The First Day of the Syrian Civil War Revisited: U.S. Ambassador to Syria, and a Surprise from the Syrian Government

The war monitor said in a statement that after two years of silence, insurgencies broke into Syria’s largest city Friday and clashed with government forces for the first time.

The battle for a city in Syria was the beginning of a war between the government and rebel fighters that erupted after protests against Assad’s rule.

The attack injected new violence into a region experiencing dual wars in Gaza and Lebanon involving Israel, and other conflicts, including the Syrian civil war that began in 2011.

There was no evidence of a significant fightback from government forces or their allies. Instead, reports emerged of government forces melting away in the face of advances, and insurgents posted messages on social media calling on troops to surrender.

The attack on the Syrian government forces shows that they are weak, said Robert Ford, the last U.S. ambassador to Syria. He said that in some cases they appeared to have been routed.

Rebel militias in northern Syria have continued to make lightning-fast territorial gains against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, as videos posted to social media show fighting raging in several of the beleaguered nation’s major cities, including the capital Damascus.

The offensive came as Iran-linked groups, primarily Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has backed Syrian government forces since 2015, have been preoccupied with their own battles at home.

A ceasefire in Hezbollah’s two-month war with Israel took effect Wednesday, the day the Syrian opposition factions announced their offensive. In the last 70 days, Israel has gone after Hezbollah and Iran-linked targets in Syria.

According to a senior adviser of the International Crisis Group, the Syrian rebels have known for a while that they’re ready for an offensive. The rapid advance by the forces towards the city of Aleppo was not anticipated.

There’s more than the Russians being distracted and bogged down in Ukraine, also the Iranians are distracted and bogged down elsewhere. She said that the regime is “absolutely cornered” because Hezbollah is bogged down elsewhere. “But the surprise element comes in with how quickly the regime crumbled.”

Russia and Iran helped the Syrian government forces to regain control of the city after a lengthy and bloody siege that lasted for weeks.

Besides backing opposition forces, Turkey has also established a military presence in Syria, sending troops into parts of the northwest. The United States has supported Kurdish forces in the east of Syria in the fight against the Islamic State.

The Kremlin said Friday that it considered the attack an encroachment on Syria’s sovereignty and that it supported the quickest possible establishment of constitutional order in the region.

The statement by the armed forces said they destroyed drones and heavy weaponry during their battles with the rebels in the countryside. They accused the rebels of spreading false information, and vowed to fight the attack.

According to the Observatory for Human Rights, two car bombs were detonated on the western edge of a city. The war monitor said the insurgencies were able to control Saraqeb, a town that was close to the intersection of the highways linking the city of Aleppo with Damascus and the coast. The highway was diverted by the Syrian government Thursday.

The Anadolu Agency reported that the rebels entered the city center on Friday and are now in control of about 70 locations.

Four people, including two students, were killed by projectiles from the rebels that landed in student rooms at the university.

The armed forces said the rebels were violating an agreement that de-escalated fighting in the area.

In a phone call with his Syrian counterpart, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi described the insurgent attacks in Syria “as a plot orchestrated by the U.S. and the Zionist regime following the regime’s defeat in Lebanon and Palestine.”

Insurgents posted videos on the internet showing how they use drones. It was not clear to what extent the drones were used on the battleground.

The 2011 Arab Spring War in Syria: Why the world is taking its eyes off the ball, and why the Turkishs may have changed their hearts

Following years of military stalemate, in which a low-intensity conflict had persisted primarily in the country’s northwestern region of Idlib, these developments appear to have upended long-held calculations about Syria’s 13-year civil war, which began during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings.

Russia and Iran have supported the Assad’s forces for many years, in order to take down the rebels who had arisen to oppose his rule. Until this past week, Assad maintained control over much of the country, albeit tenuously in some areas.

“We’re further away from a solution today than we were two days ago,” he said. There is a need for the world to find a final settlement in Syria.

The world has taken its eyes off the ball, says a senior fellow at the New Lines Institute think tank. “Between Russia, Turkey and Iran, they have mostly established a stalemate of instability across Syria, from east to west, north to south, with areas that are overlapping — of different competing interests.”

Despite the presence of American troops in the northeast, the U.S. has not commented on developments in the region.

A scheduled visit by Iran’s foreign minister to Syria was reported on Sunday by Al Arabiya, but President Assad’s whereabouts were unknown late Saturday.

“Syria has little capacity to hold ground because of dependence on Iran and rampant corruption in the army ranks”, says an associate fellow at the Middle East and North African program at Chatham House. “The regime had taken for granted that it had basically won the war, and had become complacent.”

“While they remain, of course, concerned about the fallout, I think they’re way less concerned than they were a few years back,” she says of the Turkish government. I think that has been a key weakness in this offensive.

For some time, Turkey seemed to have prohibited HTS, as a recipient of their support, from launching this kind of attack on government territory, says Dareen Khalifa, a senior advisor at the International Crisis Group who focuses her research and advocacy work on peacemaking. But, she adds, the Turks may recently have gone through a change of heart given the regional changes.