After having seized the Syrian city of Aleppo rebel groups are now advancing to neighboring Hama province. Syria's regime is rushing reinforcements to the region. Military analyst Marina Miron says the insurgents have been waiting for an opportune moment to strike.
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00:00For more, let's bring in Marina Miron,
00:02post-doctoral researcher in
00:04the War Studies Department at King's College.
00:06She joins us from Munich.
00:08Marina, some analysts have described this group,
00:12acronym HTS, as Islamists.
00:15Yet, there are reports the group has cut
00:18deals with local Druze and Christian groups.
00:21I know this is a hard question,
00:22but generally speaking, who are they?
00:27Good evening. Well, it's a good question.
00:31The group is fairly new,
00:32so it was formed or rebranded in
00:352017 by Abu Muhammad al-Jilani.
00:39But it's an offspring of a more radical group,
00:44which existed since 2011,
00:47the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, Jabhat al-Nusra.
00:50That group did have ties to Al-Qaeda.
00:54It is a very interesting concoction here because,
00:57on the one hand,
00:59this group is preaching Salafi Islam,
01:05so that's a Sunni branch of Islam, a radical Islam.
01:07On the other hand, according to al-Jilani himself,
01:11he wants to unite all the opposition,
01:15and he doesn't want any sectarian violence
01:17in order to challenge the Assad government.
01:19That being said, this group has been put on
01:23the foreign terrorist organization
01:25list by the United States in 2018,
01:27because the US thinks it covertly works with Al-Qaeda,
01:33even if it overtly denounced
01:35Al-Qaeda and arrested some of the fighters.
01:38It was in the group linked to Al-Qaeda.
01:41The rebel forces are advancing
01:44towards the city of Hama in the south.
01:47Do we know when they will stop?
01:49Have they articulated what their ultimate goal is?
01:54Well, if you look at the military
01:57and the political strategy of HTS,
01:59their goal is to get rid of the Assad regime.
02:02Essentially, the goals haven't changed
02:06since its predecessor in 2011,
02:09when 120 different factions were
02:12fighting for power in the Syrian civil war.
02:15I think the primary target will,
02:19of course, be the Idlib province,
02:21but that said, they might go further.
02:24What we have to keep in mind is that
02:27we don't know the exact size of this group,
02:29and there were estimates of about
02:30some 20,000 fighters as of 2018.
02:33So do they actually have the ability
02:37to recruit more support amongst other factions
02:41to achieve this goal,
02:43and how the government then will look if they succeed?
02:46And of course, it depends on what the others will do,
02:50such as Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and Turkey, of course.
02:55I mean, that leads to the next question I had in mind.
02:57I mean, this offensive is happening
02:59at a very momentous time geopolitically.
03:02In the region, we have Israel fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon,
03:05fighting Hamas in Gaza, and even Iran directly at times.
03:10We know that Russia has supported Bashar al-Assad for years.
03:14Russia is now preoccupied with its invasion of Ukraine.
03:18Is any of this connected in terms of the timing
03:21of this offensive?
03:25Well, it is connected in a way that this group, of course,
03:29looked for an opportune moment
03:31where all the key players or backers
03:33are very much busy with their bigger issues.
03:37They have bigger fish to fry.
03:40And so for the Russians, of course, this is bad news
03:43because they are fighting in Ukraine right now,
03:47and they don't want to commit any ground troops to Syria.
03:52They didn't want to do so in 2015.
03:54They reluctantly joined the fight
03:56because of the longstanding tradition
03:58and ties between the Soviet leadership
04:01and Hafez al-Assad, who is Bashar al-Assad's father.
04:04So they cannot drop Syria.
04:06They have military bases in Tartus,
04:08a naval base and Khmeimim, an air base.
04:11So they cannot drop Syria,
04:12but they will have to somehow send in capable units
04:18in order to support the Syrian Arab army.
04:21We have to be very careful with names
04:22because there are many Syrian armies within Syria right now,
04:27the Assad's army, essentially.
04:30And of course, it opens up another battlefield
04:33because the Ukrainian military intelligence
04:36has been said to be operating in Syria,
04:38supporting government opposition.
04:41So the HDS, interestingly enough,
04:45has some capabilities that have been seen in Ukraine,
04:48such as the use of FPV drones.
04:50So it looks like there is a spillover
04:53of the Ukrainian war into Syria as well in this scenario.
04:57Marina Mehran, thank you so much for joining us.