#'During the summer of 2016, the Syrian regime scored two strategic victories over opposition forces: it took control of Daraya, a suburb of Damascus, and imposed a siege on Aleppo. On both these fronts, major factions of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) were conspicuous by their absence.#Since mid-2015, most non-jihadist rebel factions have been marginalized in the fight against the regime, not so much because the FSA no longer exists, as sometimes claimed, but because their backers ask them to deescalate the fight against Assad forces to be able to focus on other enemies instead. This marginalization has two consequences. First, it has made Assad and his allies confident enough in their capacity to militarily defeat the rebellion that they felt no need to seriously take part in political negotiations or abide by negotiated truces. Second, it has left the jihadist and Salafist factions of the rebellion practically alone on the battlefields, granting them near monopoly over the revolutionary discourse.
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While the strategy of selecting factions to pull away from the battlefield so that they could fight jihadists had proved to be a failure, the alternative strategy was to impose nationwide truces with the regime. On two occasions, a Russian-American deal was reached to impose a truce on belligerent forces. While the truce of February-March 2016 led to a reduction of fighting for over a month, the one in September 2016 was never effectively implemented.#The Assad regime and Russia clearly had no intention of respecting their engagements and saw the truces simply as a way to gain time and to test the determination of the rebellion and its supposed allies. For the regime, truces are not a first step towards a#political negotiation but rather a step towards the complete surrender of rebels, as was the case for local truces in Damascus and Homs.
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While almost all of the opposition forces rallied to the principle of a political solution and de-escalation with the regime, Jabhat al-Nusra/Fateh al-Sham reclaims the revolutionary discourse and presents itself as the only force striving for the definitive fall of the Assad regime. Those accepting compromise with Assad were called defeatists, if not traitors. The failure of the truces proved the jihadists right. The regime had no intention to respect them and diplomacy has not could not save Aleppo. Only the military action led by Jabhat Fateh al-Sham in August was successful in breaking the siege. During the regime’s major offensive in Aleppo since April 2016, Jabhat al-Nusra/Fateh al-Sham seems to be the only force capable of facing Assad forces. Within FSA factions, morale was at its lowest. During the so-called truce of spring 2016, Jabhat al-Nusra recruited fighters by the hundreds, mainly among
die-hard FSA fighters who were convinced not by the ideology of the group but rather by its will to fight.#
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