Syrian Rebels’ Blitzkrieg Threatens Assad and the Russians

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a dictator who inherited the office when his father died, was nearly toppled in the mid-2010s. Western-backed rebels had gotten within blocks of his palace in Damascus, and ISIS had captured the southeastern half of his country.

The Russians helped Assad push the rebels back, and an international coalition broke ISIS’ control.

Since then, the Syrian Civil War has been somewhat frozen: Turkish-backed rebels occupied the north, the separatist Kurds in the east, and Assad mostly controlled the rest, with pockets of rebel and ISIS resistance.

This all changed over the past week when Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a coalition of Islamist rebel forces, undertook a long-planned assault, surging southward and capturing key cities like Aleppo and Hama.

HTS is led by Mohammad al-Julani, an Islamist and former high-ranking member of al-Qaeda, who has long sought to establish an Islamic republic in Syria. Al-Julani gained notoriety in the past for claims that Christians and other minorities would have a tough time surviving in his envisioned republic.

But HTS, in a bid to make the group more credible to international observers, has stepped away from his past statements, and has worked with the Kurds and other opposition groups.

They also attempted to demonstrate their newfound openness after they conquered Aleppo, promising that all minorities would be respected, so long as they had no allegiance to Assad. The group is now determined to move further south to strike at Damascus.

The surge caught Assad and his backer, the Russians, entirely unprepared. Russian President Vladimir Putin fired his general in charge of Syria operations, and the Russian air force is scrambling to target rebel positions.

Russia securing Assad’s regime made them active players in the Middle East for the first time since the 1970s. His fall would see them effectively shut out of the region.

Turkey is backing the rebels’ assault, which would gain heavily if Russia was ejected, as it has long nursed ambitions in northern Syria.