Syria’s conflict heats up once again

Since March 2020, Syria’s conflict lines have been frozen, as Russia, Turkey, Iran and the United States held together a series of ceasefires and security understandings. That all changed this week, when a broad coalition of armed opposition groups launched a surprise and daring offensive west of Aleppo city.

As “Operation Deter Aggression” was launched on Wednesday morning, the goal was to expand opposition control of Aleppo’s western countryside, from where Syrian regime forces had been indiscriminately shelling civilian areas for years. Many would have assumed that goal was ambitious, but within three days, more than eighty villages and towns had been captured. Syrian regime forces and their Iranian proxy militia allies were collapsing, as defensive positions repeatedly fell and troops fled. By Friday night, opposition fighters had advanced into Aleppo’s city center, declaring the city under their control.

In truth, the crisis has continued, with violence steadily escalating

As the advance into Aleppo played out, opposition forces in neighboring Idlib province launched a second offensive, capturing the strategic town of Saraqeb, which lies on Syria’s primary north-south M5 highway, cutting Aleppo off from Damascus. As Aleppo city fell on Friday night, the Syrian National Army — another opposition umbrella based in Aleppo’s northern countryside — declared a third offensive, this one aimed at the strategic northern town of Tel Rifat, which is controlled by the Syrian regime and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

These developments have the potential to fundamentally transform Syria’s long-running crisis, which will enter its fifteenth year in March 2025. Ever since Bashar al-Assad’s regime brutally reconquered Aleppo in December 2016, followed by opposition zones around Damascus, Homs and in the southern province of Daraa in 2018, the crisis has steadily receded from international attention. According to many observers, the war has been over for years, Assad having achieved a de facto victory six years ago. But in truth, the crisis has continued, with violence steadily escalating. Throughout 2024, anywhere from thirty-five to 100 people have been killed each week across Syria as multiple conflicts continue to rage.

Amidst this persistent instability, Syria’s armed opposition, headquartered in the northwest of the country, has been preparing for a resumption of major conflict. Since 2020, the most powerful group in the area, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has invested heavily in enhancing its military capabilities. The group operates a professionally staffed military academy run by defectors from the Syrian military and it has restructured its armed wing into conventional armed force structure. In recent years, it has also developed “special forces” units dedicated to covert operations, lightening raids behind enemy lines, and night-time operations.

These units have played a pivotal role in securing the advance into Aleppo this week — with HTS’s Asaib al-Hamra (or Red Bands) the tip of the spear in daytime, and Saraya al-Harari (or Thermal Brigades) leading the night-time maneuvers. The latter force contains several hundred fighters, each one equipped with assault rifles, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenades all equipped with sophisticated night-vision scopes. No Syrian regime unit has any such capability.

Events in recent days did not come out of nowhere, and they are unlikely to end anytime soon either. Today, Syria’s humanitarian crisis is worse than it has ever been — with 90 percent of Syrians living under the poverty line, more than 50 percent still displaced, and approximately 75 percent in daily need of aid. Despite such unprecedented levels of suffering, the international community’s aid effort in Syria, run by the UN, is just 27 percent funded. With such conditions in place, Syrian refugees in the surrounding region have shown zero interest in returning — much to the frustration of their regional hosts. The implications of such a dramatic imbalance inside Syria will always lead to a spiral of escalating instability and violence.

Meanwhile, Assad’s regime has emerged as the world’s biggest narco state, producing and trafficking in tens of billions of dollars of an illegal amphetamine known as captagon. The revenues from that drug trade serve as the glue holding together a regime comprising of Assad’s corrupt business elite and a powerful network of military commanders, militia leaders and warlords. Captagon, known as the poor man’s cocaine, is now also flooding Syria itself, drawing the country’s youth in a debilitating cycle of addiction, unemployment and crime. The effect: more instability.

Throughout 2024, near-daily conflict has raged in Syria’s northwest, north, northeast, east and south, as well as in the central desert. Within all of that hostility, the militaries of Turkey, Russia, Iran, Israel and the United States are all regularly and directly involved. Five years after its territorial defeat in Syria, ISIS is also resurgent — currently on track to double its operational tempo across Syria, and triple it in the northeast, home to US troops and our SDF allies. Taking Syria as a whole, the trajectory in play a week ago was dire. It is a lot worse now.

In earlier years of Syria’s conflict, opposition forces spent five years fighting to take control of and hold onto half of Aleppo city. That the entire city appears to have fallen in twenty-four hours this time around is a stunning reminder of how quickly things can change. In all likelihood, HTS and its opposition partners did not expect to achieve so much so quickly, but their advance looks unlikely to stop anytime soon. With Bashar al-Assad currently in Moscow, a vacuum is rapidly developing and Syria looks set for an extremely rocky and potentially historic few weeks ahead.