorities; and maintaining a permanent security corridor for the Turks along the entire border strip, 22 miles deep. Turkey is now in a strong position to get all three, which it’s been bartering over, via the Russians, for the past seven years.
In 2017, by way of fostering Turkish-Syrian reconciliation, Putin came up with the idea of reviving the Adana Agreement of 1998, which was reached in October of that year, three months after his appointment as director of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, under Boris Yeltsin. It aimed at expelling Abdullah Ocalan, the head of the PKK, and his paramilitaries from Syria and called for a safe zone of three miles, where the Turkish Army could enter in pursuit of Kurdish separatists, but only after informing their Syrian counterparts and getting their approval ahead of time.
Under the rebooted Adana proposal, Turkish troops could only enter Syrian territory with a specific operational purpose and not stay within those 3 miles indefinitely. Erdogan agreed to these constraints in principle but demanded that the safe zone be expanded to 22 miles.
During consecutive rounds of negotiations, the Syrians refused the depth Erdogan was demanding for his buffer zone, but agreed to up the ante from 3 miles to 6 in late 2022. They insisted that the Turkish army could only enter Syria after getting the regime’s permission. This was still not good enough.
Renewed Russian pressure these past several months, doubtless brought on by Moscow’s waning patience with its client and more urgent priorities in Eastern Europe, resulted in Assad showing a willingness to compromise — or at least pretending to.
In mid-2024, he dropped his demand for an immediate withdrawal of Turkish troops from the four main cities they currently occupy: Al-Bab, Azaz, Jarablus and Afrin. He said he’d settle for a mere commitment to withdraw, followed by a three-to-five-year timetable for its execution. On the surface, it looked as if the regime were finally cooperating with the Russians to reach an agreement with the Turks. In reality, however, Assad was bargaining with more than he could ever deliver.
His straitened military and governing capacity meant his forces could never assume control of those territories at once, in either the near- or mid-term future. So Assad demanded withdrawal from Jarablus first, then set a timetable for leaving Al-Bab, Manbij and Afrin. Erdogan, meanwhile, wanted Syrian help to to dismantle the Kurdish missile system in Tel Rifaat, north of Aleppo, which was manned by PKK-aligned militias that in 2018 had fled Afrin, now in range of that system’s rockets.
So Syrian-Turkish rapprochement stood as of this summer. Then it deteriorated.
Now with Iraqi mediation, the regime agreed to a plan for a joint operation aimed at expelling the U.S.-backed Kurds in eastern Syria. That plan remained in place until August but fell apart thereafter due to disagreements over the specifics. Assad insisted on conducting ground operations with only Turkish air cover, excluding Turkish forces from direct involvement. Erdogan was skeptical about his intentions and designs for the borderlands once this mission was complete.
The final indignity seems to have come two weeks ago.
During his visit to Saudi Arabia for the Arab and Islamic summit on Nov. 11, Assad turned down Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s request to meet with Erdogan, a snub which followed earlier refusals by Assad since 2022 reconciliation talks got underway. Assad also wouldn’t budge on the 22-mile buffer zone demand. The furthest he’d go was 10.
Turkey’s buffer zone now stretches over 30 miles deep — and that’s assuming the rebels are done marching, which they evidently are not. Assad will have little choice but to agree to Erdogan’s new terms and conditions and meet him across the table in a thoroughly abased form. Turkey finds itself with an embarrassment of riches, the custodian of both Idlib and Aleppo.
For its part, the U.S. is sitting this affair out, until and unless HTS and its confederates threaten the SDF on the eastern banks of the Euphrates, at least while American boots are still on the ground there.
In its first and only statement, the Biden National Security Council emphasized its mild pleasure at seeing Assad humiliated thanks to his overreliance on wobbly Russian and Iranian guarantors, but wanted nothing to do with HTS, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. Biden’s counterterrorism-only approach to Syria, a legacy of the Barack Obama administration, means that U.S. policy is designed around ensuring the Islamic State doesn’t return and, now, that Iran’s “ring of fire” in the Levant is permanently doused to protect Israel. Amos Hochstein, the departing U.S. special envoy to the region, is reportedly discussing sanctions relief for Assad with the Emiratis in exchange for the regime’s severance of all ties with Tehran. (Nice work if you can get it, especially since Quds Force militias are the only ground force capable of mounting an effort to recapture lost territory.)
Conspicuously, the NSC made no mention of Turkey, and yet the conclusion was unmistakable: The sultan, despised by most actors involved in Syria, holds all the cards now.
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