rebels claim to have entered Hama, Syrian army admits to having lost control

The situation was uncertain on Thursday, December 5, in Hama. Rebel groups who launched an offensive on the outskirts of this city, Syria's fourth largest, said they had managed to enter it, captured the prison and freed hundreds of detainees. The Syrian army, for its part, admitted in a statement that it had lost control of Hama: “During the last few hours (…)the terrorist groups were able to break through several fronts into the city and enter it”she said, adding that her strength had “redeployed outside the city”.

Located 210 kilometers north of Damascus, the country's fourth city is strategic because it is located between the northern city of Aleppo, which fell on 1^is December in the hands of the rebels, and the capital, stronghold of Bashar Al-Assad's power. This conservative city of nearly 1 million inhabitants is predominantly Sunni but also has an Alawite minority from which comes the Assad clan, in power in Syria for more than five decades. It was the scene of a 1982 massacre by the army under the rule of the president's father, Hafez Al-Assad, who was suppressing a Muslim Brotherhood insurgency. It was also in this city that some of the largest protests took place at the start of the 2011 pro-democracy uprising, the suppression of which sparked civil war.

In the space of a week, and to everyone's surprise, the rebels led by the radical Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTC, Levant Liberation Organization) seized most of Aleppo, the second city of the country, continuing their momentum towards Hama, a strategic city for the regime of Bashar Al-Assad because it commands the road to the capital, Damascus, located around 200 kilometers further south.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH, based in the United Kingdom but which has a vast network of informants in the country) reported violent clashes overnight in the region of Jebel Zein Al- Abidine, about 5 kilometers north of Hama. “Government troops are putting up fierce resistance and trying to stop the progress of the rebels”declared to Agence France Presse (AFP) the director of this NGO, Rami Abdel Rahmane.

Bombings by Russian and Syrian aircraft

On Wednesday evening, a military source, cited by official Syrian media, said that “Russian and Syrian aviation and artillery and missile forces [avaient] carried out concentrated strikes on the (…) terrorists » in the vicinity of Hama.

The clashes triggered since the start of the rebel offensive are the first of this magnitude since 2020 in a country ravaged by a devastating civil war which has left half a million dead since 2011, and divided it into several zones of influence, with belligerents supported by different foreign powers. Russia and Iran, Damascus' main allies, as well as Turkey, a major backer of the rebels, are in “close contact” to stabilize the situation, Russian diplomacy said on Wednesday.

The American Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, warned against a resurgence of the Islamic State group in Syria, where this jihadist formation had proclaimed a “caliphate” in 2014, straddling Iraq, before being defeated several years later.

Since the start of the rebel offensive on November 27, fighting and bombings have left more than 727 dead, including 111 civilians, according to the OSDH. The NGO Human Rights Watch has expressed alarm at the risks for civilians, while the belligerents have been accused of human rights violations.

The UN's deputy regional humanitarian coordinator for Syria, David Carden, told AFP that more than 115,000 people had been displaced in a week of fighting. The German agency DPA announced the death of one of its photographers, Anas Alkharboutli, killed in an airstrike near Hama.