Turkish Offensive in Syria - Part 1

( Map Source: AlJazeera)

The recent events in Syria is nothing short of a potboiler beginning to churn the middle east. Israel’s war in Gaza and later in Lebanon against Hezbollah seems to be a calibarted effort to dismantle and degrade the Iranian threat in the middle while keeping it alive for strategic purposes. The opportunity was perfect Sultan Erdogan to take advantage of the situation and turn the tide in Turkey’s favour for its strategic objectives in North & North Eastern Syria. Let us try and make sense of the Turkish offensive its jihadist militias in Syria and how this impacts the region and the world.

The main group that took part of the offensive in Aleppo and is threatening Hama is HTS — Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (''Organization for the Liberation of the Levant”) They split away from al-Qaeda. They stopped support for the global jihad and focus on toppling Assad and fighting Iran. The other group that js active in the current events is the SNA, the Syrian National Army. This is a Turkish proxy — the Turkish answer to the Wagner Group. They seek to topple Assad, but they are also interested in helping Türkiye prevent the rise of PKK dominated Kurdish enclaves in Syria.

Most belong to HTS. which split from Al-Qaeda in 2016. However, since 2018 HTS is designated a foreign terrorist group by the US State Department. HTS is active around Aleppo and Hama. The commander of HTS is Abu Muhammad al-Jolani. Earlier he headed Nusra Front (Al Qaeda in Syria). After HTS split from AlQaeda, he claims to have distanced himself from AQ. There is still a $10 million bounty on his head by the U.S. In addition to the HTS operation, there is another offensive going on simultaneously. This second battle is by the SNA (Syrian National Army - a Turkey funded Syrian rebel umbrella organization). The SNA operation is mainly targeting Kurdish forces north of Aleppo

HTS takes lead, but following brigades also participate in offensive against Assad forces:

-Faylak Al Sham (Sham Corps)

-Jaysh al-Izza (Army of Pride)

-Suqour al-Sham (Sham Falcons)

-Ahrar alSham (Sham Free Men)

-Turkistan Brigade

-Ansar alTawhid (Supporters of Monotheism)

The Turkistan Brigade is interesting. Most of its members are jihadists from a/ Central Asia (Uzbeks, Tadjiks), b/ Chinese Uyghurs or c/ non-Syrian Arab fighters from the Middle East or Europe. Most came already to Syria for jihad in 2012-2015. Almost all SNA groups are involved in fighting Kurds north of Aleppo. But 3 SNA battalions are part of HTS led offensive against Assad:

-Suleiman Shah Division

-Hamza Division

-AlJabha alShamiya (Levant Front) There are no foreign fighters in SNA, some are Syrian Turkman.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Syrian National Army (SNA) found themselves the beneficiaries of neighboring conflicts, an opportunistic patron in Ankara, the recent election in the United States and a dynastic dictatorship in Damascus weakened by civil war, sanctions and corruption. There were two concurrent battles that started last Wednesday: The first, named “Repelling Aggression,” was led by HTS, and the second was the “Dawn of Freedom,” launched by the SNA, a collection of Islamist insurgents and former Free Syrian Army factions now refashioned into Turkish janissaries.

The SNA managed to seize strategic military positions, such as the Kuweires air base; the Aleppo thermal power station, a key source of electricity located 15 miles east of Aleppo; and the defense factories at a military-industrial complex southeast of Aleppo. They swept in all but uncontested, barely any shots fired. Coinciding with the dramatic takeover of Aleppo was a push by HTS into the countryside of northern Hama, a sweep of 39 villages in the space of 48 hours, and a similar Syrian troop withdrawal from the town of Maaret al-Numan, south of Idlib. HTS practically controls all of Idlib, and large parts of Aleppo, Syria’s largest governorate.

HTS fighters briefly entered Hama City, but the takeover of yet another provincial capital appears to have been a diversion, aimed at delaying the arrival of regime reinforcements in Aleppo so that HTS could consolidate its hold there.

Turkey allowed the operation to happen owing to a unique concatenation of circumstances:

• First, the failure of attempted negotiations over reconciliation and normalization with Damascus.

• Second, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s desire for greater bargaining power with the incoming White House, given the expectation that Donald Trump will inevitably withdraw U.S. forces from northeastern Syria, as he’s long said he intends to do.

• Third, the prospect that Kurdish militias dominated by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, operating under the umbrella of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, will no longer pose a significant threat on Turkey’s southern doorstep so long as they aren’t protected by American F-16s from above and U.S. commandos from below.

• Fourth, the dilapidated state of Bashar al-Assad’s main ground forces, a consortium of militias assembled by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has been given a drubbing by Israel over the past year.

• Fifth, Russia’s redeployment of assets to Ukraine and its desire to see a “peace dividend” in Syria, beginning with the lifting of Western sanctions.

Assad crumbled not just because of a well-planned jihadist campaign but because 13 years of civil war have left his army a husk, and his soldiers demoralized. He mortgaged the security to Iran and Russia, which did the heavy lifting in retaking Aleppo and defeating Western-backed rebels in southern Syria. Shiite militias built or imported by Iran’s Quds Force, or Hezbollah or their Iraqi confederates, eclipsed the role played by conventional Syrian soldiers, whose rank and file are mostly Sunni.

The Turkish-backed operation coincided with the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire, meant to end the long Israeli bombardment of Lebanon. Hezbollah’s decision to enter a war against Israel led to Israel’s assassination of its senior leadership, including its long-serving secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah; the neutralization of its middle cadres via exploding pagers; and the destruction of as much as 80% of its arsenal.

With a depleted Party of God on the Syrian battlefield, and Iran too preoccupied picking up the pieces of its shattered project in the Levant, Turkish-backed rebels found the perfect moment to strike. Russia, too, has been busy elsewhere and could put up no real countermeasures. Vladimir Putin is now months away from entering the fourth year of a war in Ukraine that was meant to be over in two weeks.

Russia has somewhat reduced its footprint in Syria, eliminating the role of the mercenary Wagner Group following its mutiny in Russia a year ago, and removing some of its most advanced air defense platforms. HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani’s tenure in the ranks of transnational jihadism is as long-standing as it is fraught with ruptures and reinventions. Known at the time as Jabhat al-Nusra, HTS broke with al Qaeda in 2016 and has since gone to war with its current affiliate in Syria, Hurras al-Din

Jolani is best understood as a Syrian cut from the same cloth as the Assads: brutal, cynical and triangulating, with a tendency to always come out on top. He outsmarted the leaders of the world’s two largest terrorist organizations. In the spring of 2013, without consulting the Syrian branch of ISI, Baghdadi announced publicly that the two groups were now one — the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Jolani refused to go along with the scheme. Instead, he declared allegiance to al Qaeda to maintain the loyalty of his men. Most of them joined Baghdadi, especially the non-Syrians among them

Three years later, Jolani would pull off a sleight of hand with al Qaeda’s then-leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Initially, he convinced Zawahiri’s representatives to accept public severance of ties as a deception to convince the U.S. and the West not to target his insurgency in Syria. In time, however, the face grew to fit the mask and al-Nusra really broke with al Qaeda. It renounced transnational jihadism in favor of the nationalist variety and got down to the sort of state-building enterprise al Qaeda never managed. The organization later renamed itself, twice, ending up as HTS, which stands for the Levant Liberation Committee.

Its reinvention is part genuine evolution — a technocratic Salafism — and part public relations gambit to persuade external stakeholders it is no longer a threat to anyone save Assad and his saviors. Jolani followed events in Afghanistan closely and wants HTS to become a downier, more tolerant equivalent of the Taliban.

Jolani’s argument to the West and Arab states runs parallel to the Taliban’s: He is not only preferable to the terrorists who go abroad in search of innocent blood to spill; he is at war with them. Jolani says he has no quarrel with Baghdad so long as it keeps its militias at home. Jolani has paid specific attention to reassuring Christian and Kurdish civilians now under his dominion, and has even offered safe passage of Kurdish militants out of Aleppo with their weapons.

Russia may be strategically wedded to Iran in Syria, Ukraine and Yemen, but that doesn’t mean it enjoys seeing itself as the junior partner in the relationship. Chatter among Russian military bloggers is heavily slanted toward castigating Assad for causing this mess, which they think he alone should clean up. Ukraine’s military intelligence service, the HUR, stated that Russian military officers and diplomats are leaving Damascus in a hurry. Other assets are said to be abandoning forward operating bases and relocating to the Russian airbase in Latakia

Putin and Erdogan are great power rivals, but their relationship is built around a common disdain for the U.S. and the West, and a mutual respect that only seems to increase the more one gets the better of the other. Central to their dispute is the perennial Turkish national security priority: the PKK, whose Syrian branch is currently the United States’ main partner in countering the remnants of the Islamic State.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, formerly the powerful head of the MIT, the Turkish intelligence service, said around the same time that Assad was not interested in normalization. Fed up with talking, Ankara finally decided to do the other thing after months of keeping HTS at bay. In 2017, by way of fostering Turkish-Syrian reconciliation, Putin came up with the idea of reviving the Adana Agreement of 1998, which was reached in October of that year.

It aimed at expelling Abdullah Ocalan, the head of the PKK, and his paramilitaries from Syria and called for a safe zone of three miles, where the Turkish Army could enter in pursuit of Kurdish separatists, but only after informing their Syrian counterparts and getting their approval ahead of time.

Erdogan agreed to these constraints in principle but demanded that the safe zone be expanded to 22 miles. During consecutive rounds of negotiations, the Syrians refused the depth Erdogan was demanding for his buffer zone, but agreed to up the ante from 3 miles to 6 in late 2022

In mid-2024, he dropped his demand for an immediate withdrawal of Turkish troops from the four main cities they currently occupy: Al-Bab, Azaz, Jarablus and Afrin. He said he’d settle for a mere commitment to withdraw, followed by a three-to-five-year timetable for its execution.

In reality, however, Assad was bargaining with more than he could ever deliver. So Assad demanded withdrawal from Jarablus first, then set a timetable for leaving Al-Bab, Manbij and Afrin. Erdogan, meanwhile, wanted Syrian help to to dismantle the Kurdish missile system in Tel Rifaat, north of Aleppo, which was manned by PKK-aligned militias that in 2018 had fled Afrin, now in range of that system’s rockets. Now with Iraqi mediation, the regime agreed to a plan for a joint operation aimed at expelling the U.S.-backed Kurds in eastern Syria. That plan remained in place until August but fell apart thereafter due to disagreements over the specifics.

During his visit to Saudi Arabia for the Arab and Islamic summit on Nov. 11, Assad turned down Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s request to meet with Erdogan, a snub which followed earlier refusals by Assad since 2022 reconciliation talks got underway. Assad also wouldn’t budge on the 22-mile buffer zone demand. The furthest he’d go was 10. This was the final breaking point when Turkey decided to ditch Assad regime for inability to come to an agreement and launched its campaign by HTS & SNA.

Further or its part, the U.S. is sitting this affair out, until and unless HTS and its confederates threaten the SDF on the eastern banks of the Euphrates, at least while American boots are still on the ground there. Amos Hochstein, the departing U.S. special envoy to the region, is reportedly discussing sanctions relief for Assad with the Emiratis in exchange for the regime’s severance of all ties with Tehran. US is primary aim is to finish off the Iranian Axis and Assad is rumoured to have sent message to Israel via UAE that cut off ties with Hezbollah, IRGC & Shia Militas and Western Bloc could allow regime to survive with a Russian enclave on Mediterranean.

Suffice to Assad inability to negotiate with Turkey despite Russian pressure bought a castostrophe for Syria once again. Erdogan milked the opportunity to push ahead his neo ottoman dreams while putting Kurdish threat far away from Turkish borders. The United States is meanwhile rejoicing in the background as Turkish jihadist militias now control Aleppo, Idlib & nearing on Hama province potentially severing regime’s link to Alawite enclave of Latakia & Tartus where the Russians have bases. HTS is now 20 miles away from Latakia and Russian Navy is taking out few of its resources off the Syrian coast.

The conclusion is unmistakable: The sultan, despised by most actors involved in Syria, holds all the cards now. The rise of imperial turkey & muslim brotherhood & salafist terror outfits in Levant unereves the Gulf Monarchies and Iran equally which makes American security cover even more important. MBS in Saudi is already negotiating a security deal with USA & this also puts Israel as dominant player in the region who is continuing to further degrade Hezbollah in Lebanon and even repel Iranian military cargo into Syria.

Turkey’s Erdogan becomes a pivotal player in the regional chessboard. An Imperial Turkey has the capacity to defy USA & yet work with China who might break bread with it to fend off central asian Jihadists with aid of Pakistan. The Chaos induced by Israeli & US smothering of Hezbollah and Shia Crescent with Turkey’s manoeuvres in Syria have put the Arab monarchies on the edge. They dare wont defy US on diluting Dollar or sit in the lap of Russia or China specially under Trump.

US is back in the region, Israel dominant thanks to Sultan Erdogan. Russia’s Putin has no option but to talk to Erdogan, engage Bibi and establish lines with Trump to secure Russian interests in Syria and will be interesting to see how this affects negotiations for a ceasefire in Ukraine. But will Americans pull out of skeleton presence from NE Syria as Trump has promised. If yes what happens to SDF (YPG or the PKK) which Turkey & its militias in HTS are eyeing as ultimate goal. An imperialist Turkey might further expand its in enclave in North Eastern Syria after US departure with a Weakened Assad tottering on with Russian crutches. !