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?
