Turkey Reverses a Decade of Russian Syria Intervention in 4 Days

Forget Saraqib. After taking Saraqib on day 3 Al-Qaeda yesterday on day 4 drove down the M5 highway taking Maarat al-Numan, Khan Shaykhun, and Hama, that’s 80 kilometers in a day taking town after town.

The Syrian Army first fled Hama (population 1 million), allowing Al-Qaeda/HTS vanguard to enter it unopposed in the evening. But during the night, the Syrian army bolstered by motivated local NDF militias rallied, came back, and now it was the HTS that turned around.

The SAA-NDF continued the counter-attack (not yet a counter-offensive), taking back a few more towns to Hama’s north, one after serious fighting.

SAA took back towns north of Hama, now trying to move further up to Morek

The SAA then has fight left in it, but the scale of the disaster is unparalleled. It’s also not yet over, to the north in provincial Aleppo HTS advances and Syrian retreats continue. The only saving grace is that some of the real-estate SAA is withdrawing from is being occupied by the Kurdish-dominated SDF (repeating a dynamic from the war-start) rather than the HTS jihadistan.

Al-Qaeda/HTS gains do not look so large on a map, but the political map is misleading. The vast majority of Syria’s population resides in a narrow strip along the west of the country.

In just days the government has lost roughly a third of the population under its control, its domain shrinking from encompassing 60% of the country’s population to something like 40%. Al-Qaeda’s domains meanwhile are swelled by up to 3 million subjects, including 2 million in Aleppo which is nearly the size of the capital and until the war was Syria’s largest.

The opposition has never controlled a continuous territory of this size, and never before had full control of Aleppo.

This means that the greatest part of what has been accomplished since the Russian entry into Syria in 2015 has been wiped clean. In some ways, the situation is actually worse.

For example, the very first successful Russian-backed offensive had the Syrians in early 2016 relieving the siege of Nubl and Zahraa, a small Shia enclave to the north of Aleppo besieged by Salafist cutthroats. Well yesterday the entire enclave was overrun by Salafist HTS and most of the population fled.

So where before 2016 they were surrounded, but at least still existed, these communities are now gone.

The HTS offensive was coordinated with SNA groups which are directly on Turkey’s payroll and have long traded in any ideological pursuits for becoming Erdogan’s enforcers vs the Kurds for breadcrumbs off his table. HTS is more independent but Turkey still quietly backs it out of its own calculation. Jolani is nothing if not an adaptable team player who knows which side of his bread is buttered. Turkey provided intelligence, logistics and planning support for the offensive and gave the final go-ahead.

In other words, with Russia tied down in Ukraine, Putin’s S-400 customer and ice-cream partner took the opening to reverse years of Russian effort in Syria at a stroke.

Those 34 Turks the Russian air force killed in 2020 (after the Turkish air force killed a Russian pilot in 2015 first), well who’s laughing now?

But the story is even more complex than Erdogan simply taking the opportunity to humiliate Moscow. What he was actually after was something else.

Throughout 2024 he had been pitching “normalization” to Syria. Meaning the pair would restore diplomatic relations and Erdogan would slowly nudge his SNA auxiliaries to reconcile with Damascus which would accommodate their local ambitions, but in return Assad would break relations with the Kurdish-dominated SDF and start on the road of becoming Erdogan’s tool against the Kurds.

The Russians saw the proposal as a welcome shift from Ankara, but it was too risky for Assad.

The government and the Kurds are the only two major factions of the civil war that have successfully avoided any major fighting. Why start on this uncertain path for the unreliable Erdogan (was a personal friend of Assad before insta-betraying him in 2011) while the Turk held the SNA & HTS cards as a Damocles Sword above his head?

The informal non-aggression with the Kurds has not only been invaluable for the Syrians, but the Kurds also have direct Pentagon backing, so who knows what additional dangers the weak Syrian government would be taking on?

Displeased, the Ottoman nostalgic in Ankara activated the Sunni fanatics in Idlib as a way to pressure Assad into a deal. Instead, the Syrian army was caught with its pants down, and HTS waltzed into Aleppo, surprising Erdogan who had given up the regime-change dream years ago.

The scale of the HTS success is actually a mixed blessing for Turkey, since it has led to the SDF turf actually expanding as it fills up some of the vacuum left behind by the government. And while the paid-for SNA is dutifully moving against the Kurds in rural Aleppo, the clever Jolani has so far been studiously avoiding clashing with the Kurds, just as Assad did before him.

Meanwhile, an advisor to the Taliban (who recently hosted Shoigu in Kabul) is calling on the HTS to avoid dealings with the US, and seek a rapprochement with Iran and Russia instead.

But Jolani is way ahead of him, he kicked off the offensive with a statement in Russian calling on Russia to not tie itself to Assad and a wish to become Russia’s partner.

Optimistic much? Well if Jolani’s main backer can get a Russian pipeline, S-400, get ice cream with Putin (after murdering a Russian pilot), and apply for SCO and BRICS, the Al-Qaeda leader can perhaps legitimately ask on what grounds should Putin discriminate against him?

These days the ISIS veteran keeps a closer shave than Ramzan Kadyrov, the Islamist in Putin’s entourage who surely has a higher Russian body count than Jolani.

For why the SAA broke multiple explanations have been offered. 1) The relative lack of Russian support:

[A]s an opposition fighter on the Saraqib front told the author, “the jets are striking, but at a slower pace than all the battles I have fought since the beginning of the revolution.”

The lack of Russian air involvement may hint at one reason for the rapid collapse of regime lines. The Russians have spent years gradually emplacing Syrian units that they support across the Idlib frontline. The regime’s 30th Division – closely backed by Russia – took over the primary defense responsibilities of west Aleppo following the 2020 ceasefire. It is possible that Russian commanders were supposed to play a key role in command and control of these Syrian units in case of any opposition attack, in which case their absence now would have induced a significant amount of chaos through the chain of command.

Regardless, Russian jets have yet to bomb anywhere close to the degree they have in the past, and regime lines have now collapsed to the Aleppo suburbs. The opposition is still suffering high casualties from the fighting, but as long as they can maintain unmolested supply lines and functioning fighting positions on the frontlines, they stand a good change of securing their gains.

2) Corruption in the ranks:

[P]ro-regime complaint pages have for many years complained about the widespread practice of ‘tafyish’ here – paying bribes to unit commanders for extended leave. This has caused many positions to be severely undermanned, as much of each deployed unit has actually paid their way back home.

Undermanned, lower tier units caught off guard fled at the first sign of contact, many seem to have been killed, others captured. The regime, as usual, has relied on its artillery and air force to try and blunt the advance. Many of the opposition dead have been killed this way (though there are several pictures showing opposition infantry ambushed and killed during the attack as well).

3) And even well-meaning Russian reform that didn’t mesh well with Syrian military culture:

Since 2018, Russian officers in Syria have attempted to reform the way in which senior Syrian officers operate on the battlefield. Long-time watchers of Syria’s war will remember that for most of the war, senior regime commanders were constantly being killed in battles.

According to a Syrian officer the author spoke with in 2019, the Russians attempted to mitigate this issue by encouraging regime officers to stop leading from the frontlines and instead operate from far in the rear, where they were safer and theoretically could more easily organize their forces.

This change in practice was apparent in the 2018 East Ghouta offensive, and especially during the 2019 northwest offensive, both of which saw a far reduced number of senior regime deaths.

Now, with the launch of this newest opposition offensive, senior commanders who have been ingrained with leading from the rear were not present when their units came under attack and communications lost. These units, unable to contact their battalion or brigade commanders, were then left to make decisions on their own, a practice not common to Syrian military doctrine.

This may help explain the complete collapse of command communication (which has been confirmed by several regime fighters), and the resulting case where some units attempted to fight while others simply ran.