In 2015, at the height of the rebel advance in Syria, Bashar Al-Assad, aware of the weakness of his army, abandoned territories considered secondary, such as Idlib, to better cement his control over more strategic areas. A front line then divided the city of Aleppo in two, between the loyalist sector in the west and the rebel part in the east.
Nine years later, the scenario repeats itself. The army and its Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah allies did not offer resistance to the entry of an insurgent coalition into Aleppo on Friday. Dominated by the radical Islamists of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTC), the former branch of Al-Qaeda in Syria, this alliance took control of the large city in northern Syria, after a lightning offensive . The pro-regime troops retreated to the region bordering Hama, leaving it to their air force and that of Russia, another protector of Damascus, to punish the attackers by bombing Idlib and Aleppo.
The insurgent fighters, who enjoy apparent Turkish support, have seized the moment: the pro-Iranian camp is weakened by the blows dealt to it by Israel, in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. Russia, occupied by its war in Ukraine, no longer has the same financial and human resources as in the mid-2010s, when it deployed its MiGs on the Hmeimim base, on the Syrian coast. Complicating the geopolitical situation, the rebellion, which includes factions in the pay of Ankara, took Tall Rifaat, a locality under Kurdish control, near the Turkish border, on Sunday. Kurdish forces have announced that they want to evacuate Kurdish civilians from Aleppo.
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Remaining a pariah in the eyes of Westerners in the name, they say, of the bloody repression he carried out against his people, Bashar Al-Assad had managed to save his post, thanks to the intervention of his powerful Russian and Iranian allies. . But he was never able to reconquer all of Syrian territory, the North-East and its oil wells remaining in the hands of the Kurds and the North-West under the control of the anti-regime. He became the king of a fragmented and bloodless country, deprived of resources, unable to rebuild itself and bounce back.
De facto economic embargo
After the reconquest of the main rebel strongholds (Aleppo, Ghouta and Daraa), completed in 2018, it was necessary to thank the militia leaders and businessmen who had contributed to saving the regime. Endemic corruption has never stopped. The sanctions, put in place at the start of the repression of the 2011 uprising, tightened in 2020, with the adoption in the United States, during the first Trump presidency, of the “Caesar” law. This text, which bears the code name of a photographer from the Syrian military police who released tens of thousands of photos of the bodies of prisoners who died of starvation or torture, placed Syria under a de facto economic embargo .
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