Seemingly out of the blue, Syrian rebels made a swift comeback campaign against the Assad regime in the last week of November. After years as a “frozen conflict,” in a few short weeks more has changed on the ground in a matter of days than at any point in the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011. Here, Sam Heller and Aron Lund, Century International’s resident Syria watchers, share what they know about Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (the armed opposition group leading the assault against the regime); the stakes of the conflict’s various international sponsors; and how the government of Bashar al-Assad is trying to respond.
Century International: Rebels took Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, on November 30. They’ve continued to move deeper into regime territory, taking Hama on December 5. What’s the significance of taking Hama, as compared to Aleppo?
Aron Lund: Aleppo is a bigger city than Hama—something like six or seven times more populous—and it was a huge surprise that the rebels captured it so quickly. I would never have imagined that happening, and everyone I talk to says the same thing. It was earth shattering.
In other words, this all starts with Aleppo, and obviously that’s the bigger of these two events. But Hama falling, too, amplifies the power of the rebel victory in Aleppo even more.
In Hama, the regime had at least some limited time to adapt to the situation, even if it wasn’t a lot. They were able to gather forces and throw up a quick defensive line. In Hama, they actually fought back. But even then, the rebels chewed through them in just a few days, and then the army just withdrew from the city instead of trying to trap them in urban combat.
So that’s a major thing, too. It shows that the insurgents capturing Aleppo wasn’t a one-off due to some confluence of local factors or bad luck for the regime. The regime is in real trouble and the rebels now have the upper hand.
Homs: The Turning Point
CI: What happens next?
Aron: If the rebels still have it in them, they’ll be heading to Homs next. It’s right down the M5 highway, something like forty kilometers south of Hama. The Syrian army and its militia auxiliaries will try to set up defensive lines in that space, now that they’ve retreated from Hama. But they didn’t succeed the first time they tried this, north of Hama, and it’s not clear they’ll succeed now.
Homs should be tougher to take than Hama, however. It’s a bigger city and you have a much bigger and more well-mobilized pro-Assad community there. The population is mixed and many surely hate Assad, but things are different in Alawite neighborhoods as well as in Alawite villages around the city (Assad is Alawite and his co-religionists form the backbone of the security forces), and in some of the Christian areas. Those places have supplied a lot of manpower to local militias and to the army over the years. Homs is also closer to Damascus and the coast, which might help bring in reinforcements. In some ways it’s just so crucial to the regime that you can expect Assad’s government to fight as hard as it ever will.
In addition, Tahrir al-Sham and its allies have now seized quite a lot of ground and two big cities. Just speculating here, but at some point they may start to be overstretched or outrun their supply tail. We’ll see if such problems start manifesting. So far they have not.
Even if Homs is objectively a harder target, however, that’s not necessarily going to determine the way that a battle over the city would play out. The rebels now have momentum—a lot of momentum. After taking both Aleppo and Hama, they should find it easy to mobilize anti-Assad supporters along the way. Conversely, and perhaps more importantly, the conscript soldiers and militiamen in Assad’s forces are bound to start asking themselves why they’re out there dying for a regime that seems to be crumbling anyway. We may start seeing defections and side-switching, or maybe the regime just won’t be able to mobilize reserves the way it used to.
If the government were also to lose Homs, then we’re looking at something more resembling a death spiral.
For Assad and his supporters, losing Aleppo was catastrophic, and losing Hama made things significantly worse. But if the government were also to lose Homs, then that’s something else. In that case, I think we’re looking at something more resembling a death spiral. I’m not saying the government would implode or that Assad would pack up and leave, but it would transform the way the regime functions and the way this conflict is structured.
Homs is not merely a very big city and a stronghold for some pro-Assad factions. It’s also a logistics node and an industrial center. There’s a refinery, there are pipelines intersecting right there—things like that. Homs governorate, which is Syria’s largest by area, is also a point of access to Lebanon, which I think would feel the impact of its northern border falling under jihadist control pretty quickly.
Most importantly, Homs is where you have the road connecting southern Syria, including Damascus and all of its state and military infrastructure, with the coast, where Assad’s family hails from and where he has his most loyal supporters. The coast is also where Russia’s two military bases are located. If you sever these two areas from each other, you’re basically cutting the regime in half.
In other words, should the government lose Homs, I suspect that regime influence and the functioning of Syrian state institutions would start to decay at an accelerated pace. And let’s not forget that it would be happening at a moment when the rebels are on their way south, preparing to attack the core of the regime. Because once you clear Homs, the next stop is Damascus.
Fears of Sectarian Killing
Sam Heller: Something worth bearing in mind, though: I think Syrian government partisans understand what losing somewhere like Homs would really mean, and will fight accordingly. Marginal conscript soldiers can plausibly desert or defect and escape to safety. But for some of Damascus’s most loyal cadres and sectarian constituencies, the stakes of this battle can be fairly considered existential.
The opposition armed factions now pushing south from Idlib have not made substantial territorial gains since 2015, since Russia’s military intervention in support of the Syrian government. When these groups last overran Alawite towns in 2015 and 2016, though, they reportedly massacred and abducted residents. That includes these armed groups’ capture of the Alawite town of Ishtabraq in April 2015, when they killed hundreds of people and took dozens of women and children captive. In the past week, Tahrir al-Sham leadership has directed messages to Syrian minorities typically identified with the government, telling them the group has changed and that these communities have nothing to fear. Yet I would understand if residents of the Alawite al-Zahra neighborhood in Homs, or of Christian loyalist redoubt al-Suqeilabiyah in Hama, don’t view those assurances as credible.
A Turkish Miscalculation?
CI: Outside powers have been instrumental throughout the Syrian war, on all sides. Assad stayed in power and reclaimed most of Syria’s territory almost entirely thanks to outside support from Iran, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and fighters from Iraq and farther afield. This new round of fighting seems largely a result of Turkish support, or at least, the rebuilding of the opposition that occurred in the opposition-held parts of Syria that survive under Turkey’s protection. What is Turkey’s role?
Aron: The extent of Turkey’s involvement with last week’s offensive against Aleppo is one of the great mysteries in all of this. It’s important, because it matters analytically which hypothesis you pick.
To me, it’s clear that Turkey must have been involved at some level. You wouldn’t see Turkish-backed groups charge out of a Turkish-protected area without some level of buy-in from Ankara. Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan has claimed that Turkey wasn’t involved at all. I don’t take that seriously. It’s perfectly plausible that Ankara wasn’t the driving force behind Tahrir al-Sham’s offensive, but of course it was involved.
But Turkey being involved can mean many things. I don’t think, for a minute, that Turkey was planning for, or even hoping for, something on this scale. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been pretty cautious over the past few years. Sometimes he’d be saber-rattling on the border and sometimes he’d be sounding very aggressive, but he’s also been mindful of Russian redlines, even as he’s been testing them from time to time. He has been fine with using military pressure of various kinds, but it’s been in pursuit of deals and talks on Turkey’s terms, not to blow up the whole situation.
Of course, he has been frustrated lately. The normalization talks that Ankara initiated with Damascus a while ago, at Russia’s urging, have stalled. Moreover, Moscow has refused to budge when Turkey asked for Russian troops to step aside and let Ankara-backed rebels purge Kurdish groups from the Aleppo area.
So, my own hypothesis is this: I think Turkey probably wanted to let Tahrir al-Sham hit Assad in Aleppo, and hit him hard. And Tahrir al-Sham obviously wouldn’t mind capturing Aleppo, or for that matter, Damascus. But from Turkey’s point of view, the plan was most probably to put pressure on the Syrian regime in order to soften up its negotiating position, while creating enough of a crisis that the Russians would realize that they couldn’t just keep underwriting Assad’s intransigence.
And then all of this happened instead.
Crashing through years-old defensive lines, seizing all of Aleppo in a couple of days, and then just rushing on to Hama and totally destabilizing the regime—that’s a whole different thing. I don’t think that was Turkey’s plan. I don’t think even Tahrir al-Sham seriously thought that could be an outcome. But it happened anyway, and now Tahrir al-Sham is massively empowered and will go for the jugular.
In some ways, of course, what has happened is great for Turkey. It suddenly looks really powerful and competent, and its clients have performed awesomely. While Tahrir al-Sham fights its way through Assad’s defenses, other Turkish-backed rebels are crushing the Kurdish enclaves one by one, and Russia can’t do anything about it. That all looks great for Ankara. Everyone now turns to Erdogan for emergency assistance, and you bet he will be asking for quid pro quos.
Erdogan and Fidan try to play it cool, but there’s no reason to think that they have a good handle on the situation. No one does. The Turks are just riding the tiger now, trying to figure out what to do next.
Still, though, this cannot have been the plan. Erdogan and Fidan try to play it cool, but I don’t think they have a good handle on the situation. No one does. The Turks are just riding the tiger now, trying to figure out what to do next. This is not a controllable situation for anyone, including Turkey, and there is a lot at stake. You’ll have major fighting, high-powered diplomatic arm-twisting, humanitarian crises, and refugees fleeing in every direction. Turkey, which was already juggling a lot of commitments and crises, will now need to spend a very large portion of its energy on managing Syria.
Self-Financed Rebels
Sam: In addition to considering whether Turkey had a hand in planning last week’s Aleppo offensive, it also seems worth clarifying outside material support Tahrir al-Sham has received, whether from Turkey or other foreign sponsors.
Tahrir al-Sham has attempted to remake its image and shed the stigma of its historical links with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq. The group does seem to be authentically post-al-Qaeda, even if it is still linked to transnational militant networks through its veteran membership and foreign fighter cadres. However, the United States and the UN Security Council still designate it a terror organization, which is a persistent obstacle to efforts to mainstream the group politically, and to permit support to the group and areas under its control.
I am not aware of direct Turkish support for Tahrir al-Sham. But Turkey does sponsor Syrian opposition factions that function as auxiliaries to Tahrir al-Sham. In that sense, Tahrir al-Sham has likely derived some indirect benefit from Turkey’s support for these adjacent factions, much as the organization benefited from earlier U.S.-led support for Syrian opposition factions.
I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if Tahrir al-Sham’s present offensive was mostly self-financed. Tahrir al-Sham (including as its previous incarnation, the Nusra Front) has been involved in governance and service provision in Syria’s opposition-controlled northwest for years. Yet its current proto-state administration in Idlib, the Syrian Salvation Government, is not just an Islamist political project and attempt to win popular support and legitimacy. It is also a moneymaking operation that, thanks to various taxes and tariffs on public services and local business, has generated revenues that Tahrir al-Sham evidently plowed back into the military capabilities it unleashed in Aleppo last week.
Tahrir al-Sham has been able to accrue those revenues because Turkey has provided safe haven to the group in Idlib and taken a tolerant attitude toward trade with the Idlib enclave—trade that Tahrir al-Sham has been able to control and tax. Just as importantly, Turkey’s defense of Idlib has provided Tahrir al-Sham with space to train and organize. Some of Tahrir al-Sham’s adversaries may have hoped that the Islamist group’s experiments in governance and business would preoccupy the group and, with time, make its leaders dissolute and complacent; evidently not. Even if Turkey did not invest directly in Tahrir al-Sham, then, it clearly helped foster the armed force that is now advancing across western Syria.
Assad’s Countermoves
CI: So can Assad still mount a comeback, or is it too late?
Sam: It likely depends on whether the Syrian government’s closest allies, Russia and Iran, come to its rescue.
In addition to the sunk cost of Russia and Iran’s past support for the Syrian government, both countries have real present interests in Assad’s survival. For Russia, its presence in Syria—including at Hmeimim Airbase and its Tartous naval facility—is key to its power projection abroad, including in Africa. And for Iran, Syria is an essential conduit for its support to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which, in turn, is critical to Iran’s forward defense against Israel. If Iran hopes to rehabilitate Hezbollah following the militant group’s war with Israel this year, it will need a cooperative Syrian partner—it will need Assad.
Both Russia and Iran have so far taken a rhetorical hard line in support of the Syrian government and its fight against “terrorist” aggression. The question, though, is how much both countries will commit to assisting their Syrian ally militarily, and whether that assistance will arrive in time.
Russia, Iran and Turkey—the three guarantors of the Astana process that licensed Turkey’s Idlib “de-escalation” zone—will reportedly meet in Qatar this weekend, on the margins of the Doha Forum. That meeting may decide if their trilateral understanding still obtains, and how Russia and Iran will now intervene in defense of the Syrian government.
Aid as Leverage for the Regime
CI: And does Assad have any other tricks up his sleeve?
Aron: He does have a few.
Since Assad controls Syria’s internationally recognized government, he has the power to regulate UN activities in the country. The UN is an organization of states, and it cannot operate in a member state without that country’s government offering approval and facilitation.
What that means is that Assad can control the UN-administered flow of humanitarian aid from southern Turkey into Idlib and other parts of northern Syria, including Aleppo. There’s now no other way for aid to access those areas, in which millions of people live. To the south, there’s a live front line, and after that you have even more solidly Assad-controlled territory. So the aid needs to come from Turkey, but for the UN to cross that border, Assad must approve.
In the past, you had a Security Council-mandated system that allowed the UN to bring in aid without Damascus’s consent. Russia vetoed that a while ago, however, and since then, it’s all up to Assad’s goodwill. In other words, the Syrian president can just call his foreign minister any time and tell him to block all UN aid to all rebel-held areas. When he does, UN operations end overnight. Turkey and Western donors would then try to bring in aid by other means, of course. They can compensate for some of the shortfall, but it’s not clear they could pick up the whole tab—in fact, it seems very unlikely. UN organs like the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs play a major role in coordinating and organizing the aid, in ways not easily replicated by nongovernmental organizations or donor governments. In addition, Tahrir al-Sham’s terrorist designation creates a lot of political and legal hazards for aid providers, and many have relied on the UN to help navigate that maze.
Assad has not pulled the plug on aid yet, but if things keep going downhill I bet it’s coming. By ending UN aid to northern Syria, he could massively intensify the humanitarian crisis in those areas and force UN officials and donor nations to come to him for negotiations over piecemeal concessions. Turkey, in particular, is sensitive to this type of blackmail. Once people start starving in northern Syria, where do you think they’ll be fleeing? To Turkey, of course. Turkey already hosts some 3.5 million Syrian refugees, and the population in general is not happy about it. It’s a very sensitive issue for Erdogan.
As long as Assad’s government remains viable, with him still alive, he could theoretically retain this power over UN operations. Shifting legal sovereignty over to another entity is not easy and requires a UN General Assembly vote. In this case, there’s no realistic alternative. To be sure, Tahrir al-Sham does have its own governing apparatus, known as the Salvation Government, which it is now rolling out across northern Syria. But the Salvation Government is unlikely to win broad recognition, given that Tahrir al-Sham is a UN-designated terrorist group. So even if the regime were to lose much of the territory it still has left, you could end up with a situation in which Assad’s rump government retains the power to hold UN aid operations hostage. In an extreme scenario, Assad could be leveraging Syria’s humanitarian crisis to his advantage even as he’s holed up in a bunker in Qardaha in Latakia governorate and Tahrir al-Sham commander Abu Mohammed al-Golani sits on the throne in Damascus.
Chemical Weapons Risk
CI: In a war full of horrific human harm, the use of chemical weapons has stood out as an especially extreme atrocity. President Obama famously pronounced the use of chemical weapons a “redline” in 2012, only to walk it back—at least in the eyes of his critics. Aron, you tracked some of the best known instances of chemical weapons use earlier in the war, and the halting international efforts to uphold the fraying taboo against chemical weapons use. Do you expect chemical weapons to come back into use at this precarious moment for the regime?
Aron: The chemical weapons question is a big one and it’s not getting enough attention. Hopefully we’ll never have to see another chemical attack, but it seems the regime still controls some form of stockpile, even if it must be fairly limited after the 2013–14 disarmament operation. Inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have concluded that the regime used chlorine gas and, in some cases, sarin, a nerve agent, against rebel targets even after 2014.
So Assad probably has some chemical warfare capability to play with, and if he’s really desperate—and I think by now he must be?—he may decide to press that button.
Dousing rebel frontlines or villages with chlorine or sarin might not defeat the insurgency, but the importance of these weapons is not their military potential. It’s the politics of it: a credible report about chemical weapons use could instantly trigger an international crisis.
The United States is on the record as having committed itself to policing chemical warfare in Syria. The U.S. military has previously bombed Assad’s government twice, almost thrice, in response to gas attacks. A chemical attack now could draw the United States right back into the fray by forcing Biden’s administration to decide whether and how to make good on that redline.
Washington would then be faced with some urgent but really awkward and controversial decisions. Do you just let Assad violate international law, murder civilians, and challenge your redline, making you look complicit and weak? Or do you fire the missiles even though you know that the U.S. military will then be portrayed as the Jihadi Air Force, helping terrorist-designated jihadists capture some of the world’s oldest Christian areas? All nuances aside, that’s how it would play out politically.
Compounding the problem, this would all happen in a situation where Biden is a lame duck president and we’re all anxiously waiting for the second coming of Donald Trump.
Moreover, a chemical attack could also set up a situation where Russia finds new opportunities to interact with the United States, looking for leverage and ways to engage a rival. Russia’s Vladimir Putin may well think he could replicate something like the 2013 redline crisis, in which Obama found himself facing two bad choices and ended up picking a third one offered by Russia. My point is, these things are unpredictable—but Russia is well placed to interfere and would be much less likely to stay on the sidelines this time, unlike when Trump struck Syria in 2017 and 2018.
For Assad, playing the chemical weapons card would be a high-risk undertaking, since his armed forces would most likely get hit by a volley of Tomahawk cruise missiles in response, at a time when the regime is already reeling from the jihadist onslaught. But if Assad is now facing the potential loss of Homs, on top of Aleppo and Hama, then how much riskier could things get? In the end, Assad may decide that it’s worth being bombed if a gas attack can jump-start international diplomacy and force foreign powers to take a stance on a conflict from which they have tried to remain aloof.
IMAGE CAPTION: A graduating recruit plants the Syrian opposition flag during battle simulation training on August 8, 2024 in Afrin, Syria. Two hundred recruits of the Samarkand Brigade, a part of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (an opposition force) graduated after more than a month of intensive training. Source: Ghaith Alsayed/Getty Images
Tags: middle east, syrian rebels, Syrian uprisings
Syria’s Civil War Has Roared Back. How Far Can the Rebels Go?
Seemingly out of the blue, Syrian rebels made a swift comeback campaign against the Assad regime in the last week of November. After years as a “frozen conflict,” in a few short weeks more has changed on the ground in a matter of days than at any point in the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011. Here, Sam Heller and Aron Lund, Century International’s resident Syria watchers, share what they know about Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (the armed opposition group leading the assault against the regime); the stakes of the conflict’s various international sponsors; and how the government of Bashar al-Assad is trying to respond.
Century International: Rebels took Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, on November 30. They’ve continued to move deeper into regime territory, taking Hama on December 5. What’s the significance of taking Hama, as compared to Aleppo?
Aron Lund: Aleppo is a bigger city than Hama—something like six or seven times more populous—and it was a huge surprise that the rebels captured it so quickly. I would never have imagined that happening, and everyone I talk to says the same thing. It was earth shattering.
In other words, this all starts with Aleppo, and obviously that’s the bigger of these two events. But Hama falling, too, amplifies the power of the rebel victory in Aleppo even more.
In Hama, the regime had at least some limited time to adapt to the situation, even if it wasn’t a lot. They were able to gather forces and throw up a quick defensive line. In Hama, they actually fought back. But even then, the rebels chewed through them in just a few days, and then the army just withdrew from the city instead of trying to trap them in urban combat.
So that’s a major thing, too. It shows that the insurgents capturing Aleppo wasn’t a one-off due to some confluence of local factors or bad luck for the regime. The regime is in real trouble and the rebels now have the upper hand.
Homs: The Turning Point
CI: What happens next?
Aron: If the rebels still have it in them, they’ll be heading to Homs next. It’s right down the M5 highway, something like forty kilometers south of Hama. The Syrian army and its militia auxiliaries will try to set up defensive lines in that space, now that they’ve retreated from Hama. But they didn’t succeed the first time they tried this, north of Hama, and it’s not clear they’ll succeed now.
Homs should be tougher to take than Hama, however. It’s a bigger city and you have a much bigger and more well-mobilized pro-Assad community there. The population is mixed and many surely hate Assad, but things are different in Alawite neighborhoods as well as in Alawite villages around the city (Assad is Alawite and his co-religionists form the backbone of the security forces), and in some of the Christian areas. Those places have supplied a lot of manpower to local militias and to the army over the years. Homs is also closer to Damascus and the coast, which might help bring in reinforcements. In some ways it’s just so crucial to the regime that you can expect Assad’s government to fight as hard as it ever will.
In addition, Tahrir al-Sham and its allies have now seized quite a lot of ground and two big cities. Just speculating here, but at some point they may start to be overstretched or outrun their supply tail. We’ll see if such problems start manifesting. So far they have not.
Even if Homs is objectively a harder target, however, that’s not necessarily going to determine the way that a battle over the city would play out. The rebels now have momentum—a lot of momentum. After taking both Aleppo and Hama, they should find it easy to mobilize anti-Assad supporters along the way. Conversely, and perhaps more importantly, the conscript soldiers and militiamen in Assad’s forces are bound to start asking themselves why they’re out there dying for a regime that seems to be crumbling anyway. We may start seeing defections and side-switching, or maybe the regime just won’t be able to mobilize reserves the way it used to.
For Assad and his supporters, losing Aleppo was catastrophic, and losing Hama made things significantly worse. But if the government were also to lose Homs, then that’s something else. In that case, I think we’re looking at something more resembling a death spiral. I’m not saying the government would implode or that Assad would pack up and leave, but it would transform the way the regime functions and the way this conflict is structured.
Homs is not merely a very big city and a stronghold for some pro-Assad factions. It’s also a logistics node and an industrial center. There’s a refinery, there are pipelines intersecting right there—things like that. Homs governorate, which is Syria’s largest by area, is also a point of access to Lebanon, which I think would feel the impact of its northern border falling under jihadist control pretty quickly.
Most importantly, Homs is where you have the road connecting southern Syria, including Damascus and all of its state and military infrastructure, with the coast, where Assad’s family hails from and where he has his most loyal supporters. The coast is also where Russia’s two military bases are located. If you sever these two areas from each other, you’re basically cutting the regime in half.
In other words, should the government lose Homs, I suspect that regime influence and the functioning of Syrian state institutions would start to decay at an accelerated pace. And let’s not forget that it would be happening at a moment when the rebels are on their way south, preparing to attack the core of the regime. Because once you clear Homs, the next stop is Damascus.
Fears of Sectarian Killing
Sam Heller: Something worth bearing in mind, though: I think Syrian government partisans understand what losing somewhere like Homs would really mean, and will fight accordingly. Marginal conscript soldiers can plausibly desert or defect and escape to safety. But for some of Damascus’s most loyal cadres and sectarian constituencies, the stakes of this battle can be fairly considered existential.
The opposition armed factions now pushing south from Idlib have not made substantial territorial gains since 2015, since Russia’s military intervention in support of the Syrian government. When these groups last overran Alawite towns in 2015 and 2016, though, they reportedly massacred and abducted residents. That includes these armed groups’ capture of the Alawite town of Ishtabraq in April 2015, when they killed hundreds of people and took dozens of women and children captive. In the past week, Tahrir al-Sham leadership has directed messages to Syrian minorities typically identified with the government, telling them the group has changed and that these communities have nothing to fear. Yet I would understand if residents of the Alawite al-Zahra neighborhood in Homs, or of Christian loyalist redoubt al-Suqeilabiyah in Hama, don’t view those assurances as credible.
A Turkish Miscalculation?
CI: Outside powers have been instrumental throughout the Syrian war, on all sides. Assad stayed in power and reclaimed most of Syria’s territory almost entirely thanks to outside support from Iran, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and fighters from Iraq and farther afield. This new round of fighting seems largely a result of Turkish support, or at least, the rebuilding of the opposition that occurred in the opposition-held parts of Syria that survive under Turkey’s protection. What is Turkey’s role?
Aron: The extent of Turkey’s involvement with last week’s offensive against Aleppo is one of the great mysteries in all of this. It’s important, because it matters analytically which hypothesis you pick.
To me, it’s clear that Turkey must have been involved at some level. You wouldn’t see Turkish-backed groups charge out of a Turkish-protected area without some level of buy-in from Ankara. Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan has claimed that Turkey wasn’t involved at all. I don’t take that seriously. It’s perfectly plausible that Ankara wasn’t the driving force behind Tahrir al-Sham’s offensive, but of course it was involved.
But Turkey being involved can mean many things. I don’t think, for a minute, that Turkey was planning for, or even hoping for, something on this scale. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been pretty cautious over the past few years. Sometimes he’d be saber-rattling on the border and sometimes he’d be sounding very aggressive, but he’s also been mindful of Russian redlines, even as he’s been testing them from time to time. He has been fine with using military pressure of various kinds, but it’s been in pursuit of deals and talks on Turkey’s terms, not to blow up the whole situation.
Of course, he has been frustrated lately. The normalization talks that Ankara initiated with Damascus a while ago, at Russia’s urging, have stalled. Moreover, Moscow has refused to budge when Turkey asked for Russian troops to step aside and let Ankara-backed rebels purge Kurdish groups from the Aleppo area.
So, my own hypothesis is this: I think Turkey probably wanted to let Tahrir al-Sham hit Assad in Aleppo, and hit him hard. And Tahrir al-Sham obviously wouldn’t mind capturing Aleppo, or for that matter, Damascus. But from Turkey’s point of view, the plan was most probably to put pressure on the Syrian regime in order to soften up its negotiating position, while creating enough of a crisis that the Russians would realize that they couldn’t just keep underwriting Assad’s intransigence.
And then all of this happened instead.
Crashing through years-old defensive lines, seizing all of Aleppo in a couple of days, and then just rushing on to Hama and totally destabilizing the regime—that’s a whole different thing. I don’t think that was Turkey’s plan. I don’t think even Tahrir al-Sham seriously thought that could be an outcome. But it happened anyway, and now Tahrir al-Sham is massively empowered and will go for the jugular.
In some ways, of course, what has happened is great for Turkey. It suddenly looks really powerful and competent, and its clients have performed awesomely. While Tahrir al-Sham fights its way through Assad’s defenses, other Turkish-backed rebels are crushing the Kurdish enclaves one by one, and Russia can’t do anything about it. That all looks great for Ankara. Everyone now turns to Erdogan for emergency assistance, and you bet he will be asking for quid pro quos.
Still, though, this cannot have been the plan. Erdogan and Fidan try to play it cool, but I don’t think they have a good handle on the situation. No one does. The Turks are just riding the tiger now, trying to figure out what to do next. This is not a controllable situation for anyone, including Turkey, and there is a lot at stake. You’ll have major fighting, high-powered diplomatic arm-twisting, humanitarian crises, and refugees fleeing in every direction. Turkey, which was already juggling a lot of commitments and crises, will now need to spend a very large portion of its energy on managing Syria.
Self-Financed Rebels
Sam: In addition to considering whether Turkey had a hand in planning last week’s Aleppo offensive, it also seems worth clarifying outside material support Tahrir al-Sham has received, whether from Turkey or other foreign sponsors.
Tahrir al-Sham has attempted to remake its image and shed the stigma of its historical links with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq. The group does seem to be authentically post-al-Qaeda, even if it is still linked to transnational militant networks through its veteran membership and foreign fighter cadres. However, the United States and the UN Security Council still designate it a terror organization, which is a persistent obstacle to efforts to mainstream the group politically, and to permit support to the group and areas under its control.
I am not aware of direct Turkish support for Tahrir al-Sham. But Turkey does sponsor Syrian opposition factions that function as auxiliaries to Tahrir al-Sham. In that sense, Tahrir al-Sham has likely derived some indirect benefit from Turkey’s support for these adjacent factions, much as the organization benefited from earlier U.S.-led support for Syrian opposition factions.
I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if Tahrir al-Sham’s present offensive was mostly self-financed. Tahrir al-Sham (including as its previous incarnation, the Nusra Front) has been involved in governance and service provision in Syria’s opposition-controlled northwest for years. Yet its current proto-state administration in Idlib, the Syrian Salvation Government, is not just an Islamist political project and attempt to win popular support and legitimacy. It is also a moneymaking operation that, thanks to various taxes and tariffs on public services and local business, has generated revenues that Tahrir al-Sham evidently plowed back into the military capabilities it unleashed in Aleppo last week.
Tahrir al-Sham has been able to accrue those revenues because Turkey has provided safe haven to the group in Idlib and taken a tolerant attitude toward trade with the Idlib enclave—trade that Tahrir al-Sham has been able to control and tax. Just as importantly, Turkey’s defense of Idlib has provided Tahrir al-Sham with space to train and organize. Some of Tahrir al-Sham’s adversaries may have hoped that the Islamist group’s experiments in governance and business would preoccupy the group and, with time, make its leaders dissolute and complacent; evidently not. Even if Turkey did not invest directly in Tahrir al-Sham, then, it clearly helped foster the armed force that is now advancing across western Syria.
Assad’s Countermoves
CI: So can Assad still mount a comeback, or is it too late?
Sam: It likely depends on whether the Syrian government’s closest allies, Russia and Iran, come to its rescue.
In addition to the sunk cost of Russia and Iran’s past support for the Syrian government, both countries have real present interests in Assad’s survival. For Russia, its presence in Syria—including at Hmeimim Airbase and its Tartous naval facility—is key to its power projection abroad, including in Africa. And for Iran, Syria is an essential conduit for its support to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which, in turn, is critical to Iran’s forward defense against Israel. If Iran hopes to rehabilitate Hezbollah following the militant group’s war with Israel this year, it will need a cooperative Syrian partner—it will need Assad.
Both Russia and Iran have so far taken a rhetorical hard line in support of the Syrian government and its fight against “terrorist” aggression. The question, though, is how much both countries will commit to assisting their Syrian ally militarily, and whether that assistance will arrive in time.
Russia, Iran and Turkey—the three guarantors of the Astana process that licensed Turkey’s Idlib “de-escalation” zone—will reportedly meet in Qatar this weekend, on the margins of the Doha Forum. That meeting may decide if their trilateral understanding still obtains, and how Russia and Iran will now intervene in defense of the Syrian government.
Aid as Leverage for the Regime
CI: And does Assad have any other tricks up his sleeve?
Aron: He does have a few.
Since Assad controls Syria’s internationally recognized government, he has the power to regulate UN activities in the country. The UN is an organization of states, and it cannot operate in a member state without that country’s government offering approval and facilitation.
What that means is that Assad can control the UN-administered flow of humanitarian aid from southern Turkey into Idlib and other parts of northern Syria, including Aleppo. There’s now no other way for aid to access those areas, in which millions of people live. To the south, there’s a live front line, and after that you have even more solidly Assad-controlled territory. So the aid needs to come from Turkey, but for the UN to cross that border, Assad must approve.
In the past, you had a Security Council-mandated system that allowed the UN to bring in aid without Damascus’s consent. Russia vetoed that a while ago, however, and since then, it’s all up to Assad’s goodwill. In other words, the Syrian president can just call his foreign minister any time and tell him to block all UN aid to all rebel-held areas. When he does, UN operations end overnight. Turkey and Western donors would then try to bring in aid by other means, of course. They can compensate for some of the shortfall, but it’s not clear they could pick up the whole tab—in fact, it seems very unlikely. UN organs like the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs play a major role in coordinating and organizing the aid, in ways not easily replicated by nongovernmental organizations or donor governments. In addition, Tahrir al-Sham’s terrorist designation creates a lot of political and legal hazards for aid providers, and many have relied on the UN to help navigate that maze.
Assad has not pulled the plug on aid yet, but if things keep going downhill I bet it’s coming. By ending UN aid to northern Syria, he could massively intensify the humanitarian crisis in those areas and force UN officials and donor nations to come to him for negotiations over piecemeal concessions. Turkey, in particular, is sensitive to this type of blackmail. Once people start starving in northern Syria, where do you think they’ll be fleeing? To Turkey, of course. Turkey already hosts some 3.5 million Syrian refugees, and the population in general is not happy about it. It’s a very sensitive issue for Erdogan.
As long as Assad’s government remains viable, with him still alive, he could theoretically retain this power over UN operations. Shifting legal sovereignty over to another entity is not easy and requires a UN General Assembly vote. In this case, there’s no realistic alternative. To be sure, Tahrir al-Sham does have its own governing apparatus, known as the Salvation Government, which it is now rolling out across northern Syria. But the Salvation Government is unlikely to win broad recognition, given that Tahrir al-Sham is a UN-designated terrorist group. So even if the regime were to lose much of the territory it still has left, you could end up with a situation in which Assad’s rump government retains the power to hold UN aid operations hostage. In an extreme scenario, Assad could be leveraging Syria’s humanitarian crisis to his advantage even as he’s holed up in a bunker in Qardaha in Latakia governorate and Tahrir al-Sham commander Abu Mohammed al-Golani sits on the throne in Damascus.
Chemical Weapons Risk
CI: In a war full of horrific human harm, the use of chemical weapons has stood out as an especially extreme atrocity. President Obama famously pronounced the use of chemical weapons a “redline” in 2012, only to walk it back—at least in the eyes of his critics. Aron, you tracked some of the best known instances of chemical weapons use earlier in the war, and the halting international efforts to uphold the fraying taboo against chemical weapons use. Do you expect chemical weapons to come back into use at this precarious moment for the regime?
Aron: The chemical weapons question is a big one and it’s not getting enough attention. Hopefully we’ll never have to see another chemical attack, but it seems the regime still controls some form of stockpile, even if it must be fairly limited after the 2013–14 disarmament operation. Inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have concluded that the regime used chlorine gas and, in some cases, sarin, a nerve agent, against rebel targets even after 2014.
So Assad probably has some chemical warfare capability to play with, and if he’s really desperate—and I think by now he must be?—he may decide to press that button.
Dousing rebel frontlines or villages with chlorine or sarin might not defeat the insurgency, but the importance of these weapons is not their military potential. It’s the politics of it: a credible report about chemical weapons use could instantly trigger an international crisis.
The United States is on the record as having committed itself to policing chemical warfare in Syria. The U.S. military has previously bombed Assad’s government twice, almost thrice, in response to gas attacks. A chemical attack now could draw the United States right back into the fray by forcing Biden’s administration to decide whether and how to make good on that redline.
Washington would then be faced with some urgent but really awkward and controversial decisions. Do you just let Assad violate international law, murder civilians, and challenge your redline, making you look complicit and weak? Or do you fire the missiles even though you know that the U.S. military will then be portrayed as the Jihadi Air Force, helping terrorist-designated jihadists capture some of the world’s oldest Christian areas? All nuances aside, that’s how it would play out politically.
Compounding the problem, this would all happen in a situation where Biden is a lame duck president and we’re all anxiously waiting for the second coming of Donald Trump.
Moreover, a chemical attack could also set up a situation where Russia finds new opportunities to interact with the United States, looking for leverage and ways to engage a rival. Russia’s Vladimir Putin may well think he could replicate something like the 2013 redline crisis, in which Obama found himself facing two bad choices and ended up picking a third one offered by Russia. My point is, these things are unpredictable—but Russia is well placed to interfere and would be much less likely to stay on the sidelines this time, unlike when Trump struck Syria in 2017 and 2018.
For Assad, playing the chemical weapons card would be a high-risk undertaking, since his armed forces would most likely get hit by a volley of Tomahawk cruise missiles in response, at a time when the regime is already reeling from the jihadist onslaught. But if Assad is now facing the potential loss of Homs, on top of Aleppo and Hama, then how much riskier could things get? In the end, Assad may decide that it’s worth being bombed if a gas attack can jump-start international diplomacy and force foreign powers to take a stance on a conflict from which they have tried to remain aloof.
IMAGE CAPTION: A graduating recruit plants the Syrian opposition flag during battle simulation training on August 8, 2024 in Afrin, Syria. Two hundred recruits of the Samarkand Brigade, a part of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (an opposition force) graduated after more than a month of intensive training. Source: Ghaith Alsayed/Getty Images
Tags: middle east, syrian rebels, Syrian uprisings