Who are the rebels who have seized control of Aleppo, Syria? : NPR

LONDON — The speedy navy advance of a Syrian insurgent group this previous week has dramatically shifted the frontlines and upended long-held assumptions a couple of Center East battle that appeared caught in a stalemate.

The group behind these dramatic developments, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has held a consequential however checkered function within the nation’s long-running civil battle.

With its roots within the early days of Syria’s 2011 rebellion, the Group for the Liberation of Larger Syria swept down this week from its strongholds within the northwest countryside to take management of an enormous swath of a rustic that had lengthy been below the grip of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

HTS shocked many individuals — together with themselves — once they seized management of Aleppo, the nation’s second largest metropolis, with minimal opposition from authorities forces.

They’ve subsequently pushed farther south previously two days, heading towards the capital Damascus as combating has damaged out in numerous cities and cities throughout the nation.

“We succeeded in breaking the primary line after which the second and third,” stated Gen. Ahmed Homsi, the commander of a unit that is been attempting to coordinate the insurgent offensive, throughout an interview with NPR.

“We hit positions of the management and succeeded in chopping off communications between them and their troops. That created huge chaos for them. It was an enormous psychological defeat.”

HTS has reworked repeatedly over time for the reason that Syrian civil battle started in 2011, with title adjustments, personnel splits and an expanded function within the nation’s northwest province of Idlib, the place it has largely ruled undisturbed for a number of years.

An Islamist group that the US and a number of other different nations way back designated a terrorist group, it was generally known as Jabhat al-Nusra when it fashioned a proper alliance with Al-Qaida greater than a decade in the past.

However lately HTS has publicly disavowed worldwide terrorism and tries to current a extra average face, in line with Charles Lister, the director of the Syria Program on the Center East Institute suppose tank in Washington D.C.

“The group has utterly turned away from having any form of world agenda. It has turned nationwide,” Lister says. “However unquestionably, the group retains very conservative spiritual foundations.”

In the meanwhile, HTS leaders say they haven’t any plans to use Sharia legislation in areas they management and have even began working with Syria’s minority Christian communities, permitting them to rebuild church buildings and returning their dispossessed lands.

In Idlib province, alongside the border with Turkey, the group’s largely technocratic directors, generally known as the ‘Salvation Authorities,’ have cooperated with United Nations assist businesses and different worldwide organizations looking for to assist the hundreds of thousands of Syrians dwelling there, lots of them displaced from different elements of the conflict-ridden nation.

Alex McKeever, a researcher with the group Syrians for Reality & Justice, says Turkey’s assist for the group has additionally been essential – regardless that it was initially supposed simply to fend off authorities forces.

“One in every of Turkey’s primary coverage objectives in Syria since 2016 is to forestall an additional inflow of refugees throughout the border into Turkey,” says McKeever, who relies within the Jordanian capital of Amman, and the Turks have been satisfied {that a} flood of recent migration “would most certainly be brought on by a regime offensive that manages to take all the Idlib pocket.”

All that worldwide help, proximity to the border and cooperation with different insurgent teams elsewhere in Northern Syria has allowed HTS to develop a diversified economic system, says Caroline Rose, a senior fellow on the New Strains Institute suppose tank. It is a mannequin that Rose says HTS could search to duplicate elsewhere.

“It strives not solely to retain but additionally arrange proto governance in Aleppo metropolis and the areas round it, ultimately establishing a monopoly over not solely native territory, but additionally items and providers for taxation, very like what we have seen in Idlib within the northwest.”

And that want to control hundreds of thousands of individuals has actually reworked the group, in line with former U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford.

“It isn’t what it was,” Ford says. “It isn’t what I had imagined once we pushed to get them on the terrorism listing in 2012. Again then they have been ‘al Qaeda in Iraq, Syria department.'”

One other important evolution for HTS is its resolution to collaborate with different armed Syrian factions, in opposition to which it would beforehand have fought, says Lina Khatib, an affiliate fellow within the Center East and North Africa program at Chatham Home

“After years of battles and competitors with different insurgent teams, HTS has now constructed an alliance of comfort with these teams,” says Khatib. “That is an alliance in opposition to Iran backed militias and in opposition to the forces of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.” 

However as HTS celebrates its comparatively straightforward advance, the Syrian military and its Russian- and Iranian-backed allies are making ready to combat again. That may imply holding much more new territory — not to mention sooner or later governing it — could show rather more troublesome for the group and different armed factions combating alongside them, says Jerome Drevon, a senior analyst on Jihad in Trendy Battle on the Worldwide Disaster Group.

“They’ve actually restructured themselves over the previous few years, they’ve turn out to be extra skilled,” Drevon says. “The difficulty is, when you attempt to develop additional elsewhere, then you already know they’d unfold thinner, and command and management is perhaps a bit tougher to take care of over these teams in the event that they go to the south.”

Lama Al-Arian contributed reporting from Beirut.