Who are Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebels taking control of Aleppo?

Rebel forces on Wednesday launched the biggest offensive against the Syrian government in years.

On Saturday they had taken control of “large areas” of the country’s second largest city, Aleppo.

The surprise offensive sparked the first Russian attacks on Aleppo since 2016 and saw the Syrian army withdraw its troops from the city.

The attack was led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which has a long and complicated history in the Syrian conflict.

HTS was created under a different name, Jabhat al-Nusrain 2011 as a direct affiliate of Al Qaeda.

The leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-BaghdadiHe also participated in its training.

It was considered one of the most effective and deadly groups that faced President Assad.

But her jihadist ideology appeared to be her driving force rather than her revolutionary zeal, and at the time she was considered at odds with the main rebel coalition under the banner of Free Syria.

But in 2016, the group’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, publicly broke ranks with Al Qaeda, He dissolved Jabhat al-Nusra and created a new organization.which took the name Hayat Tahrir al-Sham when it merged with several other similar groups a year later.

For the past four years, the war in Syria has felt like it was effectively over.

President Bashar al-Assad’s rule is essentially unchallenged in the country’s major cities, while some other parts of Syria remain outside his direct control.

These include Kurdish-majority areas in the east, which have been more or less separated from Syrian state control since the early years of the conflict.

There has been some ongoing, though relatively quiet, unrest in the south, where the revolution against Assad’s government began in 2011.

In the vast Syrian desert, strongholds of the group calling itself the Islamic State still pose a security threat, particularly during the truffle hunting season, when people flock to the area in search of this highly profitable delicacy.

And in the northwest, Idlib province has been in the hands of jihadist groups and rebels expelled there at the height of the war.

The dominant force in Idlib is the one that launched the surprise attack on Aleppo, HTS.

For several years, Idlib remained a battleground as Syrian government forces attempted to regain control.

But a ceasefire agreement in 2020 brokered by Russiawhich has long been Assad’s key ally, and Türkiye, which has backed the rebels, have largely held on.

Some four million people live there, most of them displaced from towns and cities that Assad’s forces recaptured from rebels in a brutal war of attrition.

Aleppo was one of the bloodiest battlefields and represented one of the rebels’ biggest defeats.

To achieve victory, Assad relied on Russian air power and Iranian military aid on the ground, primarily through Iranian-sponsored militias.

Among them was Hezbollah.

There is no doubt that the setback that Hezbollah has suffered recently Israel’s offensive in Lebanonas well as Israeli attacks against Iranian military commanders in Syria, have played an important role in the decision of jihadist and rebel groups in Idlib to take a sudden and unexpected step on Aleppo.

For some time now, HTS has established its power base in Idlib, where it is the de facto local administration, although its efforts to achieve legitimacy have been marred by alleged human rights abuses.

It has also been involved in some bitter infighting with other groups.

His ambitions beyond Idlib were no longer clear.

Since breaking with Al Qaeda, its goal has been limited to trying to establish a fundamentalist Islamic government in Syria rather than a broader caliphate, as Isis tried and failed to achieve.

Until now, it had shown few signs of attempting to reignite the large-scale Syrian conflict and renew its challenge to Assad’s rule in much of the country.

Additional reporting by Maia Davies.