How the Syrian Opposition Shocked the Assad Regime

In a stunning offensive that appeared to catch the regime of Bashar al-Assad off guard, opposition forces took over much of the Syrian city of Aleppo last week, and began moving on the city of Hama, another major urban center. Despite pledges on Monday from the governments of Russia and Iran that they would increase their support for the Syrian regime, rebel advances continued throughout the day. What was recently a largely dormant uprising may have entered an entirely new phase.

Last week’s attacks are the latest wave of resistance to Assad’s despotic rule, a civil war that began in 2011 and quickly descended into a proxy war, eventually leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees. Russia and Iran helped stabilize the regime even as it used chemical weapons against its people. The region’s Sunni autocracies, meanwhile, supported various rebel groups. Some of these were secular nationalists who wanted an end to Assad’s dictatorship; others were Islamist Sunnis who wanted an Islamic state. ISIS, the most infamous and violent of the rebel groups, was among the latter, and claimed significant territory in Iraq and Syria. Then, in 2019, a United States-led coalition attacked and largely eliminated ISIS in Syria, and it appeared that Assad had decisively won the war. But now, with Assad’s allies engaged in Ukraine and in Lebanon, the rebel groups have been able to make their boldest and most successful military moves in years, surprising both the Syrian leadership and the rest of the world.

To understand more about the situation in Syria, I spoke by phone with Fawaz A. Gerges, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, and the author of “ISIS: A History.” His most recent book is called “What Really Went Wrong: The West and the Failure of Democracy in the Middle East.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the Assad regime has been diminished in the last decade, why the Islamist opposition to Assad remains more powerful than the secular resistance, and where ultimate responsibility for one of the worst calamities of the twenty-first century lies.

What’s happened in Syria over the past week has been shocking for almost everyone. But was it shocking for people like yourself who follow this region extremely closely?

I was shocked because of the speed with which the Islamist and nationalist opposition was able to recapture large parts of northwest Syria, including Aleppo. Aleppo is the second-largest city in Syria—the cultural capital. It used to be an economic powerhouse for Syria. And of equal importance, the Syrian government’s recapture of Aleppo, in 2016, marked a turning point in the civil war.

This was and is a military earthquake. First, because of the ability of the opposition to really carry out a preëmptive attack, which meant that the opposition, mainly Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (H.T.S.) and various groups, had been planning for this attack for a long time. This is not a byproduct of a month or two but probably a couple of years. And second, the reason I was surprised was the swiftness with which many Syrian Army units folded. For Aleppo to fall so quickly, and for the Army and the security forces to be crushed so quickly, tells me that the Syrian Army and the Syrian government suffer from major vulnerabilities. We knew about them, but we did not really appreciate their gravity and depth.

Can you explain what you mean by both the Islamist and nationalist opposition?

The opposition includes more than a dozen factions, including both Islamist and nationalist factions. You have a combined Sunni Islamist opposition, and then nationalist and somewhat secular opposition. But I think this kind of division overlooks an overarching point. The key driver behind the rebels and the opposition is H.T.S. H.T.S. is the vanguard of the opposition. H.T.S. was originally called Al Nusra Front and, historically, it was an affiliate of Al Qaeda, of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the two late leaders of Al Qaeda. And H.T.S. tried to distance itself from Al Qaeda in the past few years. Al Nusra Front changed its name to H.T.S. because it wanted to send a clear message to its regional supporters, particularly Turkey and Qatar, and also to the international community, that it no longer really belonged to Al Qaeda. Even though H.T.S. says that it’s no longer really an integral part of Al Qaeda, it’s a Salafi jihadi organization. So it subscribes to a kind of Sunni revolutionary doctrine. It’s still a declared foreign terrorist group by both the United States and the United Kingdom.

As for the more nationalist groups, less Islamist groups, they have been the mainstream opposition, and they have as many as ten thousand fighters. They are more pluralistic and believe in a more open society that includes all ethnic and religious elements. They are less dogmatic and religiously driven. But sadly, they didn’t gain momentum, largely because they were reliant on outside powers, including the United States.

But I think the opposition could not have done what they have done in the past few days without the fighting capabilities of H.T.S., without the willpower of H.T.S., without the organizational capacity of H.T.S., without the organizational and the decision-making process of H.T.S. At the end of the day, H.T.S. will take ownership of whatever advance, whatever gains, military gains, that the opposition achieves in Syria.

To what degree has this group and others like it used the destruction of ISIS to their advantage?

I think you really cannot understand the map of the Syrian opposition, both Islamist and nationalist, without understanding the internal civil war that devastated the oppositional groups in Syria from 2013 up to 2019. This particular civil war was between ISIS and the Al Nusra Front. It was a fight about power.

At first, during the civil war, ISIS gained the upper hand, the U.S.-led coalition changed the balance of power by destroying most of the capabilities of ISIS. The United States unwittingly allowed H.T.S. to become the dominant opposition group in Syria. With very minor exceptions, the U.S.-led coalition has not systematically targeted H.T.S., and has avoided killing its top leaders, particularly Abu Mohammad al-Julani. And Abu Mohammad al-Julani has proved to be a very clever and a very calculated operational leader—not only by changing the name of Al Nusra Front to H.T.S. but also by sending direct and indirect messages to both regional actors and the United States that he was no longer really part of an Al Qaeda alliance. And more importantly, we have many reports that H.T.S. did provide some intelligence to the U.S.-led coalition about top leaders of ISIS.

Is the reason the United States has not tried to go after this group because the U.S. is not currently focussed on Syria? Or is it because they think this group, in addition to changing its name, has also reformed so that it is no longer a threat to American interests?

What’s fascinating is that throughout, really, the U.S. has consciously avoided targeting H.T.S. and consciously avoided attacking Abu Mohammad al-Julani and his top leaders. Not because the United States could not do it—because they did decimate the ISIS leadership—but I think it is because the United States wanted to drive a wedge between Al Nusra Front and ISIS, and focussed mainly on ISIS because it represented a greater threat to American interests and to its allies in the region, and also because of the relationship between Turkey and Al Nusra Front and then H.T.S.

Turkey and Qatar helped and provided financial support, and probably military arms, to H.T.S. [Qatar denied funding the group in 2017.] My sense is that the intelligence coördination between the United States and the Turkish and the Qatari governments probably mattered as well. This was not the lack of resources on the part of the United States, or the lack of will. The U.S. knows their addresses. They’re all in Idlib, in the northwest of the country, close to the Turkish border, and Turkey works very closely with them. This was a strategic decision on the part of the United States.

The story you read the most about the Assad regime is that its military weakness lies mostly in the fact that its allies—the Iranians, Hezbollah, and Russia—are tied down in other areas. Do you think that that is what is going on?

I think it’s a partial explanation. I have a different explanation, too. I think most observers of Syria don’t really recognize the effects of the American sanctions on Syria. The American-imposed sanctions on Syria have decimated the Syrian economy. Between eighty and ninety per cent of the Syrian people, according to humanitarian agencies, need humanitarian aid. We have reports that the Syrian Army is not getting the nutrition that it needs for its soldiers and units.

The second aspect that is overlooked is that Israeli systematic attacks against the Syrian Army in the past two or three years have exacted a heavy toll on the decision-making, on the infrastructure, on the morale, on the units, on the leadership. And you have to take into account that Syria has been at war since 2011. The Syrian Army has lost about a hundred thousand soldiers since 2011.

So in this sense, H.T.S. and the opposition and the rebels know very well the vulnerabilities of the Assad regime. Not only do you have a broken economy, not only do you have abject poverty, not only do you have an army that is starved, but Israeli attacks have turned the same army into a shadow of its former self.

And then there’s the fact that the Assad government’s major regional and global backers are preoccupied somewhere else. Russia has withdrawn most of its forces from Syria in the past three years. Israel has systematically targeted Iranian assets in Syria, literally on a daily basis, in particular in the past year, and also targeted Hezbollah units, which played a pivotal role in allowing Bashar al-Assad not only to survive but to basically defeat most of the opposition. In the past year, Iran has begun to pull out most of its leadership assets from Syria because they were targeted and killed, and Hezbollah has been deeply engaged first in supporting Hamas in Gaza and then in Israel.

So all these drivers really have brought about this particular moment. And H.T.S. and its allies recognized that there was a window of opportunity, and they struck very hard. Their shock attack came on the same day that Israel and Hezbollah signed the ceasefire agreement. So it was quite a decisive moment, which H.T.S. and the rebels exploited.

But we’re talking about a moving target. The Syrian Army now, along with Russia, is likely preparing for a counterattack, in particular in Hama and other places. My take on it is that you’re going to see a great mobilization on the part of the Syrian Army and its allies, including the Russians and the Iranians and other militia forces. Even though what has happened is a military earthquake, this is still the beginning.

Syria has a relatively large Kurdish population, and in Syria’s post-ISIS era, when the civil war was considered over, there were still areas under Kurdish control that were being protected by the United States. And there was a sense that Assad had handed over control to Iran and Russia, who were making battlefield decisions. Can you describe what the Syrian state is right now?

First and foremost, the Syrian war that ignited in 2011 has never ended. What we have seen since 2020 is a lull in the war. Syria is an explosive cocktail of non-state actors, of regional powers, great powers. You have more than ten thousand Islamist Sunni Salaf fighters, and they are directly and indirectly supported by Turkey. You have the Syrian national secular opposition, again, fully supported by Turkey in Idlib. In the Idlib area, you’re talking about five million people under the control of H.T.S. You also have the Kurds who are probably as powerful as H.T.S., and they are currently supported by the United States, and the United States has around a thousand soldiers. You have Turkish forces in Idlib. You have Iranian as well as Hezbollah’s assets. You have a Russian base in Syria. So even though the Syrian government, the Assad government, controls about sixty per cent of Syrian territory, the reality is Syria is no longer a sovereign state. You can argue that the Assad government is the biggest state militia in Syria. But in a way, President Assad has forfeited Syrian sovereignty in order to survive. Because without the support of the Russians and the Iranians and Hezbollah and other non-state actors, including the militias, Assad probably could not have initially regained or recaptured some of the towns and cities, including Aleppo in 2016.

The Iranian foreign minister was just in Syria, and he promised full support for the Syrian government. The Russian government also promised to send reinforcements to Syria. Turkey obviously supports its proxies in Syria, and the Kurds are moving in. So you’re not going to have just a war between Assad and H.T.S. You’re going to have a war between the Kurds in Syria, who are supported by the United States, and Turkey and their proxies. And the Kurds are also now moving into some of the areas which the Syrian government has withdrawn from.

What we’re seeing at this particular point is the reigniting of the Syrian war. But my fear is that we are also seeing the reigniting of the proxy war in Syria that almost destroyed the country between 2011 and 2020.

Would it be equally fair to say that the Assad regime destroyed Syria in that time? It still seems to me that in some fundamental sense this is morally Assad’s doing.

Well, there’s no denying that Assad, as the autocratic President of Syria, is first and foremost responsible for the catastrophe that has befallen Syria since 2011—legally, morally, politically, and militarily. He caused any peaceful opposition to him, which began in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring, to become militarized. Without Assad using overwhelming force against his opposition, I don’t think Syria would have descended into all-out war. And since 2020, the Assad government has systematically and consciously avoided any kind of genuine resolution of the conflict because the approach of the Syrian government is that the opposition has failed to win on the battlefield, and thus they will not be allowed to win at the negotiating table.

The Syrian government literally undermined and sabotaged every single initiative that was put forth, whether by the international community, or by the U.N. envoy, or by other regional powers. Assad believed that he won the war, and refused to compromise with the opposition. So Assad owns the catastrophe in Syria, and not only the war itself. You’re talking about almost five hundred thousand victims. You’re talking about the million injured, six million refugees, six or eight million displaced people. Between eighty and ninety per cent of the Syrian people are on the verge of starvation. So Assad’s culpability and responsibility are really not even questioned. He’s the head of the state. It’s a fundamental point, a foundational point.

If I’m reading your voice correctly, despite what you have been saying about Assad, you don’t welcome what’s happened in the last week because you’re concerned that this latest advance could just mean more war and death for the people of Syria.

Absolutely. The Middle East does not really need another war zone. The tragedy of the Middle East is that you have a ceasefire in one place and another war zone in another place. And what we’re going to see in Syria now, and the reason I say “proxy war,” is that all these actors—the opposition and Assad and even Iran—may still view the conflict as existential. Syria is now going, again, back to square one. ♦