Al-Qaeda Linked Militants Advance, ‘Encircle Damascus’

Forces seize Quneitra Province on the border with Israel

On Thursday, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamist militants captured the major city of Hama, just days after the fall of Aleppo. As some HTS forces entered the city, others continued south, circling the city en route to Homs and ultimately Damascus.

HTS is a merger of assorted Sunni Islamist factions, and it has historic ties to al-Qaeda. (Its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Juliani, founded al-Qaeda in Syria, later Jabhat al-Nusra, still later the core of HTS.) The group has already seized, Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city, and Hama, fourth largest. Two days later, HTS’s staggering territorial gains continue as the militants are now attacking Homs, Syria’s third largest city, and have already reached the Damascus suburbs. Damascus is Syria’s capital and second most-populous city.

The obvious next step after the fall of Hama was to advance southward and attack the city of Homs. Taking Hama and Homs effectively isolates the Alawites, Assad’s ruling group, on the coast, removing them as an obstacle to HTS al-Qaeda’s stated goal of taking Damascus.

It was just Saturday morning when HTS fighters first entered Homs itself, and by the evening they had reported capturing Homs. As the city is heavily defended, considerable fighting is expected, and thousands of residents have fled in anticipation of major conflict, adding to the general chaos.

Perhaps even more significant than the advance on Homs is that HTS forces have taken provinces further south. They say they have taken the Quneitra Province, which borders the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The southern cities of Deraa and Suwayda, near the Jordanian border, have also fallen. There are also reports that the ancient city of Palmyra, further to the east, has fallen.

Turkey has been increasingly public about their backing of the HTS with an eye toward regime change. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been saying Damascus is the goal for the extremist movement. The HTS has also reportedly been courting Israel for support.

Israel seems supportive of the idea of Islamist jihadists taking over a country on their border, though it has shored up IDF forces along the Golan Heights. Israel is said to be preparing for the collapse of the Assad government.

Israel has warned Iran against sending arms to the Assad government. Iran has reportedly begun evacuating some of personnel from Syria in the event the fighting worsens.  Iraq is reportedly also considering sending aid to Assad, though HTS has threatened to expand the war into Iraq if they get involved.

The official US position is that it prefers HTS to Assad, with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan saying the US “won’t cry” if Syria is taken over by al-Qaeda linked militants. The US also sees this as an opportunity for the Kurdish SDF to seize territory further east.

Though the US still considers HTS a terrorist organization, it seems increasingly comfortable with the group. Historically, the US has funded multiple of the organizations which eventually merged into the HTS, with billions of dollars spent arming and training them with the ultimate goal of regime change. The current admission that the US prefers HTS to Assad, then, isn’t so much a change to long-standing policy as a willingness to publicly state so.

HTS formed in early 2017 as a merger of several Islamist militant groups, centering initially around fighting Jabhat al-Nusra but ultimately merging with them. Jabhat al-Nusra was effectively the Syrian wing of al-Qaeda, though it broke with al-Qaeda publicly in 2016. Despite that, HTS maintains much of the underlying rhetoric of al-Qaeda.

HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who was previously al-Qaeda’s top official in Syria, has tried to distance himself from the organization recently, in an effort to make himself and the HTS more palatable to the West. In practice, its ideology is still essentially the same.

The recent fall of southern cities and provinces clearly isn’t just about taking border areas. The HTS is being very public about its intention to encircle the capital city of Damascus. HTS reports on Saturday suggest the militants are less than 13 miles from Damascus, and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights puts them as close as just over 6 miles.

Damascus would seem unlikely to face imminent collapse under a major rebel offensive, but a massive battle looms, a massive battle that has already gotten underway in Aleppo, Hama, and now Homs. The multi-year Syrian Civil War stalement has exploded into major confrontations once again, fraying an already depleted and weakened civilian population.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.