How the Syrian rebels’ surprise offensive shocked the world

The war in Syria was supposed to be over.

Over, of course, didn’t mean peace: During the past few months, the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and its Russian backers have launched periodic airstrikes on rebel-held areas in the country’s northeast; the US and its Kurdish allies have continued to wage an ongoing campaign of airstrikes and special forces operations targeting the remnants of the militant group ISIS; while Israel has continually — particularly since the October 7, 2023, attacks — struck Hezbollah and targets linked to Iran, both of which are Assad allies.

But with unprecedented conflicts erupting elsewhere in the Middle East, the war in Syria, which has been fought since 2011 and may have resulted in the deaths of more than half a million people and displaced millions more, had become an afterthought.

The front lines were fixed: Sunni militant groups controlled the country’s northeast, US-backed Syrian Kurds dominated the Northwest, and Assad held the rest, including his capital, Damascus. Regional governments like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia that had spent years backing a revolution to overthrow Assad, had begun to welcome him — with tacit US support — back to regional summits and gatherings. To the degree Syria was still considered a security threat outside its borders, it was at the nexus of a flourishing regional drug trade — promoted and facilitated by the regime. The active phase of the war, in which territory regularly changed hands and Assad’s regime faced a serious threat from foreign-backed rebels, seemed to be over.

All that changed last week when a coalition of rebel groups swept into the city of Aleppo, rapidly pushing back government forces and taking control of most of the city. Aleppo, which had been Syria’s largest city before the war, fell to the rebels in the early days of the uprising, and Assad spent roughly four years fighting to take it back, annihilating much of it in the process. Now, he has lost it again in the span of about four days.

While international governments called on all sides to “deescalate,” the rebel coalition took control of much of the city, as well as more than 200 surrounding towns, pushing south toward the government-held town of Hama where the regime has been scrambling to set up a new defensive line. Rebels have freed inmates from the regime’s jails, where many political prisoners had been held, some for years. In response, Syrian and Russian jets have launched airstrikes on the city, including some that hit hospitals.

Vox spoke by phone on Monday with Abdulkafi Alhamdo, an English teacher and opposition activist from Aleppo who gained an international following for his video reports, posted on social media, in the early days of the Syrian civil war. Alhamdo had been living in rebel-held Idlib for the past eight years, after fleeing Aleppo when it was taken by the Assad regime. He returned to his hometown for the first time over the weekend, reuniting with family members, some of whom he hadn’t seen since the war began 13 years ago.

“Eight years I waited, dreaming every day to go back,” Alhamdo told Vox by phone from Syria. “The whole whole world said that we were over, that the season of revolution is over, that we had no chance. But we made it.”

Though the rebels had reportedly been planning their operations for months, it took Washington and other Western capitals by surprise. “It goes to show that sometimes there’s a tendency in Washington for people to sit there and say, ‘Oh, well, you know, the conflict is frozen. We don’t worry about it anymore,’” said Brian Carter, an analyst who tracks militant groups in the Middle East for the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats project. “This offensive shows how flawed that sort of thinking is. It’s going to have big impacts for the region and for US policy.”

The second fall of Aleppo is also a warning that the conflicts proliferating around the world should not be considered in isolation. Syria had become overlooked because of the much more active wars in Ukraine, the Palestinian territories, and Lebanon, all of which heavily engaged international attention and energy, from high-level arms shipments to global street protests. But the effects of those wars likely provided an opening for the rebels’ stunning advance, and constrained Assad’s ability to respond to it.

And in turn, the latest revival of the Syrian civil war is likely to have reverberations that will be felt far beyond the country’s borders.

Will the Syrian regime hold on?

The conflict began in 2011 as an outgrowth of the regional Arab Spring movement, with protests against the Assad regime that quickly mutated into an insurgency after the regime’s brutal crackdown.

Randa Slim, a fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Foreign Policy Institute who has participated in backchannel negotiations on Syria, told Vox the rapid pace of the offensive reminds her of the momentum the rebels had in the early days of the war in 2012 and 2013. “The opposition was winning, winning, winning, winning, and we were saying, ‘Oh my God, they’re going to get to Damascus soon,’” Slim said.

The tide started to turn in 2013 when the rebels were defeated in a battle at the town of al-Qusayr by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia, which had entered the war the previous year on Assad’s side.

Today, however, Hezbollah is reeling after more than a year of war with Israel that has resulted in the targeted deaths of much of its senior leadership, including longtime head Hassan Nasrallah. “Hezbollah has been dealt a devastating blow in Lebanon, and they have seen many of their fighters leave Syria,” Slim said. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the group does not appear to be involved in the regime’s efforts to retake Aleppo.

Assad’s other most vital ally has been Russia. It was Russian airpower that reduced Aleppo to rubble and allowed the regime to retake the city in 2016, another crucial turning point in the war. But Russia has moved much of its military hardware and personnel out of Syria since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022. As this week’s bombardment shows, the Russians aren’t gone entirely, but President Vladimir Putin may be less willing, this time around, to devote significant resources to bailing out Assad at a time when the Ukraine conflict is at a critical juncture.

Mouaz Moustafa, executive director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a US-based lobbying group backing and coordinating with the Syrian opposition, told reporters in Washington this week, “I believe that the war in Ukraine and the war in Syria is the same war for the same aims against the same authoritarians, and so I know that I many Syrians are grateful for the brave Ukrainians that have been fighting against the Russians, which gave us the breathing space of not having a full Russian air force in Syria.”

The international context is vital to understanding how the Syrian military’s defenses collapsed so quickly, Robert Ford, former US ambassador to Syria, told Vox. “The key thing to know is that the Syrian government has long depended on the Russians and the Iranians to provide hard fighting power because the Syrian army itself is really hollowed out after so many years of fighting and defections and corruption,” Ford said.

Assad may not be totally helpless, however. Hundreds of fighters from Iran-backed militias in Iraq have reportedly crossed the border to fight the rebels in recent days.

Syria is a large country in a strategic location on the sea, between Turkey and Israel, and Iran views it as vital for its regional ambitions. “Do not underestimate the will of the Iranians to throw the kitchen sink at this going forward in order to keep Assad in power,” Slim said.

You might think that a major strategic defeat for Iranian and Russian proxies would be enthusiastically cheered by Washington. Instead, the administration has been treating the rebel offensive cautiously, mainly because of who makes up the rebels.

“The United States has nothing to do with this offensive, which is led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a designated terrorist organization,” National Security Council spokesperson Sean Savett said in a statement.

HTS, which is indeed the main rebel group involved in the offensive, was, under its former name, Jabhat al-Nusra, an affiliate of al-Qaeda. The group’s leader, Muhammad al-Jolani, spent five years in an American prison in Iraq for taking part in that country’s anti-US insurgency and has a $10 million price on his head from the FBI.

But supporters of the Syrian opposition say the situation is more complicated than that. The group formally broke with al-Qaeda in 2016, when it changed its name to HTS. It is opposed to both ISIS and al-Qaeda’s remaining Syrian affiliate. HTS still adheres to and promotes an austere and strict Islamist ideology, but observers say religious minorities, including Christians, have been permitted to exercise their religion in the areas of Idlib they control.

Since taking Aleppo, HTS has “said all the right things,” said Ford, noting that Christian services were held on Sunday. The group has published a statement proclaiming “diversity is our strength” and calling for solidarity with Aleppo’s Kurdish population.

Alhamdo, the activist from Aleppo, told Vox he was not a supporter of HTS’s ideology, but gave them credit for their tactical leadership on the battlefield and felt that “they are developing their mentality.”

Ford, who spearheaded the move to designate the group — under its former name — as a terrorist organization when he served in the Obama administration, told Vox he “would be hard-pressed now, in 2024, to legally justify a listing” for the group in its current incarnation.

Of course, not everyone is likely to buy the group’s rebranding effort. That includes the Biden administration as well as regional governments, like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which used to staunchly back the Syrian opposition, but are fearful of the overtly Islamist turn some opposition groups have taken. These are the governments that have also been reaching out to try to normalize relations with Assad.

“For the UAE especially, HTS is Islamist. It is the Muslim Brotherhood. It is evil incarnate, no matter how many permutations it has undertaken,” Slim said. “This group was al-Qaeda, and it’s going to take a lot of change to convince the US, or the Saudis, or the Egyptians that it really has changed.”

Another group involved in the rebel coalition is the Syrian National Army (SNA), which despite its name is a Turkish-backed proxy militia. Turkey has a more wary relationship with HTS, but reportedly gave the green light to the SNA’s involvement in the operation due to Assad’s unwillingness to engage in talks earlier this year.

Turkey’s bigger concern, though, is the Kurdish-dominated statelet that has emerged in Syria’s northeast. The Syrian Kurdish forces, known as the SDF, have been America’s primary allies in the ongoing campaign against ISIS, but Turkey views them as a branch of the PKK, the Turkey-based Kurdish militant group that has fought a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish government. The Turkish military and its proxy forces have launched several incursions over the border into Syria to push the Kurdish forces back.

The SDF also controlled some pockets of territory in and around Aleppo but has withdrawn from these as the rebels have advanced. Sinam Mohamad, the representative in Washington for the Syrian Democratic Council — as the predominantly Kurdish government in northeast Syria is known — said she believes Turkey is “planning to occupy some Syrian lands in order to destroy the autonomous administration of northeast Syria.” Despite the HTS’s assurances that Kurds have nothing to fear from Aleppo’s new rulers, she told Vox the group is a “terrorist organization” and that “we are really afraid about the minorities, especially the Kurdish people, in Aleppo city.”

Will this be Trump’s first foreign crisis?

Mustafa, the Syrian American activist, argues that the US ought to see the events of the past week as a victory for its interests. “What’s actually happening on the ground is that Syrians are finding our enemies,” he said. He expressed frustration with the Biden administration’s calls on all sides to deescalate the situation. “It makes no sense for me,” he said. “They should ‘deescalate,’ what, the liberation of towns from the Iranians, the Russians and the Assad regime?”

Syria has not been a major priority for the Biden administration, as it was for the Obama and Trump teams, and despite national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s pledge on Sunday that the US would “stay deeply engaged” in the crisis, it’s unlikely this White House will make any major moves on the issue in its remaining month and a half in office. (The US did launch a strike against Iran-backed militia groups in Syria on Tuesday, though such attacks have taken place repeatedly this year.)

What about the next administration? During his first term, Trump attempted — but was eventually dissuaded by his advisers — from withdrawing the remaining US troops from Syria. (About 900 American military personnel are still in the country as part of the ongoing counter-ISIS mission, operating from Kurdish-held territory in the northeast and from a base near the Jordanian border in the south.) Trump’s selection of former US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence — she’s known for meeting with Assad in 2017 and has described the entire Syrian opposition as “terrorists” — does not indicate much sympathy for the rebels.

On the other hand, Trump and his team are also known for their extremely hawkish views on Iran, a close ally of Assad. Mustafa said he had met with Richard Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence and an influential Trump adviser, to discuss the situation, and Grenell’s recent posts on X indicate at least some sympathy to their position.

But as always with Trump and foreign policy, the actual policies he pursues in office are difficult to predict.

Despite the Syrian regime’s recent setbacks, Ford told Vox, “I strongly doubt that Damascus, 2024, is going to be Kabul, 2021,” referring to the Afghan capital’s rapid fall to the Taliban after the withdrawal of US troops. “I don’t think we’re going to see the HTS militants rampaging through the president’s office,” Ford said.

For one thing, the rebel forces may simply not be large enough. For another, Iran and Russia — even in their diminished capacity — are unlikely to completely abandon a regime they see as strategically vital.

But even if the rebel offensive does not get much farther than the area it currently controls, their rapid success demonstrates a couple of important lessons. One, the war in Syria is not over. Many of the fighters who entered Aleppo this week were young children when the uprising against Assad began more than a decade ago, and there could well be years more fighting to come.

Second, it’s a mistake to consider conflicts like Syria in isolation. The Syrian conflict is often called a “civil war,” which generally means a war fought by factions existing within one country. But at the conflict’s height, it drew in countries from around the region, as well as the United States and Russia, presaging similar lines of conflict in Ukraine. Through the rise of ISIS, the massive global refugee crisis, and the spread of illegal drugs, it has had truly global ripple effects. Like a feedback loop, events abroad — particularly in Lebanon and Ukraine — are now helping drive events on the ground in Syria.

The latest offensive will have its own ripple effects. Optimistically, it could allow for refugees from Aleppo living abroad and elsewhere in Syria to return home, and weaken or even topple a truly odious regime, one that has used chemical weapons on its own people and is believed to have killed tens of thousands of civilians.

Pessimistically, it could lead to more chaos and displacement. HTS may yet go back to its former jihadist ways, the horrific levels of violence we saw years ago could return, more regional actors could be drawn in, and jihadist groups like ISIS could take advantage of the chaos to reconstitute themselves.

The world may have thought it was done with Syria. But Syrians themselves are not done, and the world has no choice but to pay attention again.