I am still, technically, supposed to be on vacation but I figure if we don’t try to make some sense of the past few days in Syria then it’s going to be a big mess when I’m actually back to work on Tuesday. So here, as best as I can tell, is what we know. On Wednesday, elements of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the jihadist group that controls much of northwestern Syria’s Idlib province, and of the Turkish proxy “Syrian National Army” coalition undertook an apparently large new offensive in western Aleppo province that seized control of over 20 villages previously held by the Syrian government. While certainly out of the ordinary, in that it’s the first time those rebel groups had made a meaningful territorial advance since the Turkish and Russian governments negotiated a ceasefire-by-proxy in and around Idlib back in 2020, the news came in the context of recent reports of spiking violence across the country and seemed like another relatively minor development along those lines.
As it happened, that initial advance proved instead to be the first step in what’s become a massive shift (at least for now) in the state of play in northwestern Syria. The rebels intensified their offensive on Thursday as the Syrian military’s localized withdrawals escalated into a general retreat and then something approximating a collapse of its defensive line. By Friday night rebel forces were in the western parts of Aleppo city. By Saturday the rebels were in control of virtually all of the city and had also managed to push south, taking previously government-held parts of Idlib and pushing into neighboring Hama province. HTS even reported that its fighters had entered Hama city but they’ve since withdrawn, either because of military resistance or in awareness that they’d outstretched their supply line. Rebel forces positioned themselves some distance north of the city and as far as I know that’s where the new front line remains at this time though Hama city is still clearly a rebel target. You can track the territorial movements at any number of live maps available online.

As far as casualties are concerned, as of Saturday the death toll had reportedly surpassed 300 but I haven’t seen an updated count on Sunday. I think the Syrian military’s rapid withdrawal/collapse has kept casualties lower than might be expected under the circumstances, as there are reported of rebels taking several places essentially unopposed.
We should also note reports circulating on social media of rebel activity in southern Syria’s Daraa province, though there’s nothing confirmed there that I’ve seen yet. Daraa is sometimes regarded as the epicenter of the Syrian civil war because it saw some of the first of the country’s Arab Spring protests back in 2011, and despite the 2018 capitulation that rebels there signed with Russia the province has never entirely been pacified. Unrest there has actually increased in recent months amid clashes between security forces and ex-rebel factions plus the rise in smuggling activity (particularly with respect to captagon trafficking).
The ramifications of these events could be massive if the Syrian government is unable to reverse course quickly and decisively. They already are quite significant.
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