The advance on Aleppo followed a shock offensive
launched by insurgents Wednesday, as thousands of fighters swept through
villages and towns in Syria’s northwestern countryside. Residents fled
neighborhoods on the city’s edge because of missiles and gunfire, according to
witnesses in Aleppo. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors
the country’s unresolved civil war, said dozens of fighters from both sides
were killed.
The attack injected new violence into a region already
experiencing wars in Gaza and Lebanon involving Israel, and other conflicts,
including the Syrian civil war that began in 2011.
Aleppo has not been attacked by opposition forces since they
were ousted from eastern neighborhoods in 2016 following a grueling
military campaign in which Syrian government forces were backed by Russia,
Iran and its allied groups.
But this time, there was no sign of a significant pushback
from government forces or their allies. Instead, reports emerged of government
forces melting away in the face of advances, and insurgents posted messages on
social media calling on troops to surrender.
Robert Ford, who was the last US ambassador to Syria, said
the attack showed that Syrian government forces are “extremely weak.” In some
cases, he said, they appear to have “almost been routed.”
This week’s advances were among the largest in recent years
by opposition factions, led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, or
HTS, and represent the most intense fighting in northwestern Syria since 2020,
when government forces seized areas previously controlled by the opposition.
