Civil War in Syria: Activists: Syria’s government is losing control of Aleppo

According to activists, the Syrian government has lost control of the city of Aleppo to rebels. The head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdel-Rahman, told the German Press Agency. The city in the north of the country is completely under the control of an alliance led by the Islamist organization Haiat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), with the exception of four districts controlled by Kurdish militias, he added.

The Observatory, based in Great Britain, obtains its information from a network of local informants.

This means that Syria’s second largest city is no longer under the control of President Bashar al-Assad’s government for the first time in years. However, some parts of the city have been controlled by Kurdish forces for several years.

Big successes for rebels in a short time

It had already become known on Saturday night that an alliance of insurgents led by the HTS had brought large parts of the metropolis under their control. The offensive in northwest Syria began in the middle of the week. Most rebel groups withdrew there, to Idlib province, after the Syrian army recaptured Aleppo in December 2016. Now the insurgents were able to celebrate major territorial gains around Idlib and Aleppo within just a few days.

According to the Syrian state agency Sana, citing the army, the military is preparing a counterattack. For the first time since 2016, the Russian Air Force flew air strikes on Aleppo as an ally of Syria’s ruler Assad. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the airstrikes continued on Sunday. They also hit places in the Idlib region. Syrian Civil Defense activists, also known as the White Helmets, reported at least four civilians dead and 54 injured in the airstrikes.

New escalation after several years of standstill

The takeover of Aleppo represents a violent escalation in Syria’s 14-year civil war. Already in the first years of the civil war, rebel groups and government troops and their allies fought heavy battles in Aleppo. In 2016, the rebels were driven out of eastern parts of Aleppo in fighting. Russia and Iran helped government troops regain control of all of Aleppo.

Between 2012 and 2016 the city was almost completely destroyed. The battle for Aleppo at that time was – especially in the final phase – one of the most brutal in the Syrian civil war. Parts of the devastated city were later rebuilt. Today there are around 2.5 million people living in Aleppo. The rebel alliance’s offensive is the first attack on the city by Assad’s opponents since 2016.

This offensive apparently came as a surprise to Syria’s ruler Bashar al-Assad. Observers assume that the rebels have exploited a current weakness in the pro-Iranian militias allied with Assad and in Iran itself.

A devastating civil war has been raging in Syria since 2011, which has completely divided the country. With the help of his allies Russia and Iran, ruler Assad recently controlled around two thirds of the country. The northwest is partly under the control of opposition forces. There is no political solution to the conflict in sight.