Rebel leader says insurgents began planning assault on Assad a year ago
In interview with The Guardian, HTS’s Abu Hassan al-Hamwi says group unified factions, overhauled military forces and developed modern doctrine when planning devastating offensive
The Syrian rebels that toppled Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorial regime began planning their shock offensive a year ago, according to the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s military wing, Abu Hassan al-Hamwi.
In an interview with The Guardian, al-Hamwi said that HTS, the Islamist group that led the rebel overthrow of Assad, had been developing a disciplined military doctrine for the past five years and had been communicating with other rebel groups to coordinate their assault on Assad’s forces.
“After the last campaign [August 2019], during which we lost significant territory, all revolutionary factions realized the critical danger – the fundamental problem was the absence of unified leadership and control over battle,” he said, adding that,”We studied the enemy thoroughly, analyzing their tactics, both day and night, and used these insights to develop our own forces.”
According to al-Hamwi, HTS had contacted other rebel groups last year to for a unified rebel “war room,” and began planning their assault.
Al-Hamwi said that the group knew that Aleppo had to be the first domino to fall in order to topple Assad, so his forces concentrated resources and planning on taking over Syria’s second largest city.
“We had a conviction, supported by historical precedent, that ‘Damascus cannot fall until Aleppo falls.’ The strength of the Syrian revolution was concentrated in the north, and we believed that once Aleppo was liberated, we could move southward toward Damascus,” al-Hamwi said.
The group also set out to fundamentally change their military forces, overhauling their doctrine from jihadist insurgent group to a disciplined modern fighting force.
Al-Hamwi told The Guardian that HTS created a new drone unit in 2019 to combat Assad’s superior weaponry, recruiting engineers and scientists to produce drones locally.
“We unified their knowledge and set clear objectives: we needed reconnaissance drones, attack drones and suicide drones, with a focus on range and endurance,” he said.
This drone program developed a new style of attack drone called the Shahin, or falcon, which deployed deadly effectiveness in their lightning offensive, disabling much of the Syrian army’s mobile artillery systems, allowing HTS forces to advance into regime strongholds.
The rebel assault accomplished in two weeks what 13 years of brutal civil war could not, succeeding in taking down Assad and freeing Syria from over five decades of Assad family rule.
But toppling a dictator is not the end of the story, and now HTS has to lead the charge in forming a new government that unifies the war-torn and sectarian country and officials from the rebel groups have been seeking to distance themselves from their jihadi past and send out reassuring messages.
“We affirm that minorities in Syria are part of the nation and have the right to practice their rituals, education, and services like every other Syrian citizen. The regime planted division, and we are trying, as much as possible, to bridge these divides,” al-Hamwi said.
HTS, which is rooted in al-Qaeda’s Syria branch but in recent years sought to moderate its image, has pledged to form a transitional government that respects all of Syria’s ethnic groups and political factions, and that his group will hand over control to a civilian regime in March 2025.
While al-Hamwi, gave the credit for the success of the offensive to planning, analysts have said that much of their gains were made possible by the severely weakened state of the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, which had sent forces to prop up Assad in the past.
This time, Hezbollah was in disarray. Many of its top officials, including longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah, were killed in Israeli airstrikes. And months of Israeli strikes destroyed much of its military infrastructure. With Syria’s key international allies, Russia and Iran, on the sidelines, Hezbollah withdrew, and Assad was ousted quickly.
Unprovoked, Hezbollah-led forces began attacking Israel on a near-daily basis on October 8, 2023, a day after its ally Hamas stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza.
In a bid to stop the rocket fire, Israel stepped up operations against Hezbollah in late September, all but decimating the terror group’s leadership.
