This is how the Syrian rebels have managed to take the city of Aleppo in a few days

The Levant Liberation Organization (HTS), the Islamist group that captured the world’s attention last week with its surprise and successful offensive on Aleppo, has long been the most powerful rebel faction in Syria.

Thousands of its fighters have just inaugurated a new phase of the 13-year civil war in Syria, which many considered over, after taking over a large city like Aleppo, cutting a strategic highway and forcing Bashar al Assad’s army to withdraw to hastily from a strip of the northwest of the country.

This Tuesday, the rebels have continued to advance south, in the province of Hama, located next to Aleppo, and have taken 14 towns. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an NGO that monitors developments in the Syrian war, the insurgents are “at the gates of the city of Hama,” another important city in the Arab country.

What is Hayat Tahrir al Sham?

For most experienced analysts, the sudden turn of events is shocking but not surprising. According to Syria expert Charlie Winter, “everyone who follows Syria knows that it has been a powder keg for years with great pressures, both internally and from regional powers.” “The war has continued in the background, the magnitude of the progress achieved by Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) may surprise; but not that it launched an offensive, if you look at what the group has been saying and the messages it has been sending,” adds Winter, director of the British consulting firm specializing in geopolitical risks ExTrac.

The Hayat Tahrir al Sham group has been controlling the northwestern province of Idlib for about five years, where it established the so-called Syrian Salvation Government in 2017, which runs schools, clinics and courts for some four million people (many of them displaced from other areas of Syria). For the radical group, Idlib is a secure territorial base and a source of constant financing thanks to taxes, among other resources.

The members of the group appear to be well trained, although poorly equipped, and in the advances of recent days they have appropriated heavy weapons belonging to Damascus troops. HTS leads a broader coalition that includes smaller factions also of Islamist ideology. Among them, the groups made up of Uzbek, Tajik and Turkmen militiamen who have been fighting in Syria for many years. According to analysts, there may also be a “handful” of Islamist veterans from Western Europe.

Where does HTS come from and who is its leader?

Formerly known as Jabhat al Nusra, HTS was created by Al Qaeda to take advantage of opportunities arising after Syria’s descent into the chaos of civil war. He soon achieved success, developing a fearsome reputation for his attacks and suicide bombings against regime forces and others. Their bitter enemies include the Islamic State terrorist group, although both share the goal of establishing a new Islamic caliphate based in Syria and Iraq. Over time, HTS ended up separating from Al Qaeda and integrating other smaller Islamist groups.

During its 13 years of existence, Ahmed Hussein Al Sharaa – better known as Abu Muhammed Al Jawlani – has been the leader of HTS. 42-year-old Al Jawlani is believed to have been born in Syria to a family who fled the Golan Heights after the 1967 war, when Israel occupied the mountainous area.

Little is known about his early years, but it is believed that Al Jawlani fought alongside other insurgents against US-led forces after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and that in 2006 he was arrested along with thousands of militiamen. He was imprisoned in Iraqi and American prisons until his release in 2011, when he returned to Syria and, along with six others, led the emergence of Al Qaeda in the country.

According to analysts, Al Jawlani not only distanced himself from Al Qaeda. He also fought against the Islamic State (which emerged in Syria in 2014), which had him among its targets since the beginning of the civil war. In the following years, Al Jawlani’s men tried without much success to gain the will of the communities not only by fear, but by offering security and basic services.

Al Jawlani’s attempts to change the image of HTS culminated in 2021 with an interview on US public television (although US authorities continue to offer a $10 million reward [unos 9,5 millones de euros] for any information leading to his arrest).

His strategy has generated intense debate among analysts. Although the US, Russia, Turkey and other countries have continued to consider HTS a terrorist organization, some analysts argue that it has broken with the extreme violence and fanaticism that characterized many previous groups. Some experts maintain that its goals are explicitly local and that, unlike the Islamic State, HTS is not waging a general war against the West or the rulers of the Middle East. Their Islamic codes of behavior have also proven to be less strict in practice, and they recently took their “morality police” off the streets over protests against them.

In contrast, other experts maintain that, although everyday tactics and actions differ, the group’s core thinking remains faithful to the fundamental principles of the most radical Islamist ideologies. Thinking that HTS represents a more pragmatic and renewed Islamist militancy is totally wrong, they point out, giving as an example the thousands of arbitrary arrests that have occurred in areas under their control.

Why has HTS now launched an offensive?

It is not clear why the organization has chosen this moment to launch its offensive and reconquer Aleppo, a bastion of the resistance against Al Assad until 2016. One possible reason is the military weakness of the Lebanese group Hezbollah, whose help was essential for the Syrian regime and which has been diminished by its war with Israel. Or maybe it’s because Iran and Russia, two key allies of Assad, are distracted by other issues.

According to HTS itself, the offensive is due to the fact that the regime’s “aggression” against the population of Idlib had become unbearable. Hence the rebel operation has been named “deterrence of aggression.”

Whatever the real reason, the strategic impact of the offensive has been enormous. As Winter, from ExTrac, states, “Aleppo took 100 days to fall in 2016 and only 48 hours to be recovered.” And he explains: “This takes us back to where we were in the middle of the last decade in terms of the possible outcome of the war.”

Text translated by Francisco de Zárate and updated by elDiario.es