AMMAN: Syrian militants have swept into Syria’s second city Aleppo and were rapidly advancing south after mounting a lightning offensive that poses the biggest threat in years to Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
The Syrian army said on Saturday dozens of its soldiers had been killed in a major attack by militants who swept into the city of Aleppo, forcing the army to redeploy in the biggest challenge to President Bashar Assad in years.
The surprise attack, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, was the boldest assault for years in a civil war where frontlines had largely been frozen since 2020.
The war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced many millions, has ground on since 2011 with no formal end, although most major fighting halted years ago after Iran and Russia helped Assad’s government win control of most land and all major cities.
Aleppo had been firmly held by the government since a 2016 victory there, one of the war’s major turning points, when Russian-backed Syrian forces besieged and lay waste to insurgent-held eastern areas of what had been the country’s largest city.
“I am a son of Aleppo, and was displaced from it eight years ago, in 2016. Thank God we just returned. It is an indescribable feeling,” said Ali Jumaa, an insurgent fighter, in television footage filmed inside the city.
Acknowledging the militant advance, the Syrian army command said insurgents had entered large parts of Aleppo.
After the army said it was preparing a counterattack, airstrikes targeted militant gatherings and convoys in the city, the pro-Damascus newspaper Al-Watan reported. One strike caused casualties in Aleppo’s Basel square, a resident told Reuters.
Overnight, images from Aleppo showed a group of insurgents gathered in the city’s Saadallah Al-Jabiri Square, a billboard of Assad looming behind them.
Images filmed on Saturday showed people posing for photos on a toppled statue of Bassil Assad, late brother of the president. Fighters zipped around the city in flatback trucks and milled around in the streets. A man waved a Syrian opposition flag as he stood near Aleppo’s historic citadel.
The Syrian military command said militants had attacked in large numbers and from multiple directions, prompting “our armed forces to carry out a redeployment operation aimed at strengthening the defense lines in order to absorb the attack, preserve the lives of civilians and soldiers.”
The militants also took control of Aleppo airport, according to a statement by their operations room and a security source.
Two insurgent sources also said the insurgents had captured the city of Maraat al Numan in Idlib province, bringing all of that area under their control.
The fighting revives the long-simmering Syrian conflict as the wider region is roiled by wars in Gaza and Lebanon, where a truce between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah took effect on Wednesday.
With Assad backed by Russia and Iran, and Turkiye supporting some of the militants in the northwest where it maintains troops, the offensive has brought into focus the conflict’s knotted geopolitics. Fighting in the northwest had largely abated since Turkiye and Russia reached a de-escalation agreement in 2020.
