One of the military commanders of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham ( HTS), Abu Hafs al-Hamoui, in his first interview with international media, according to the British Guardian newspaper.
According to the military commander of HTS, the organization that controlled part of Idlib, came into contact with organizations and groups from all over the country and together they created a common operations center – “war room” to implement the plan that brought the description ” prevention of aggression”. The objective of the participants in the operation was the encirclement of Damascus from the north and from the south. Achieving it, according to Hamoui, required his organization’s expertise in “unifying” disparate, disorganized armed opposition groups into a single force. HTS, according to him, has gained this experience since 2019 when government forces carried out their last major campaign against the armed groups, which resulted in taking back a lot of territory in Idlib from Assad’s control.
This operation by government troops – which ended with the mediation of Turkey to achieve a truce – made the leadership of the organization realize that in order to be able to confront Assad’s forces, there should be coordination and discipline. As a result, HTS began talks with other groups to merge under its umbrella, but these broke down. So its fighters turned against the rest of the organizations and eventually incorporated them.
According to Hamoui, HTS fought among others an al-Qaeda affiliate, Hurras al-Din, which was more extreme than HTS’s approach to Islam. Gradually since then, as it incorporated other fighters and organizations, it began to better organize its forces and, as the commander mentioned, created branches, units and security forces, while at the same time it began to produce its own weapons, vehicles and ammunition. As he mentioned in his interview, among other things, an unmanned aircraft unit was created, in which engineers, mechanics and chemists participated, and he emphasized that: “We consolidated their knowledge and set clear goals: we needed reconnaissance drones, attack drones and suicide drones, with an emphasis on range and endurance.’ Their production began in 2019 and gradually evolved resulting in the production of the Shahin attack drone, which entered service last month.
So after building a military force capable of fighting the Syrian army on par, HTS sent messages to the rebels in the south. This move was made a year ago and then the process to create a single “war room” began. Southern Syria has been under regime control since 2018, and despite ongoing fighting, rebel groups have been in retreat. Much of the military leadership of the southern opposition was in exile in Jordan, and from there commanded the armed groups. In the operations room, which they set up together with HTS, the commanders of about 25 southern rebel groups gathered. So they were coordinating with each other, but also with HTS in the North. In late November, it was decided that the time was right for a frontal attack.
HTS began the operation, entering Aleppo on 29 November. Hezbollah fighters tried to defend the city, but soon retreated. The rapid fall of the city, Syria’s second largest, which took four years to wrest the Assad regime from rebel control in 2016, surprised the group.
After the fall of Aleppo, the rebel advance in the north seemed unstoppable. Four days later, the opposition captured Hama. On December 7, the rebels launched their assault on Homs. They captured the city within a few hours.
Rebels in the south were supposed to wait until Homs fell to launch their own insurgency in the south, according to Abu Hamzeh, leader of the operations room for the liberation of Damascus, but out of excitement they started earlier. The rebels quickly drove the Syrian army out of Daraa and reached Damascus before HTS.
On December 8, Bashar al-Assad left the country.
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