By SARAH EL DEEB | Associated Press
BEIRUT (AP) — Insurgents breached Syria’s largest city Friday and clashed with government forces for the first time since 2016, according to a war monitor and fighters, in a surprise attack that sent residents fleeing and added fresh uncertainty to a region reeling from multiple wars.
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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 experiencing dual 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 U.S. 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.
The offensive came as Iran-linked groups, primarily Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has backed Syrian government forces since 2015, have been preoccupied with their own battles at home.
A ceasefire in Hezbollah’s two-month war with Israel took effect Wednesday, the day the Syrian opposition factions announced their offensive. Israel has also escalated its attacks against Hezbollah and Iran-linked targets in Syria during the last 70 days.
Dareen Khalifa, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group and an expert on Syrian groups, said the insurgents have signaled for a while that they were ready for an offensive. But no one expected the swift advance of the forces toward Aleppo.
“It’s not only that the Russians are distracted and bogged down in Ukraine, but also the Iranians are distracted and bogged down elsewhere. Hezbollah’s distracted and bogged down elsewhere, and the regime is absolutely cornered,” she said. “But the surprise element comes in with how quickly the regime crumbled.”
The attack on Aleppo followed weeks of simmering low-level violence, including government attacks on opposition-held areas. Turkey, which has backed Syrian opposition groups, failed in its diplomatic efforts to prevent the government attacks, which were seen as a violation of a 2019 agreement sponsored by Russia, Turkey and Iran to freeze the line of the conflict.
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Associated Press writers Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, and Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, contributed to this report.