After nearly five years of being written off as a frozen conflict, a new and unprecedented chapter was written over the weekend in Syria’s 13-year civil war. Last Wednesday, rebels in the north of the country launched a lightning-ground offensive against regime forces and managed, within 72 hours, to take over the major metropolis of Aleppo.
A day later, rebels captured Tal Rifaat, the last major stronghold in northwest Syria that had been held by a third group, the Kurdish-dominated and US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
The significance and speed of the rebel victory in Aleppo cannot be overstated. From 2012 to 2016, thousands of rebel and regime soldiers died in the city—then divided between government and opposition enclaves—in gruelling house-to-house battles, with fighters from both sides dying in droves to capture individual streets and move the front line forward meters at a time.
Rebels were expelled from Aleppo in December 2016 following Russia’s intervention on the side of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, in a major blow that preceded a humiliating string of losses for Syria’s opposition over the next eight years. That the entire city would fall so quickly in the past week signals the extent to which the global balance of power has shifted along with the priorities of key regional players—in particular, Russia and Iran.
Unlike in 2016, during last week’s initial rebel advance, Russia’s military assets in Syria—in particular, its powerful air force—did almost nothing to intervene to protect government forces, allowing the rebel ground offensive to advance 20 miles unimpeded toward Aleppo from an opposition stronghold in the province of Idlib.
Russia only began to launch air strikes in the days after Aleppo was captured in order to halt the rebel advance as it moved farther south and deeper into regime territory, approaching the entrances to Hama in the centre of the country.
To many, Moscow’s failure to act quickly in the first three days of the campaign appears inexplicable, considering how frequently Russian air power has been deployed over the past year against a low-level Islamic State (IS) insurgency in Syria’s central desert area, a far less strategic region and located far from Russia’s large Hmeimim air base along Syria’s coast.
By contrast, Aleppo and Idlib are immediately adjacent to Hmeimim—one of Russia’s largest military bases outside the former Soviet Union—and one that Moscow has relied on since 2018 to transport weapons and thousands of mercenaries and soldiers to war zones across Africa. A symbol of Moscow’s presence in the country, Hmeimim has regularly been targeted by drone strikes carried out by rebels, whose rapid gains over the past week will further threaten the facility along with other key Russian assets in the area.
That Russia did not immediately intervene to arrest the rebel advance has led many to question Moscow’s calculus, including whether the Kremlin intentionally withheld its firepower as a way to pressure al-Assad to pursue certain political aims—in particular, rapprochement with Turkey, the last patron of Syria’s rebel movement.
Since 2022, Russia has sponsored mediation efforts between al-Assad and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with the latter hoping to reach a political solution to the conflict that would allow the 4.7 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey to return to their homes and solicit al-Assad’s support to counter the US-backed SDF.
For Russia, an internationally recognised political solution would help lift sanctions on Syria and allow for greater investment in the country’s reconstruction—which estimates suggest will cost several hundred billion dollars. Russian companies would be poised to benefit from that effort based on agreements reached with Syria’s government since 2017.
It would also reduce the burden of Russia having to provide for Syria’s defence at a time when Moscow is believed to be suffering some of its heaviest losses yet in Ukraine. However, despite this—and following several failed attempts—al-Assad and Erdogan still have yet to meet or break ground on negotiations, purportedly due to ongoing disputes over the status of tens of thousands of Turkish troops still in Syria.
Al-Assad’s failure to approach talks in good faith has led many to suspect that Russia and Turkey had prior knowledge of the rebel attack on Aleppo and allowed it to occur in order to bring al-Assad to the table. According to Reuters (citing opposition sources with ties to Turkish intelligence), before last week’s assault, Turkish authorities reportedly gave rebel forces the green light to attack Aleppo.
The idea that the Russians themselves also would have had advance knowledge of the attack is not implausible. Rebels in Idlib first began to publicly claim in early October 2024 that the movement planned to launch a ground campaign to capture Aleppo in response to an escalated campaign of suicide drone attacks carried out by Russian and al-Assad regime forces that began over the summer.
In October, the decision was purportedly vetoed by Turkey, whose military has deployed thousands of troops to rebel-held areas since 2020 to ward off assaults by the al-Assad regime. This presence has given Turkey significant leverage over rebels, which Ankara has used to enforce agreements reached with Russia in late 2017 that limited the areas that rebels are allowed to deploy to specifically delineated parts of Idlib province.
