From New Lines Magazine.
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.
Hassan Hassan is Founder and Editor in Chief of New Lines magazine.
Michael Weiss is contributing editor at New Lines magazine.