“Our armed forces began moving on several axes in the countryside of Aleppo, Hama, and Idlib to encircle the terrorists and expel them from the areas they entered and secure them completely and establish new concentration points to prepare for the next attack,” Syria’s state-run SANA news agency said, citing an army statement.
Military reinforcements along with deadly strikes in cooperation with Moscow have “resulted in the destruction of 5 command headquarters and 7 ammunition and various weapons depots, some of which contained drones,” the army added, claiming the death of over 400 rebels and jihadists in the raids.
A coalition of Syrian rebel groups spearheaded by the jihadist Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) launched a major offensive against the Syrian army over the past week. They took control of the northern city of Aleppo, the largest in the country, and advanced their offensive into Hama province.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Monday said that the developments are part of a wider plan to divide the region, in a phone call with his Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian, with Tehran also a key backer of Damascus.
“The terrorist escalation that is taking place reflects far-reaching goals in an attempt to divide the region, fragment its countries, and redraw the maps anew according to the interests and goals of the United States and the West,” Assad told Pezeshkian, as reported by the Syrian presidency.
Assad vowed that the escalation “will only increase Syria’s determination to confront and eliminate terrorists in all Syrian territories,” while Pezeshkian reaffirmed support to Damascus.
But both Iran and Russia are in very different positions from the last time they jumped to Assad’s assistance to dislodge the rebels across the country. Russia is at war in Ukraine and Iran’s network of proxies has been weakened by Israel.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitor, placed the death toll in five days of fighting at 446, including 200 and 44 militants from HTS and SNA respectively, 141 Syrian army soldiers, and 61 civilians.
Syrians rose against the Assad regime in 2011, leading to a full-scale civil war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, left millions more in dire need of humanitarian assistance, and left much of the country’s infrastructure in ruins.
More than 13 million Syrians, half the country’s pre-war population, have been displaced since the start of the civil war, more than 6 million of whom are refugees who have fled the war-torn country, according to United Nations figures.
