- Syria is Russia’s southern flank and it is fast crumbling.
- How has a Syrian rebel lightning offensive managed to seize Aleppo from Bashar al-Assad’s regime?
- Who are the leaders, the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham?
- Could the civil war be reignited?
Damascus, Dec.3.– In a bizarre twist of fate, it is possible that the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) may be inadvertently coming to the aid of the West – and more importantly, Ukraine – by disrupting Putin’s southern flank.
Exactly eight years ago, in December 2016, Aleppo eventually fell to Assad and the Russians when the Syrian regime rained down chlorine barrel bombs for 17 days.
This led to the surrender of 300,000 civilians, and the rebel fighters disappeared into Idlib province. Many of the civilians were later tortured and murdered by Assad’s brutal regime.
Since I last visited north-west Syria in 2020, things seem to have been relatively quiet there, and certainly since 2022 all eyes have been on Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
But it appears that the various rebel factions, especially the Free Syrian Army and HTS, have been regrouping, rearming, and most importantly training. These rebels we see today in Aleppo are not the ragtag fighters that I saw in Idlib province between 2013 and 2020, but well-equipped outfits who seem to know what they are doing ...
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