why Bashar al-Assad's regime is backing down in the face of the breakthrough of rebel groups

The forces of the Syrian regime, although supported by Iran and Russia, quickly lost ground in northern Syria, facing the offensive of the coalition of rebels led by HTS Islamists.

Fighting continues in Syria. The rebel forces led by the Islamists of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), after taking Aleppo on Sunday December 1, are moving south. They are now at the gates of Hama, 200 km north of the Syrian capital Damascus. Calls for de-escalation increased on Monday, with fears of a resumption of large-scale fighting after more than a decade of civil war.

The regime's army is having difficulty containing the rebel offensives. On paper, Bashar al-Assad's troops are nevertheless supported by the Iranians and the Lebanese Hezbollah militia, as well as by the Russian air force, permanently present in Syria. The Syrian armed forces should therefore have been able to resist, but the fall of Aleppo in 24 hours shows that this army was not capable of organizing the defense of Aleppo, the second city in the country with two million people. inhabitants, fell without a fight. Rebels took government buildings, prisons, the international airport and a military airfield “without encountering significant resistance”according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH).

Worse for the regime's army, the rebels seized a significant quantity of military equipment and weapons, which the regime's troops left behind: around ten L39 Albatros fighters, at least two helicopters, batteries anti-aircraft and armored vehicles, including dozens of heavy tanks.

In their offensives, the rebels used new equipment that is still rare on the Syrian front, such as FPV-type kamikaze attack drones, used on the Ukrainian fronts. To defend the city of Hama, the regime and the Russian air force have been carrying out a few bombing missions since Sunday, but mainly targeting the supposed headquarters of the HTS group, particularly in the city of Idlib. It is not clear that they are capable of hastily constructing real lines of defense on the ground, such as trenches and bunkers. The dynamics of the offensive currently give the rebels the advantage.

The fighting, the first of this magnitude since 2020, has already left more than 500 dead, according to an NGO. The Syrian civil war, sparked by the brutal repression of pro-democracy protests, has left around half a million people dead.