LThe air is starting to get thinner for Bashar Al-Assad. Since 2011, in thirteen years of civil war, the Syrian dictator has defied all predictions about his imminent fall. But, faced with the meteoric progress of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Cham (HTC) and its allies supported by Turkey, who seized Hama on Thursday, December 5, after Aleppo, support is starting to run out. Its fate could be sealed by the fall of Damascus at the hands of HTC, something which is no longer unthinkable, or be decided between the great powers united within the Astana process, Iran, Russia and Turkey, who emerges as the big winner from this new situation.
The collapse of the Syrian army, in the face of the offensive launched by HTC on November 27, took everyone by surprise, both supporters and detractors of the Damascus regime. The loyalist forces are having difficulty keeping their ranks united, and the 50% increase in the pay of career soldiers, decreed on Wednesday by President Al-Assad, comes a little late to remobilize an army demoralized and eroded by the war . The Alawite militias, for their part, are in no hurry to once again come to the aid of Mr. Al-Assad.
Preoccupied with their war in Ukraine, where they transferred most of their resources, the Russians were unable to help the Syrian army. Iran and its allies, including Lebanese Hezbollah, weakened by a year of confrontation with Israel, are also struggling to deploy reinforcements. Hezbollah, which is estimated to have lost between 2,500 and 4,000 men, is unable to redeploy on the Syrian front, after having withdrawn troops in October to concentrate on the battle in southern Lebanon.
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A few hundred fighters were sent as reinforcements by the Iraqi Shiite militias Al-Nujaba and Kataeb Hezbollah. According to a well-informed source, they were deployed on the Deir ez-Zor front, where loyalist forces repelled an attack launched by fighters allied to Kurdish forces on Wednesday, near the Conoco base, where American troops are stationed. , supported by the American air force.
Tehran's fears
On Thursday, HTC chief Abu Mohammed Al-Joulani, who now goes by his birth name Ahmed Al-Chara, urged Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Chia Al-Soudani in a video not to allow the departure to Syria of units of the Popular Mobilization, a government force composed mainly of militias close to Iran. The head of the Iraqi government has already banned the departure of these troops, anxious to preserve the strategic partnership he sealed with Turkey in April.
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