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The Rebel Offensive in Syria Has Global Connections.
The Syrian city of Aleppo is back in the global spotlight. Eight years ago, Aleppo was embroiled in a pitched battle that produced large-scale war atrocities and underscored the brutal fighting that characterized Syria’s civil war. That battle was ultimately won by the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, backed by his Russian and Iranian allies. But the anti-government rebels were not defeated, only displaced to an enclave in neighboring Idlib province, where they consolidated their territorial control ever since. Late last week, those rebels launched a large and long-planned offensive to retake Aleppo. They have now pushed past it to retake Hama further to the south along the route to Damascus.
The war in Syria, now nearly 15 years old, is a product of the pro-democracy movements that swept across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011. After early successes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, those movements were subsequently turned back by the region’s autocrats, with Tunisia and Egypt once again ruled by dictators, and Libya, Yemen and Syria descending into civil wars from which none has fully emerged.
Since the Syrian civil war began in 2011, the fighting between Assad’s forces and various alliances of rebel groups has led to external interventions by a host of major and regional powers, as well as nonstate actors. Those interventions not only bolstered the internally warring parties, but also highlighted the complexity of the conflict. For instance, while the U.S. and Russia primarily intervened to support opposing sides, they also joined forces to defeat the Islamic State after it took advantage of the chaos to seize wide swathes of Syrian—and Iraqi—territory. Or consider that Washington’s principal partners on the ground in the fight against the Islamic State were Kurdish rebel groups that were not only opposed to Assad’s regime, but were considered enemies by Turkey, a U.S. NATO ally.