Four days after Aleppo, the rebels took the strategic town of Hama in central Syria on Thursday during a dazzling offensive against the troops of President Bashar al-Assad, whose power appears increasingly weakened.
Located south of Aleppo, the country’s second city at war, the city of Hama commands the road to Homs, further south and the capital Damascus, two large cities still in the hands of power.
The rebels led by the extremist Islamists of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched a surprise offensive on November 27 from their stronghold of Idleb (northwest), seizing dozens of localities as well as the major part of Aleppo (north) and Hama and causing, according to an NGO, more than 800 deaths.
In Homs, residents began fleeing the city for Damascus or the Syrian coast, residents said. “We are afraid and we fear that the scenario in Hama will happen in Homs,” said Abbas, a 33-year-old civil servant. “We fear that they (the rebels) will take revenge on us. We have nowhere to flee if fighting breaks out in Homs, and we will fight to the death,” he said.
The rebel coalition announced on Telegram the “total liberation of Hama”. “Our forces entered Hama central prison and freed hundreds of unjustly detained prisoners,” Hassan Abdel Ghani, an insurgent military leader, announced earlier.
The Syrian army admitted losing Hama, saying its forces had “redeployed out of the city.” According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH), “more than 200 military vehicles” of the army left Hama towards Homs and government forces also withdrew from two other towns in the area, including ‘one on the Hama-Homs road.
Syrian Defense Minister Ali Abbas said Thursday that the army was “still close” to Hama after rebels captured the city in central Syria. He stressed that the decision to redeploy government forces outside Hama was “a temporary tactical measure.” “Our forces are still near the city,” Ali Abbas said in a statement carried by the official Sana news agency.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose country is a major supporter of the rebels, called on Bashar al-Assad to “urgently” find a “political solution”.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned of a resurgence of the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria, where the jihadist group had occupied large areas of that country and neighboring Iraq before being successively chased away in 2019.
Weakened by two months of open war with Israel, Hezbollah said it stood by Mr. Assad. “The loss of Hama is a very hard blow for the Syrian government, especially after its defeat in Aleppo. This is where the army tried to reverse the situation (…) but it did not succeed,” said Aron Lund, researcher at Century International. “HTS will now try to advance towards Homs.”
