Following the defeat of government forces loyal to the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, in a matter of days, rebel fighters claimed to have taken control of the Syrian capital, Damascus, early on Sunday.
The 13-year civil war that has devastated the ancient land will enter a new phase with the rebels’ claim.
“We declare the city of Damascus free from the tyrant Bashar al-Assad,” said Hassan Abdul-Ghani, the senior commander of the terrorist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, in a WhatsApp post. “To the displaced people around the world, Free Syria awaits you.”
The rebel’s assertion has not been independently verified by NBC News.
It was not immediately clear where Assad was.
The HTS militants’ abrupt takeover of the city was viewed as a setback to the external forces—Iran, Russia, and Iranian-backed Hezbollah—that have allowed Assad to maintain power for 24 years.
Shortly after rebels began attacking government soldiers in Homs, Syria, on Friday, leaving three of the country’s five main cities under their control and with nothing to stop them from advancing on the Syrian capital, Damascus fell. A day after claiming to have taken Daraa, HTS rebels declared on Saturday that they had taken the city.
With roughly 900 American soldiers in northern Syria, the United States has been keeping a careful eye on events there.
In less than two weeks, the HTS rebels also took control of the central city of Hama, where government forces were driven out on Thursday, and the northern city of Aleppo.
Since Assad regained control of Aleppo in 2016 thanks to a vicious air campaign by Russian airplanes, the HTS onslaught was the first rebel attack on the city.
Hassan Abdul-Ghani, senior commander of the HTS-led forces, wrote on X on Friday, “Thanks to God, our forces are still moving steadily toward the city of Homs after convoys carrying hundreds of displaced people from Homs arrived to deter Assad’s aggression against their city.”
HTS’s swift progress coincides with a flurry of new combat in the Middle East, as Israel, supported by the United States, attempts to drive out Hamas in Gaza and uphold a precarious ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah and Hamas are both affiliated with Iran.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, pro-Assad troops were engaged in combat with Kurdish forces that took control of government buildings in eastern Syria, close to the cities of Raqqa and Deir Ez-Zour, on Friday.
The United States and the United Nations have classified HTS as a terrorist organization. It was formed from the previous Al Qaeda offshoot, Jabhat al-Nusra.
It is one among several opposing forces in Syria that are battling to overthrow the Assad government, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians since the start of the civil war over 14 years ago.
Assad still controls 70% of Syria after a ceasefire in 2020, but 6.8 million Syrians have left the nation.
Numerous people have fled to Europe, where the unexpected flood of Syrian migrants has stoked far-right anti-immigrant movements from Portugal to Poland.
According to experts, HTS’s recent combat victories are the result of four years of efforts to provide the opposition forces with drones and other advanced weapons of war so they can compete with Assad’s army.
In a post on X, Charles Lister, director of the Syria program at the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank, stated that the growth of units… and extensive domestic rocket and missile production have produced a force that Assad’s regime has found extremely difficult to repel, let alone outmaneuver.
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