Max Boot
The Syrian civil war began in 2011 and never really ended. The fighting has claimed about half a million lives and forcibly displaced more than half of Syria’s inhabitants. But, following a ceasefire agreement negotiated in 2020 by Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, combat subsided and Syria fell off the front pages. Bashar al-Assad, the Russian- and Iranian-backed strongman, was left in control of all of the major cities and roughly 70 percent of the country. A variety of opposition groups ran the rest — including Kurdish forces in the northeast assisted by the U.S. military.
In recent years, moderate Arab regimes, with quiet Israeli and U.S. support, have been trying to bring Assad back into the fold — to “normalize” him as just another Arab despot and thereby to try to wean him away from his Iranian sponsors. This fall, the Biden administration reportedly had been discussing, with the encouragement of the United Arab Emirates, the possibility of not renewing the toughest U.S. sanctions on Syria when they expire on Dec. 20.
Now the geopolitical landscape has shifted dramatically following the news that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Islamist rebel group, has captured Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, which Assad had reclaimed in 2016. The Syrian government is desperately trying, along with its backers in Tehran and Moscow, to stanch the rebel onslaught. The front lines have already shifted south of Aleppo. The Syrian regime is now in a battle to hold onto the city of Hama (site of a notorious massacre carried out by Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, in 1982).
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