The First Day of Syrian Insurgencies in Aleppo: Israeli, Russian and Turkish Forces in a Regime that Supports Hezbollah

The war monitor and fighters said that insurgenciesbroke into Syria’s largest city Friday, and clashed with government forces for the first time in two years.

Aleppo has not been attacked by opposition forces since they were ousted from eastern neighborhoods in 2016 following a grueling military campaign in which Syrian government forces were backed by Russia, Iran and its allied groups.

The attack injected new violence into a region that was already experiencing dual wars in Gaza and Lebanon involving Israel.

But this time, there was no sign of a significant pushback from government forces or their allies. Instead, reports emerged of government forces melting away in the face of advances, and insurgents posted messages on social media calling on troops to surrender.

Ford says that Assad’s military forces were very brittle and could cause a lot of casualties. The regime is weak, and its supporters are weak as well, and that is not good for the image of the country.

This week’s gains by opposition groups were among the largest in the last couple of years, and they are the most intense fighting in northwestern Syria since 2020.

The offensive came as Iran-linked groups, primarily Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has backed Syrian government forces since 2015, have been preoccupied with their own battles at home.

A ceasefire in Hezbollah’s two-month war with Israel took effect Wednesday, the day the Syrian opposition factions announced their offensive. Israel has intensified its attacks on targets in Syria over the past 70 days.

According to a senior adviser from the International Crisis Group, the fighters have been ready for an assault for a long time. But no one expected the swift advance of the forces toward Aleppo.

The Russians are distracted by what’s happening in Ukraine and the Iranians are not focused on what’s happening elsewhere. She said the regime is absolutely cornered because Hezbollah’s distracted and bogged down elsewhere. The regime collapsed so quickly that the surprise element came in.

Russian and Iranian groups helped the Syrian government get back in control of the city after it had been under siege for weeks.

Besides backing opposition forces, Turkey has also established a military presence in Syria, sending troops into parts of the northwest. In the eastern part of Syria, the United States has supported Kurdish forces in their battle with the Islamic State.

The Kremlin considers the attack an intrusion on Syria’s sovereignty and supports the rapid establishment of a constitutional order in the region.

“Rebel” attacks in Syria are a conspiracy between the U.S. and the Zionist regime,” the state-run Anadolu Agency reported

The Anadolu Agency reported that drones destroyed a helicopter in an attack on a military air base. The opposition groups also seized heavy weapons and military vehicles belonging to the government forces, the agency said.

The group that tracks human rights in Syria said there were car bombs in the western edge of the city. The war monitor said that the rebels were in control of the town of Saraqeb, which was south of the city at the intersection of the highways linking the city with the coast. Syrian government authorities diverted traffic from that highway Thursday.

Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency reported that the insurgents entered the city center Friday and now control about 70 locations in Aleppo and Idlib provinces.

According to Syria’s state media, projectiles from the rebels killed four people, including two students, at the university.

There is an agreement between the rebels and the Syrians that has de-escalated fighting in the area for the last few years.

The Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi described the attacks in Syria as a conspiracy hatched by the U.S. and the Zionist regime after they lost in Lebanon and Palestine.

Insurgents have posted videos on the internet showing themselves using drones. It was not clear to what extent the drones were used on the battleground.

The World has Done It All: The Case of Syria’s 2013 Arab Spring Uprisings, and the Status of the Interaction Between Turkey and Turkey

Following years of military stalemate, in which a low-intensity conflict had persisted primarily in the country’s northwestern region of Idlib, these developments appear to have upended long-held calculations about Syria’s 13-year civil war, which began during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings.

For years, Assad’s forces had leaned on support from Russia and Iran-backed militias to grind down various rebel factions that had sprung up to oppose his rule. Even though control of much of the country was in the hands of Assad, it wasn’t always easy.

He said that they were far from a solution than they were a few days ago. It’s time for the world to get involved in Syria and find a resolution to the conflict.

“The world has taken its eye off the ball,” says Myles Caggins, a senior fellow at the New Lines Institute think tank and a former spokesperson for the anti-ISIS military coalition that U.S. led in northeast Syria. “Between Russia, Turkey and Iran, they have mostly established a stalemate of instability across Syria, from east to west, north to south, with areas that are overlapping — of different competing interests.”

The U.S. has not commented publicly on developments in the region, despite the long-standing presence of American troops in the country’s northeast, where the U.S. military established bases in the wake of the campaign against ISIS.

The whereabouts of the president were unknown late Saturday, before the news channel said Iran’s foreign minister would visit later in the day.

“The dependence on a weakened Iran and rampant corruption within the Syrian army rank have meant that their ability to hold ground is very limited,” says an associate member of the Middle East and North African program at Chatham House. The regime had become careless, and had taken for granted that it had won the war.

The Turkish government is concerned about the repercussions, but she thinks they’re not as worried as they were a few years ago. I think that has been a key enabler in this offensive.

The International Crisis Group’s senior advisor at peacemaking, who focuses her research and advocacy work on peacemaking, says that Turkey had prevented HTS from launching this kind of attack on government territory. The Turks may have gone through a change of heart recently as a result of the regional changes.