Whatever pretence there was left in Syria’s “cessation of hostilities” (CoH)—which was never more than a reduction in hostilities—enacted at midnight on 26/27 February is now at an end. Russia and the regime of Bashar al-Assad have never ceased attempts to militarily weaken the armed opposition and escalated with a concerted campaign of aerial bombardment against Aleppo City on 22 April. The insurgency fully mobilized in response on 5 May with a major offensive south of the city. The dynamics set in place by Russia’s intervention—the bolstering of the Assad regime and the strengthening of extremist forces in the insurgency—have been in full view with this latest crisis, as has the longer-term trend of the United States moving toward the position of Assad, Russia, and especially Iran in Syria.
Jaysh al-Fatah and the Aleppo Offensive
The Jaysh al-Fatah (Army of Conquest) coalition that drove the regime from Idlib City in March 2015 and expelled it from Idlib Province in September was reconstituted on Monday. Faylaq al-Sham (The Syrian Legion/Corps) has rejoined Jaysh al-Fatah, having left over ideological disagreements with Jund al-Aqsa, a group that started as an al-Qaeda front and is now—after its al-Qaeda leadership left—trending into the Islamic State’s (IS’s) orbit. Probably for this reason, Jund al-Aqsa has been excluded from Jaysh al-Fatah this time around. Faylaq al-Sham is a moderate Islamist group that has been drawn closer to the West recently, including having been seen in the last few months operating TOW anti-tank missiles, while expanding its influence throughout Aleppo. The only other change is the addition of the largely-Uyghur al-Hizb al-Islami al-Turkistani fil Bilad al-Sham (The Turkistan Islamic Party in Syria, or TIP)*, a Jihadi-Salafist group that is heavily dependent on Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch.
Jaysh al-Fatah retains as its dominant forces al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham. Of the other components of the original Jaysh al-Fatah: the smaller Islamist groups Ajnad al-Sham (not to be confused with al-Ittihad al-Islami li-Ajnad al-Sham, the Sufi rebel group in East Ghouta that recently merged its forces in that area with Faylaq al-Rahman) and Liwa al-Haqq remain, as does Jaysh al-Sunna, a small, non-ideological faction that was absorbed by Ahrar in February.
When the offensive began in the early afternoon (British time) yesterday, it honed in on the regime-held Khan Tuman, south-west of Aleppo City, with reports of fighting in the adjacent district of al-Khalidiya and insurgent shelling against Barnah and Khalasa. It is likely that the intention is to clear the ground for a run at the important town of al-Hader further to the south and just east of al-Eis, which al-Nusra-led insurgents took over temporarily on 2 April and where a regime plane was shot down on 5 April. Iranian-led forces conquered al-Eis on 12 April, sapping the momentum of this insurgent push. The next attempt was not long in coming, however, when simultaneous offensives in southern Aleppo, Latakia, and Hama erupted on 18 April.
It was Ajnad that made the first formal announcement that Jaysh al-Fatah was moving in southern Aleppo and Ajnad and Jund al-Aqsa were the most visible for some time in terms of the social media and video output from Aleppo. Soon enough the centralized—effectively al-Nusra—output began. Al-Nusra deployed suicide bombers in Khan Tuman and the town appears to have fallen overnight. A video allegedly showing the capture of a member of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was filmed from a drone. Later in the day, Jaysh al-Fatah disclosed their capture of a foreign Shi’a jihadist, very likely an Afghan Hazara of Liwa Fatemiyoun, one of the many IRGC-run militias on which the Assad regime is now dependent for any offensive capacity and increasingly for defence, too.
Concurrent with this, in Zahraa district and New Aleppo on the western edge of Aleppo City and near the nearby military base, mainstream rebels vetted by the West recommenced an assault they had begun on 3 May, when Jaysh al-Tahrir (which contains the U.S.-vetted Division 46), Liwa Suqour al-Jabal, Division Sixteen, and (less formally in the U.S.-supported camp) al-Jabhat al-Shamiya (The Levant Front) were seen using TOWs.
Russia, meanwhile, was in the middle of staging a concert in Palmyra, a city whose partially-choreographed exchange between the pro-Assad coalition and IS had been the cause of such misplaced optimism in March when the propaganda of Assad guarding the boundary for civilization was so credulously accepted by so many. The concert was evidently meant to reinforce that narrative, but the pro-regime coalition’s responding to the Aleppo offensive by bombing the Kamouna refugee camp in the far-north of Idlib Province, thirty miles away from Aleppo City, killing thirty people and burning down more than fifty tents, was surely a far better indication of what Vladimir Putin and his client mean by “modern civilization“.
Al-Qaeda and the United States
The waves of insurgent offensives in Aleppo certainly have been pushed by al-Nusra, which found that during the reduction of violence the moderate opposition was reinvigorated. Without extreme violence imposed on Sunni communities by the Assad regime and its enablers, al-Nusra’s tactical usefulness to the opposition was diminished. For the first time in more than three years it was possible to hold peaceful protests of the kind that began the uprising. The nationalist, revolutionary discourse re-asserted itself, and it wasn’t long before al-Nusra cracked down, in Maarat al-Numan on 11 March, leading to a counter-reaction that threatened its long-term durability in Syria.
Needing to undermine the CoH, al-Nusra met with armed opposition leaders on about 20 March, Charles Lister reports. “They presented some convincing arguments,” an opposition commander who attended one of the meetings said. The argument doubtless will have been that the pro-regime forces continued their war against the rebellion, albeit at a lower level and in a more localized fashion, while the rebels were restrained from responding. This kind of one-sided restraint was never going to last, so al-Nusra had plenty to work with. “But,” added the commander, “mostly, it seemed we were being threatened: If we didn’t join the operation, we would be seen as an enemy.”
The U.S. has in recent weeks put a renewed emphasis on getting the mainstream rebellion to separate itself militarily from al-Nusra. While a defensible (and ultimately necessary) goal, the method has not been. As one FSA commander put it to Lister: “Don’t you think we would prefer not to have al-Nusra in our trenches? They represent everything we are opposed to. Sometimes, they are the same as the regime. But what can we do when our supposed friends abroad give us nothing to assert ourselves?” But rather than—finally—empower the moderate armed opposition so that it is not dependent on al-Nusra, instead, the U.S. effectively leveraged the prospect of Russian atrocities against its own allies and in practice tried to have them surrender Aleppo City to the pro-Assad forces.
On 20 April 2016, as Russia was clearly building up to an attack on Aleppo City, Colonel Steve Warren, the spokesman for Operation INHERENT RESOLVE, came very close to saying that the U.S. position was one of support for Russia’s airstrikes against Aleppo City. While “concerned” about the Russian moves, said Col. Warren, “it’s primarily al-Nusra who holds Aleppo, and of course, al-Nusra is not part of the cessation of hostilities.”
But the eastern part of Aleppo City that is out of regime control is not held “primarily” by al-Nusra. The pro-regime coalition recently took control of parts of north-western Aleppo Province, cutting the final Aleppine supply-line for the rebellion into Turkey on 2 February. The pro-regime coalition broke the incomplete sieges on Nubl and Zahra the next day and began to move against the provincial capital after that. Al-Nusra had withdrawn from northern Aleppo in August 2015—and remains largely absent from that area, having no more than 100 fighters in the Azaz pocket—redeploying those forces from Aleppo to Idlib. On 26 January 2016, as the pro-regime forces were advancing in Aleppo, al-Nusra sent a convoy of up to two-hundred vehicles that by one estimate constituted 1,000 fighters to Aleppo City. This immediately provoked resistance, however, especially from the local, Free Syrian Army-style groups but also from Ahrar al-Sham, and by mid-February more than two-thirds of al-Nusra’s arrivals had been sent out of Aleppo City, either taking up residence in the south (and some in the west) of Aleppo Province or returning to Idlib Province, where al-Nusra is strongest.
Key: Red (regime), Green (rebels and Jabhat al-Nusra), Yellow-Green (Kurdish PYD), Black (Islamic State). [Original map by Thomas van Linge]
Key: Red (regime), Green (rebels and Jabhat al-Nusra), Yellow-Green (Kurdish PYD), Black (Islamic State). [Original map by Thomas van Linge]
So, al-Nusra has a presence in Aleppo City, and Ahrar al-Sham, too, is present, as is the Abu Amara Special Forces, a unit of 300 rebels led by Muhanna Jaffala, which joined Ahrar in October while remaining somewhat autonomous. But the rebel-held areas of Aleppo City are overwhelmingly under the control of Fatah Halab (Aleppo Conquest), an operations room that specifically excludes al-Nusra.
Continued.....
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