If you didn’t know any better, you might have thought Syria’s 13-year-old civil war was largely over. The conflict, sparked by a peaceful rebellion against dictator Bashar Assad in 2011, only to descend into factional infighting and intervention from numerous foreign powers, was arguably the Middle East’s deadliest since Lebanon’s own civil war in the 1970s and ’80s, which carved up that small Arab state into competing fiefdoms. Assad, whose family has ruled Syria since the early 1970s, came out on top thanks to sheer brutality and the valuable assistance of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, his biggest backers.
Last week, however, the civil war everybody thought was over reignited in the blink of an eye. The remaining rebel battalions in the northwest, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTC), a former al-Qaida affiliate, shocked Assad’s government with a blitzkrieg offensive the Syrian army wasn’t prepared for. HTC, with the aid of several Turkish-backed Syrian factions, made a beeline toward Aleppo, the city Assad recaptured in 2016 after four years of intense airstrikes and ground combat. Yet the rebels retook the city in days. The Syrian army and pro-government forces melted away like a chocolate bar in the dog days of summer. The entire episode seemed like a dream. “As I entered Aleppo, I kept telling myself this is impossible. How did this happen?” one Syrian who fled Aleppo eight years earlier asked.
It’s the same question Assad was probably asking as he reportedly fled Syria for Russia. The answer, though, is relatively easy to find. The Syrian government’s main foreign backers, who saved Assad from exile or worse when his position looked even wobblier than it does today, are busy dealing with their own problems. And the corrupt, rapacious, dictatorial kleptocracy they’ve bailed out for well over a decade was thought to be stronger than it really was.
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