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An Iraqi militia controlled by Iran has promised to fight alongside Syrian President Bashar Assad’s army and Hezbollah against a resurgent rebellion.
This move by the Nujaba Movement was the latest in a shift in the power balance in Syria, Newsweek reported on Saturday. Sunni rebels launched a major offensive there against their Iran-backed enemies, who have been weakened by the protracted war with Israel.
Sunni Islamist terrorists from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, or the “Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant'), an al-Qaeda splinter faction, and a number of allied rebel militias launched a major offensive in northern Syria on Wednesday, hours after Israel and Hezbollah entered a ceasefire. In the 13-and-a-half-month war against Israel, Hezbollah lost its entire top command, thousands of fighters, hundreds of strongholds and a majority of its ballistic arsenal.
Meanwhile, Russia, an ally of the Assad regime, reportedly has only 10 warplanes in Syria, having sent the rest to the war in Ukraine.
The rebel offensive quickly resulted in the occupation of large areas in the northwestern Aleppo Province. The rebel offensive is the largest upset in years to the stalemate born out of the Syrian civil war. Within 48 hours of its launch, rebels entered the strategic city of Aleppo and seemed to be extending their offensive southward, into Hama.
The Syrian army said on Saturday that dozens of its soldiers were killed in the rebel assault. The army further confirmed that large parts of the city of Aleppo were lost.
The Damascus-affiliated Al-Watan newspaper reported that the Syrian army was preparing a counterattack, with airstrikes targeting rebel gatherings and convoys in Aleppo.
The jihadist rebels, unified under a newly formed coalition called the “Military Operations Command,” said that they gained control on Saturday over the Aleppo airport, as well as the city of Maarat al-Numan in Idlib Province, south west of Aleppo.
Oncu Keceli, the spokesman for Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called for a halt to the fighting on Friday. “We have emphasised that these attacks must come to an end,” he wrote on X. “In fact, the recent clashes have resulted in an undesirable escalation of tensions in the region.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called on Friday for the Syrian regime to retake control of the lost areas.
“As for the situation around Aleppo, it is an attack on Syrian sovereignty and we are in favour of the Syrian authorities bringing order to the area and restoring constitutional order as soon as possible,” he said.
Hezbollah was Iran’s best-armed proxy in the Middle East. Its fighters, along with Russian support, have had a decisive role in keeping Assad, a key Iranian ally, in control of much of Syria. He was nearly swept from power in a civil war that erupted in 2011 but managed to hang on thanks to the intervention in 2015 of Russia and the Iran-led Shia axis.
A ceasefire agreement in 2020 brokered by Russia, a key ally of Assad, and Turkey, a backer of the rebels, had kept the fighting at low-levels, with Assad’s regime and the Iranian-Russian axis the seeming victors.
Israeli defence officials briefed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his office on Friday night on the developments in Syria. The rebel offensive could prompt Iran to send more troops and weapons to Syria to help prop up the Assad regime, defence brass told him. If this fails, they added, rebel forces, which include Sunni jihadist groups, may obtain some of the Assad regime’s weapons, including chemical ones.
Newsweek quoted Nujaba Movement (full name: Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, or the "Movement of the Party of God's Nobles") spokesperson Hussein al-Musawi as linking the rebel push to the ceasefire with Israel. "We also realise that the movement of the armed [Sunni] terrorist groups ... are moving according to American will and wanted to open this front to relieve pressure on Israel,” he said.
According to estimates, more than 600,000 people have died in the Syrian civil war, including more than 300,000 civilians.
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