It was certainly a blitzkrieg. Syrian rebels shocked the federal government and the area with a lightning fast offensive that in the end ended with the breach of Damascus Sunday morning. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled the nation and the Military commander mentioned that the federal government has fallen.
In what will be known as the largest advances within the latest instances, the rebels had seized the cities of Aleppo and Hama, in addition to giant components of the south, in an offensive that started on November 27.
United below Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a former al-Qaida affiliate, the group that was as soon as thought to be the insurrection’s most extremist factions has no come again to hang-out the Assad authorities.
Who’re the rebels?
The Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group (HTS), based on the BBC, was arrange below the identify of Jabhat al-Nusra in 2011, as a “direct affiliate of the Al-Qaeda”. The identify means the Group for the Liberation of the Levant.
The group, with the jihadist ideology as its driving power, was thought-about as one of the efficient and lethal of the teams ranged towards President Assad.
In 2016, HTS chief Abu Mohammed al-Golani sought to rebuild the group’s picture after reducing ties with the Al-Qaeda, ditching hard-line officers and vowing to embrace pluralism and non secular tolerance, based on AP information.
The group has managed a lot of northwest Syria, and in addition arrange a “salvation authorities” in 2017 to run day-to-day affairs within the area. Its objective now could be to ascertain fundamentalist Islamic rule in Syria quite than a wider caliphate, because the Islamic State (IS) had tried however didn’t do, BBC said.
How has the group managed to pay money for territory?
Within the preliminary days, the group had coaxed village council leaders to voluntarily settle for its rule and mimicked a state by issuing identification playing cards to residents, based on a UN report cited by The New York Instances.
It continued to stay unpopular amongst residents, who protested its arbitrary arrests, taxation and intolerance of dissent.
Turkish bases in Idlib and Turkish artillery stationed on the Turkish facet of the border have served to buffer the group’s territory from Syrian authorities troops, Robert Ford, a former US ambassador to Syria was quoted as saying by NYT.
Nonetheless, after a cease-fire brokered by Russia and Turkey in 2020 generated an uneasy calm in northwestern Syria, the group took the chance to restructure its forces, changing into extra skilled with higher coaching and weapons. Slowly, different insurgent organisations merged with them, making them the biggest power in northwestern Syria.
