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Syrian insurgents led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham captured most of Aleppo on Saturday, in the biggest challenge to President Bashar al-Assad’s authority in years.
The Syrian army said its forces had redeployed and were preparing for a counterattack, while a war monitor reported the first Russian strikes on the city since 2016.
The Syrian army said on Saturday dozens of its soldiers had been killed in a major attack by rebels who swept into the city of Aleppo in the northwest, forcing the army to redeploy in a huge setback for Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Read Also: Battle For Aleppo: Syrian Rebels Now Command Half the City
The surprise attack led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has jolted the frontlines of the Syrian civil war that have largely been frozen since 2020, reviving fighting in a corner of the fractured country near the Turkish border. The army said it was preparing a counteroffensive to restore state authority.
Acknowledging the rebel advance, the Syrian army command said insurgents had entered large parts of Aleppo, which had been under full state control since government forces backed by Russia and Iran drove rebels out eight years ago.
Images from Aleppo showed a group of rebel fighters gathered in the city’s Saadallah al-Jabiri Square after entering the city overnight, a billboard of Assad looming behind them.
“I am the 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 Jumbaa, a rebel fighter, television footage showed.
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 defence lines in order to absorb the attack, preserve the lives of civilians and soldiers, and prepare for a counterattack”.
The army said bombardment had stopped the insurgents from establishing fixed positions. It promised to “expel them and restore the control of the state … over the entire city and its countryside”.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitor, said the rebels had also advanced in Hama and Idlib provinces, taking control of “dozens of strategic towns without any resistance”.
“Many of the towns they have seized are ghost towns, emptied of their population when the Syrian army captured them with the help of Iran,” said FRANCE 24’s Middle East expert Wassim Nasr.
“So those people fighting today are fighting to go back to those towns,” Nasr added.
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.
