On 27 November, the Syrian rebels launched a lighting offensive on President Bashar al-Assad’s forces. By the 29th, they had captured the city of Aleppo. And Hama a week later. On 8 December, Assad fled and Damascus fell, ending the 54-year rule of Assad and his late father Hafez al-Assad.
The Islamist rebels led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham had never had it so good since a civil war erupted in Syria in the year 2011. Until the last week of November, the war in Syria had been mostly dormant for years. The front lines had remained frozen since 2020 but the sudden advance by the rebels has re-ignited fears of renewed sectarian clashes. President Assad and his supporters are followers of an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam called the Alawites. They are in a minority in a Sunni-dominated Syria.
So who is Abu Mohammed al-Golani?
His real name is Ahmed al-Sharaa. He was born in the late 1970s or early 1980s. His grandfather was displaced from the Golan Heights when the Israeli Army entered the area. Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967 and later annexed it in a move that has not been recognised by the international community. In a 2021 interview to U.S. T.V. channel P.B.S., al-Golani said that his nom de guerre was a reference to his family origins in Syria’s Golan Heights.
As the commander of Al-Qaeda’s franchise in the Syrian civil war, al-Golani was a shadowy figure who kept out of the public eye, even when his group became the most powerful faction fighting President Assad. Today, he is Syria’s most recognisable insurgent, having gradually stepped into the limelight since severing ties to Al-Qaeda in 2016, rebranding his group, and emerging as the de facto ruler of rebel-held north-western Syria.
Joshua Landis from the University of Oklahoma in the U.S. says that al-Golani has been smarter than Assad. “He’s retooled, he’s refashioned, made new allies, and come out with his charm offensive towards minorities.” Aron Lund from the Swedish Defence Research Agency has a slightly nuanced taken on al-Golani. He says that it is P.R. but the fact that al-Golani and the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham are engaging in this effort at all, shows they are no longer as rigid as they once were; Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State would have never done that.
Before founding the Al-Nusra Front, al-Golani had fought for Al-Qaeda in Iraq, where he spent five years in a U.S. prison. He returned to Syria once the uprising began. The U.S. designated al-Golani as a terrorist in 2013. As the Islamic State was collapsing, al-Golani cemented the grip of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the north-western Syrian province of Idlib, establishing a civil administration called the Syrian Salvation Government. In 2016, he announced that his group had cut ties with the Al-Qaeda. The following year, Al-Nusra was dissolved and replaced by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. The U.S. and its allies have since designated the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham as a terrorist group. The group has sought to moderate its image in recent years but it faces a challenge convincing Western Governments it has fully renounced hardline jihad.
The rebels led by al-Golani timed their offensive to perfection. They launched their offensive on Aleppo to co-incide with a ceasefire coming into force between Israel and Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon. But is there more to the timing of the offensive? Absolutely. For one, Syria’s main backer Russia is pre-occupied in Ukraine. Two, Iran’s influence in the region has diminished. And three, Hezbollah, which had fought alongside Assad’s men against the rebels, has weakened and its leader Hassan Nasrallah dead. So, the regional power balance has been shaken by more than a year of conflict pitting Israel against Iran and the militant groups it supports.
The Iran-backed Hezbollah, in particular, has suffered major blows during more than two months of war with Israel in Lebanon. Hezbollah, which has agreed to a ceasefire with Israel, helped Assad recover Aleppo in 2016.
U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan tells C.N.N. that it was no surprise that rebels would try to take advantage of a new situation, what with the Syrian Government’s main backers — Iran, Russia and Hezbollah — distracted and weakened by regional conflicts and the Ukraine war.
That’s not all. Israel has dramatically escalated its airstrikes against Iranian forces stationed on the ground in Syria. The U.N. says that Israel has carried out more than 100 strikes on Syrian territory, killing more than 100 people. The increasing Israeli strikes have put Iranian forces in Syria on the defensive, allowing rebels to exploit a moment where various proxy forces backing Assad are more engaged elsewhere.
Surely, such an offensive would have taken some amount of time and planning. Reuters news agency cites the head of Syria’s main opposition abroad as saying that the rebels began preparations to seize Aleppo a year ago but the operation was delayed by the Gaza war. Turkiye’s Military, which is allied with some of the insurgents and has bases across its southern border in Syria, had heard of the armed groups’ plans but made clear it would play no direct role. However, Turkiye stands to benefit from Assad’s ouster. For one, Syrian refugees would leave Turkiye for Syria. Turkiye has a long border with Syria and has become home to about three million Syrian refugees since 2011. Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was long a supporter of the Syrian opposition after the civil war erupted in 2011.
Before the fall of Damascus to rebels led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Syria was divided into several zones of influence with the warring parties backed by different foreign powers.
-The Hayat Tahrir al-Sham ruled Syria’s north-west.
-The Kurdish fighters occupied the country’s north and east – east of the Euphrates river.
-Turkiye’s Military and factions loyal to it controlled two sections of the border in the north.
-The U.S. controlled the al-Tanf air base and its surrounding deconfliction zone bordering Iraq and Jordan. A deconfliction zone, as the name suggests, is an area that has been earmarked to avoid a potential clash or accident involving two or more militaries in a particular combat area.
-And the Syrian Government controlled 70 per cent of the country.
The U.S.-backed Kurdish-led fighters belonging to the Syrian Democratic Forces control lands east of the Euphrates river. The S.D.F. controls large parts of the Raqqa and Deir Ezzor provinces – virtually a quarter of Syrian territory. Formed in 2015, the S.D.F. is the de facto army of the ethnic Kurds but it also has Christian and Muslim fighters in its ranks. The S.D.F. is considered to be the second most powerful military force after the Syrian Army.
Pro-Turkish forces control two sections of the border from Jarabulus to Afrin in Aleppo province as well as a 1 hundred and 20-kilometre stretch of border territory from Ras al-Ain in Hasakeh province to Tal Abyad in Raqqa. The Kurds are present in Turkiye, Syria and Iraq. Turkiye sees the Kurds along its border with Syria as a threat. It sees the S.D.F. as a separatist group. Since 2016, Turkiye has carried out successive ground operations to expel Kurdish forces from parts of Syria’s northern border. Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has long sought to establish a safe zone 30 kilometres deep along the frontier.
Then there are the U.S.-led coalition forces, which entered Syria in 2014 to fight the Islamic State. In 2016, the U.S. set up a remote base in Al-Tanf region, bordering Jordan and Iraq.
Tartus and Latakia were the strongholds of Assad’s Alawite sect. Russia, which joined Syria in its fight against the rebels in 2015, has a Naval facility in Tartus and uses the Hmeimim airbase near Latakia.