Surprise rebel attacks in northwestern Syria might well divert some of Russia’s attention away from its grinding war in Ukraine, but will the distraction prove big enough to become a lifeline for Kyiv?
Rebel insurgents, led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, viewed as terrorists by the U.S., kicked off a lightning attack against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a staunch Kremlin ally, a week ago. The rebels swept into the country’s second-largest city, Aleppo, and the Hama province just to the south.
The war in Syria, while not officially ended, had lapsed into a relatively static conflict in recent years. Estimates from the United Nations in 2022 suggested more than 300,000 civilians were killed in the first 10 years of the conflict.
Russia has supported the Assad regime since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, formally entering the conflict in 2015 to prop up the Syrian leader. The U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies has described the Russian move into the conflict as providing “decisive air power to Syrian and Iranian-backed ground forces,” and broadening Assad’s grip on territory in the country.
But the Islamist-led militants have caught Assad and his allies off guard. They appeared to meet scant resistance from regime forces, which had pushed rebel fighters back from Aleppo and areas of Hama in 2016. The Syrian armed forces, loyal to Assad, said on Saturday that rebels had “launched a large-scale attack” on multiple points in Aleppo and to the southwest in Idlib, with “dozens” of pro-regime soldiers killed.
The army pulled back to strengthen their defensive lines, the military said over the weekend, and to “prepare for a counterattack” to the most significant challenge to the Syrian president’s rule in several years.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a U.K.-based monitoring organization, said on Wednesday that while rebels had made gains the previous day in the countryside around Hama and were “approaching Hama City,” regime forces retook several villages close to the city.
To what degree Russia might feel the need to involve itself with any counterattack remains to be seen.
Assad’s forces are “keeping rebels nearly 10 kilometers away from Hama City,” said SOHR, adding military reinforcements had arrived “at front lines in the northern, eastern and western countryside of Hama, along with the arrival of local gunmen from villages to the outskirts of Hama city.” The Syrian military said late on Tuesday that “work is being done to recover a number of sites and towns that have been invaded by armed terrorist organizations” around Hama.
From fall 2015 onward, Russia primarily used airpower in Syria, but it also had on-the-ground special forces to guide airstrikes and Russian commanders leading Syrian troops, said Marina Miron, postdoctoral researcher at the War Studies Department at King’s College London.
She outlined major changes in the conflict which could raise Ukrainian hopes of Russia becoming overstretched through continuing military support for Assad.
The “important actor” in Syria was the Wagner Group and other paramilitary groups and private military companies, Miron told Newsweek. The Wagner Group, led by former Kremlin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin before his death in mid-2023, was highly influential in Ukraine until an aborted mutiny last year led to Moscow pulling the group apart.
Wagner worked closely with local Kurdish forces, known as YPG, deemed to be the Syrian branch of the PKK Kurdish insurgents operating from Turkey that Ankara considers to be terrorists, Miron said.
Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency said on Tuesday that Russia was sending fresh forces from private military companies to Syria. Newsweek could not independently verify this.
When regime forces retook Aleppo in 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin said “there is no doubt” that Russia’s “direct participation” was decisive in the Assad campaign.
Russia has been carrying out airstrikes against anti-government forces in recent days, balancing its commitment to Assad with the attention it has fixed on Ukraine.
“For Russia, they cannot drop Syria,” said Miron.
Will It Make a Difference in Ukraine?
“Any level of Russian political, economic, or military bandwidth which is diverted from the conflict against Ukraine is beneficial to Ukraine,” said William Freer, a research fellow in national security at the U.K.-based think tank, the Council on Geostrategy.
“The impact however will likely be extremely limited,” Freer told Newsweek. “The fighting in Ukraine is too important to the Kremlin.”
“Russian military resources diverted to Assad would be unlikely to change much with regards to their campaign in Ukraine,” agreed Nick Reynolds, a research fellow in land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
“The full implications of the fall of Aleppo and the impact upon the regime in Damascus aren’t yet clear, but the fighting in Syria is much smaller scale than that in Europe and bolstering the Assad regime is unlikely to prove materially demanding,” Reynolds told Newsweek.
Russian jets are active in Syria, but this “does not mean that any significant forces have been deployed there,” said Valeriy Romanenko, an aviation expert and former Ukrainian air defense officer.
This is unlikely to impact the course of the Ukraine war in any real way, Romanenko told Newsweek. Russia’s jets in the Middle East are “more than enough to support ground troops in current rather limited operations,” Romanenko said.
The timing is not ideal for Russia, but Moscow is dominating in Ukraine and can afford to have a small contingent of forces operating in Syria, said Miron. Russia has steadily gained in eastern Ukraine throughout 2024.
The impact may be more political than military, said Andrii Ziuz, a former chief executive of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council and current head of technology at London-based company Prevail. Any indication of Russia being weakened in Syria would “play a significant role for Ukraine, as the reputation loss of Putin is something inspiring for Ukrainians,” Ziuz told Newsweek.
Russia has two bases—the Hmeimim base and the Tartus naval hub—in Syria, both of which help Russia project power into the Mediterranean.
Reports have suggested Russia is evacuating its Tartus naval base in western Syria. This could indicate Russia “does not intend to send significant reinforcements” to al-Assad in the near future, the U.S.-based think tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said on Tuesday.
“Russia will likely therefore redeploy the vessels to its bases in northwestern Russia and Kaliningrad Oblast,” the ISW predicted. Kaliningrad sits on the Baltic Sea, bracketed by numerous NATO nations.
Ukraine’s GUR said on Tuesday that the success of the rebels in Aleppo and Hama, heading further south toward Homs, had been a blow to morale for Russian military personnel in Syria, with Arabic-Russian interpreters “urgently” heading for Hama.
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