Aleppo Has Fallen in 2024: How HTS Rebels Captured Syria's Largest City in Days

In the final days of November 2024, a shock rebel offensive erupted from Syria’s besieged Idlib province and accomplished what few observers thought possible: the capture of Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city, in under four days. Led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and a coalition of allied forces, the lightning assault — dubbed Operation Deterrence of Aggression — smashed through defensive lines that had been frozen for half a decade, sending Syrian regime forces and their Russian and Iranian backers into full retreat. The offensive didn’t stop at Aleppo’s city limits. Rebel forces continued their advance southward along the M5 highway, threatening the cities of Hama, Homs, and potentially even Damascus itself, in what has become the most dramatic escalation of the Syrian conflict in years.

The Syrian Powder Keg: Understanding the Factions

To understand the fall of Aleppo in 2024, it is essential to grasp the extraordinarily complex web of factions operating inside Syria. The country had been showing signs of a slow descent back into full-scale war for months, with multiple forces working at cross purposes across the territory.

The Syrian regime under long-time dictator Bashar al-Assad had maintained steady control over much of the country’s heartland and south, including the major cities of Homs, Damascus, and — until the final days of November 2024 — Aleppo. The country’s second-largest landholding entity was the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava, a Kurdish-led government that had managed to maintain a largely peaceful existence on the territory it controlled. In the north, the Turkish-backed Syrian Interim Government held a large stretch of land and claimed to be Syria’s sole legitimate opposition government.

The Islamic State still held pockets of territory in the far desert and was showing signs of resurgence. Unrest against the regime was brewing in the southern provinces of Dara’a and Suwayda, while a network of Iran-backed militias operated with impunity and frequently received regime support in the countryside.

Three foreign nations deserved particular mention for their involvement: Turkey, which backed the Syrian Interim Government, held its own buffer zone, and conducted frequent operations against Kurds in Syria; Russia, which backed the Assad regime directly with military forces and air power; and the United States, which maintained a limited counterinsurgency presence near Syria’s three-way border with Jordan and Iraq.

But the organization that turned all of Syria on its head was the so-called Syrian Salvation Government, controlled by HTS. Designated as a terror organization by the United States, Russia, the United Nations, the European Union, and others, HTS had been historically affiliated with al-Qaeda under the name al-Nusra Front. Over recent years, however, HTS claimed to have severed those ties.

Since 2019, the group had held large portions of the governorate of Idlib in Syria’s northwest, working to convince both the West and the Syrian people that it had left radicalism behind and intended to build Idlib into an autonomous region. Crucially, HTS leader Abu Muhammad al-Julani had declared a fundamental goal for the group in May 2023, stating: “Aleppo is the gate to Damascus and it will be under focus for one or two years.” With the benefit of hindsight, that timeline proved remarkably accurate.

The Buildup: Signs of an Imminent Offensive

In the weeks leading up to the offensive, northwestern Syria was abuzz with signs that something was coming. The Assad regime had spent months escalating its activity on the fringes of Idlib — not launching anything truly massive against the heart of HTS or its allies, but maintaining a troublesome pressure through artillery barrages and suicide drone strikes that seemed likely to worsen if HTS didn’t respond.

Embattled, encircled, and without the level of foreign support that most Syrian factions received, HTS didn’t outwardly appear ready to fight back. But the group’s leaders apparently knew different. HTS and a range of allied forces began to mobilize quietly. Rebels dropped hints to local and international press that they had been working for months to prepare a large-scale offensive, and it became increasingly clear that Aleppo would be the ultimate target.

The trigger came on November 26, 2024, when the Syrian regime launched its latest attack — an artillery barrage on the city of Ariha that killed sixteen people, including two children, and wounded twelve more, including eight children. The HTS response began the following day, November 27, and it was not merely retaliatory. Dubbed Operation Deterrence of Aggression, it was designed as a lightning assault, effective immediately.

Day One — November 27: The Offensive Begins

The first day of the HTS offensive was ruinous for the regime. Over twenty towns and villages fell to the rebel assault in the first twelve hours. The violence both consolidated HTS’s hold around some of the further-flung villages of Idlib where the government had established positions, and claimed towns on the road to Aleppo.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based organization that serves as the de facto leader in tracking minute-to-minute casualties in the Syrian Civil War, around forty government and allied soldiers were known to have been killed during the first day, alongside about sixty members of the opposition. However, real-time death toll statistics were almost certainly unreliable, and with the fog of war and mutual incentives for both sides to hide their true losses, the numbers were likely an undercount. By the end of the day, up to 180 combatants were suspected to have been killed, along with at least nineteen civilians catalogued as killed in retaliatory airstrikes by both Syria and Russia.

The HTS-led assault brought down the base of Syria’s 46th Regiment, a military unit that had long led the artillery and drone harassment against the forces and people of Idlib. Dozens of soldiers were captured. As the day wore on into the evening, local press reported that HTS forces hadn’t just smashed through the first line of regime defenses around Aleppo — they were already in the process of breaking through the regime’s second set of defensive lines, taking over high ground, and opening the way to critical breakthrough areas that would need to fall before Aleppo could be taken.

During the fighting, HTS forces or their allies ambushed a vehicle carrying Russian special forces known to be on the ground in Syria providing protection and military advice for the regime. As HTS armored bulldozers smashed through regime roadblocks and checkpoint after checkpoint was entirely overrun, the rebels captured advanced weaponry: several T-55 tanks, a well-stocked depot of guided anti-tank missiles, and apparently sophisticated weapons recovered from the ambushed Russian patrol.

Alongside HTS, evidence emerged that brigades of Syrian Palestinians and fighters from Hezbollah were present in support of the rebel attack, alongside members of a wider consortium of anti-regime forces that HTS had worked hard to build. Elements from the Turkish-backed Syrian Interim Government also joined, perhaps at Turkey’s instruction — though this involvement may have been driven by tensions with their sponsor Turkey over the nation’s recent overtures to the Assad regime, which had raised fears that Turkey could sell out its own proxy force.

Over the course of the day, HTS unveiled a new Military Operations Command, complete with social media accounts, spokesmen, branding, and other elements indicating it had been in the works for some time. They also revealed a new weapon: a cruise-missile-like, indigenously produced projectile going by the alternating names Zawam and Qaysar. The missile reportedly carried a warhead of 200 kilograms and was used in surprise strikes against regime positions ahead of the ground assault.

Day Two — November 28: The Regime Perimeter Collapses

If the first day of HTS operations was stunning, the second day was catastrophic for the Syrian regime. Coming down from the highlands with the full tactical advantage that a downhill attack confers, rebel forces crashed into the strategic district of Khan al-Asal on Aleppo’s outskirts, bringing them just barely three kilometers from Aleppo proper. They were able to cut off the vital M5 highway, which the Syrian regime absolutely needed to rush soldiers and equipment into Aleppo from Damascus.

Meanwhile, a second thrust of the rebel offensive cut southward, focusing initially on the town of Saraqeb but consolidating control at a more southerly point of the M5 in order to set up multiple layers of defense that any regime counterattack would have to break through.

Russian fighter jets were mostly silent on the second day, while Iran allowed its forces to become involved — to disastrous effect. During the day on November 28, a Brigadier General of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was killed in battle with the rebels. Both IRGC and allied militia forces are believed to have taken significant casualties as the advancing rebels encroached on majority-Shia villages where the IRGC and its many militia partners maintained a considerable presence.

After about twenty towns and villages fell on the 27th, twenty-four more were captured on the 28th, in patterns and locations that indicated the Syrian regime’s perimeter around Aleppo had largely collapsed.

New information emerged about the makeup of HTS forces, revealing they possessed not just captured Syrian tanks and Russian advanced weaponry, but real expertise of their own. During the night from the 27th to the 28th, an elite HTS unit called the Thermal Brigades (Saraya al-Harari) launched assaults in which every soldier was armed with thermal night-vision scopes, sniper rifles, assault rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades. It was this unit that kept up the pressure on Khan al-Asal and forced it to the breaking point, before handing operations over to another elite unit in the daytime — the so-called Red Bands (Asaib al-Hamra).

As they attacked, HTS demonstrated that it, like many other asymmetric forces around the world, had learned the greatest lesson of the invasion of Ukraine. The skies around Aleppo were filled with the incessant buzz of drones — both off-the-shelf consumer-grade quadcopters for reconnaissance and first-person-view suicide drones used to neutralize regime defensive positions. Drones were also used to scatter leaflets across regime positions, encouraging soldiers to defect before it was too late.

The second day’s haul of captured equipment was even more impressive than the first: more advanced T-72 tanks, several armored personnel carriers, a number of Russian-made drones, even more anti-tank missiles, and large quantities of ammunition.

Day Three — November 29: Aleppo Falls

By nightfall on November 28, it was obvious to all that the battle for Aleppo was imminent. A highly experienced and successful military leader widely known as “The Tiger” — Major General Suhayl al-Hassan, long thought to be a potential successor to Bashar al-Assad — had arrived in the city to take command. Experts around the world watching the shock offensive anticipated that this was where the battle would transform from a steamrolling into a brutal and attritional affair.

But by the time the sun set on November 29, those expectations had collapsed. It became clear early in the day that whether due to a collapse in morale or a decision to withdraw from an unsustainable position, regime forces were already in the process of fleeing the city. After that, the result was an inevitability.

Over the course of November 29, HTS forces charged into Aleppo, collapsing what remained of the regime’s front lines. They captured the Governor’s Palace without much trouble, brought down each of the four major intelligence directorates inside the city, reached and began the process of clearing Aleppo’s ancient citadel, and took positions around Aleppo International Airport.

In the south, the town of Saraqeb fell as expected, granting the rebels dominance at a critical chokepoint without which an easy recapture of Aleppo would be near-impossible. But rather than simply hold the M5 highway, the rebels pushed southward another thirty kilometers to the city of Ma’arat al-Nu’man. That city allowed HTS to cut off other routes Syrian forces could use to counterattack against Idlib directly, and it was a major symbolic target for the broader Syrian revolution.

In Aleppo, HTS took pains to reassure locals that they meant no harm and made specific promises to protect the city’s large Christian community — a much-needed reassurance given the group’s reputation years ago as a Salafi-Jihadist terror organization. In a remarkably quick showing of its potential for civilian governance, HTS-affiliated civil administrations — particularly its Emergency Response Committee — were already sweeping western Aleppo by the day’s end, helping residents restore water and electrical access and dealing with street debris and unexploded munitions. Well over a hundred people were released from regime custody across the city, many of them refugees who had been detained arbitrarily — a common practice for the Syrian regime whose release was taken as a show of good faith by nearly every group across Syria.

Alongside HTS, the Turkish-backed Syrian Interim Government confirmed prior suspicions and surged into action in the countryside north of Aleppo. Their attack, dubbed Operation Dawn of Freedom, focused on areas to Aleppo’s northeast where the regime had been relying on stable territory. If that area had remained stable, the regime could have retreated or surged reinforcements through it, potentially hardening into a defense.

But the Turkish-backed forces moved effectively to cut it off. With them blocking the regime from the north, HTS waging an all-out assault from the west, and a massive bulwark of Kurdish territory acting as an immovable wall to the east, the rebels ensured that when the Syrian military left Aleppo, they would have to go much further south than anticipated to reconsolidate any defensive positions.

Days Four and Five — November 30 and December 1: Consolidation and the Push South

When it came time for the most decisive day, November 30, HTS entered as a fundamentally changed organization from what it had been just days prior. Its Red Bands and Thermal Brigades were still leading the charge, its drones and homemade cruise missiles were doing the work for which they were intended, but the group also brought to bear an even greater number of tanks, at least a dozen pieces of heavy artillery, even more drones, ammunition, and anti-tank missiles — along with the knowledge that the Syrian Army was now in full retreat.

Over November 30 and December 1, events proceeded as expected. Rebel forces seized Aleppo’s International Airport as Syria admitted to the deaths of dozens of its soldiers and issued orders to cancel all flights for the foreseeable future. News emerged that Russian forces in the area were quickly wrapping up local operations and departing from their bases. Out along the highways leading south, the haste of the Syrian retreat was put on full display — videos posted on social media showed numerous armored vehicles abandoned, apparently out of gas, with those vehicles likely to be captured and put to work by HTS or their allies.

From the air, Syrian and Russian fighters surged into action while ground forces began to reconsolidate in areas far from Aleppo. The decision for air power to wait for the city’s takeover before beginning counterattacks, combined with early indicators that retreating forces were falling back to a containment perimeter, suggested that after arriving in the city, Major General al-Hassan and his allies had realized their position was untenable within Aleppo and chose to minimize losses.

The corresponding airstrikes hit numerous rebel gatherings and convoys of vehicles, including across Aleppo, and are known to have killed significant numbers of civilians. One state-run organization indicated that strikes had killed about 300 rebels while targeting “militant concentrations, command posts, depots, and artillery positions.” According to Syria’s military command, its forces planned to “carry out a redeployment operation aimed at strengthening the defence lines in order to absorb the attack, preserve the lives of civilians and soldiers.” How much of that was tactical forethought and how much was code for a panicked flight from the city was difficult to determine, though the truth was likely a mix of both.

In Syria’s defense, Russia pledged to surge extra military aid to Damascus, while Kurdish forces indicated they had taken over some territory within Aleppo before HTS arrived, similar to their modest expansion into other nearby areas that government forces had abandoned.

Beyond Aleppo: The M5 Highway and the Road to Damascus

Even as HTS declared victory across Aleppo, the group did something equally shocking — continuing its southward advance down the M5 highway rather than consolidating its position. After capturing Ma’arat al-Nu’man and establishing a secure fallback point to protect Aleppo and Idlib, HTS made its way toward cities like Khan Shaykhun and Morek, indicating what the true ambitions of the offensive push might be.

The strategic significance of the M5 highway cannot be overstated. Starting in Aleppo, with its pre-war population of 2.1 million, the highway provides direct or indirect access to all five of Syria’s biggest cities. Traveling southward from Aleppo, one reaches Hama (pre-war population 300,000), then Homs (population 650,000). Taking Homs and heading west would cut off Latakia (population nearly 400,000). And finally, the highway reaches Damascus (population 1.5 million) — home to Bashar al-Assad himself.

In apparent recognition that Hama was the rebels’ next target, Syrian forces fell in around the area to prepare what was described as a “strong defensive line” in the north of the governorate. Whether that would be enough remained to be seen. At the time of the source reporting, HTS forces had pushed past Khan Shaykhun and Morek, coming very close to Hama’s outer limits, and had started to cut westward toward Latakia — possibly in anticipation that regime defenses would shatter as easily there as they did around Aleppo.

The Broader Implications: A Regime in Crisis

As of the reporting cutoff on December 2, 2024, battles were almost certainly still raging across Syria, with HTS, the Turkish-backed rebels, Kurdish forces, and others all bursting through restraints that the Assad regime had believed might constrain them. Syria’s rebels controlled all of Idlib province, nearly the entire city of Aleppo, major portions of Hama province, and a significant amount of military equipment that they did not possess just one week prior.

The fall of Aleppo in 2024 stands as a dramatic departure from the four-year siege that began in 2012. Where that earlier battle was defined by grinding attrition, the 2024 offensive was characterized by speed, coordination, and the near-total collapse of regime resistance. The combination of elite HTS units with night-fighting capabilities, widespread drone warfare adapted from lessons learned in Ukraine, indigenously produced cruise-missile-like weapons, and a broad coalition of allied forces proved overwhelming for a Syrian military that — despite Russian air support and Iranian ground forces — could not hold its lines.

The offensive also revealed the extent to which HTS had transformed itself organizationally. The pre-planned Military Operations Command, the rapid deployment of civilian governance structures in captured territory, the protection of minority communities, and the release of political prisoners all pointed to a group that had spent years preparing not just for military conquest, but for the political and administrative challenges that would follow. Whether this transformation represents a genuine departure from the group’s radical past or a strategic rebranding remains one of the most consequential questions in the evolving Syrian conflict.

The Regime’s Military Failings — and Its Silver Lining

The rebel assault on Aleppo exposed deep structural weaknesses in the Syrian regime’s military posture. While Assad’s forces had demonstrated over months of artillery bombardment that they were potent on the offensive and resistant to counterattacking skirmishes, their defensive lines snapped almost immediately when HTS and its allies applied real, sustained pressure. The collapse was swift and comprehensive — a stark indictment of a military that had grown accustomed to static warfare and harassment operations rather than defending against a coordinated, multi-axis assault.

However, there was a silver lining for Damascus amid the wreckage. Syria’s more capable military leaders were now on-scene and directly engaged in the crisis. After more than a decade of civil war, the best among them had demonstrated in previous campaigns that they could reorganize and mount effective resistance when given the opportunity. Critically, they would be aided by a change in Russian military leadership: General Sergei Kissel, the commander of Russian forces in Syria at the time of the rebel offensive, was relieved of duty and replaced with a new commander tasked with stabilizing the situation.

The regime’s defensive calculus also shifted in a potentially favorable direction. Rather than trying to guard against attack from all angles across the dense Aleppo suburbs — a task that had proven impossible — Syrian forces could now consolidate around a handful of individual strongpoints along a more sparsely populated perimeter. Heavy weaponry was reportedly en route to the front, while Iran-backed militias were believed to be making their way to the area to reinforce the battered defensive lines.

Perhaps most importantly, the regime and its Russian backers retained an overwhelming advantage in the sky. While HTS could attempt to shoot down aircraft with anti-air weapons, the rebels had no capacity to fight regime and Russian air power head-on. This asymmetry in airpower remained the single greatest military advantage Assad could leverage. Reports emerged that regime forces had already been able to offer limited push-back against HTS, retaking a few villages in localized counterattacks, although it remained unclear how long those positions could hold against the rebel momentum.

Debunking the Palace Coup Rumors

In the chaotic earliest days of the rebel advance, a claim circulated widely that Bashar al-Assad himself was facing a palace coup — a rumor that, if true, would have signaled the total disintegration of the regime. On November 30, reports surfaced of explosions and gunfire in the capital Damascus as Assad was reportedly returning from Moscow. The attacks were purportedly launched by supporters of Syria’s State Security Director, General Hussam Luka, raising the specter of an internal power struggle at the worst possible moment for the regime.

However, whatever transpired in Damascus that day, Assad appeared to emerge unscathed. On Sunday, December 1 — possibly to ease mounting concerns about his status — Assad made public comments vowing retribution against the rebels. “Terrorists only know the language of force and it is the language we will crush them with,” he declared.

He made the statement while hosting Iran’s foreign minister and appearing on camera in Damascus, providing rather reliable confirmation that he was, in fact, alive and well. While the possibility that Assad could eventually be deposed as the pressure of the rebel offensive intensified could not be ruled out, the palace coup narrative appeared to be premature at best and fabricated at worst.

The Kurdish Dilemma: HTS, Rojava, and Turkey’s Shadow

The rapid rebel expansion created an immediate and complex friction point with the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria — Rojava — and its Kurdish paramilitaries. With their territorial gains, HTS and allied forces were now pushing directly up against Kurdish-held territory. Although Kurdish forces had taken advantage of the chaos to snap up strategically valuable land abandoned by the retreating regime, they had thus far opposed the insurgency rather than joining it.

Rojava’s primary fear was that Turkey was directly involved in the offensive, or may have even laid the foundation for the entire attack. Turkey maintained a long and bloody history of military operations against Kurdish forces in both Syria and Iraq, and per Rojava’s assessment, Turkey’s current involvement — whether direct or through its proxy Syrian Interim Government forces — was designed to displace Kurdish people in Syria’s northwest. HTS, for its part, had asked some Kurdish troops in areas near Aleppo to retreat toward consolidated Rojava territory, a request that underscored the tension between the two forces even as they shared a common enemy in the Assad regime.

The question of Turkey’s direct involvement remained murky. It was not clear that Turkish troops or intelligence operatives were present on the ground alongside the rebel forces. However, Turkey had indicated that it intended to return up to one hundred thousand Syrian refugees to territory in Aleppo province — a move that would reshape the demographic landscape of the region and potentially serve Turkish strategic interests. The decision of the Turkish-backed Syrian Interim Government forces to support HTS through Operation Dawn of Freedom provided further evidence that the offensive advanced Ankara’s goals.

The relationship between Turkey and its proxy forces added another layer of complexity. While the Turkish-backed rebels might harbor skepticism toward their sponsor following Turkey’s recent attempts to normalize relations with the Assad regime, those normalization efforts had recently collapsed. This created a dual dynamic: the proxy forces might question Turkey’s long-term reliability, but they might also be more than willing to participate in what could be interpreted as a Turkish attempt to punish Syria for refusing to come to terms.

Potential Coalition Scenarios: What Cooperation Could Achieve

In the coming weeks, HTS, the Turkish-backed rebels, the Rojava government, and other opposition forces would need to come to terms on how they could move forward. The incentives for cooperation were enormous. If the various anti-regime factions remained broadly fractured or distrustful of each other, there were clear limits to what each group could achieve individually. But if they could overcome their differences, the potential military rewards were staggering.

In the northwest, an extension of HTS’s current offensive could combine with a push from the Turkish-backed rebels, potentially traveling through HTS territory or even staging operations from Turkey itself. Such a combined force could target the city of Latakia or potentially strike as far south as Tartus, capturing a broad stretch of Mediterranean coastline in the process. While Assad’s forces might consolidate effectively around Hama, the forces defending the Latakia region would face a harder time digging in — and if the forces defending Aleppo had shattered so easily, it was an open question whether those around Latakia could provide much greater resistance.

A partnership between HTS and Kurdish forces, though fraught with political complications, could yield even more dramatic results. Together, they could seize massive amounts of territory and oil resources in Syria’s less populated heartland. If the rebels managed to take Hama and force the regime to commit to a defense of Homs, they would gain access to another key highway that could enable an attack on Palmyra in the central desert. In such a scenario, Kurdish forces could leverage their own territorial position to create the second half of a pincer offensive, squeezing regime forces from multiple directions simultaneously.

These scenarios remained speculative but illustrated the scale of the strategic opportunity that the fall of Aleppo had created for the regime’s opponents.

A Brittle Regime Exposed: Ripple Effects Across Syria

The fall of Aleppo sent shockwaves far beyond the city itself, forcing every faction in Syria to reassess the regime’s actual military strength. As Robert Ford, a former American ambassador to Syria, explained to NPR: “What this shows is that the Assad military forces were hard — I mean, they could inflict a lot of casualties, especially on civilian targets, but they were very brittle. The regime is obviously very weak, and its external supporters are much weaker than they were a couple of years ago, and, frankly, much weaker than almost anybody expected.”

This brittleness was a problem the regime could potentially address in the defense of critical strongholds like Homs or Damascus, where the stakes would force maximum effort and concentration of resources. But it almost certainly could not be remedied across the entire country simultaneously. The exposure of regime weakness created a cascading set of threats from multiple directions.

The Rojava government and its Kurdish paramilitaries would now be looking to re-examine their long front line with the regime, probing for points where they might force a breakthrough. Smaller insurgencies, particularly in the southern province of Dara’a, might leverage the local militia alliances they had formed in recent months to make a play for provincial control. On a more foreboding note, resurgent Islamic State forces could seize this moment of regime weakness to re-establish territorial control, conduct prison breaks, or eliminate competitors while the Syrian military was distracted and overextended.

This was precisely the powder keg dynamic that had long defined Syria’s fragile status quo: one seemingly small, localized spark — in this case, an artillery barrage on Ariha — and the entire conflict could very quickly spiral back into a multidimensional, all-out war. The fall of Aleppo was not merely a single battle lost; it was a stress test that the regime failed catastrophically, and every faction in Syria had taken note.

Why the Fall of Aleppo Matters Beyond Syria

Despite its enormous strategic significance, the fall of Aleppo in 2024 was flying under the radar in much of the Western world. This was a dangerous oversight. The offensive demonstrated that frozen conflicts can reignite with breathtaking speed, that asymmetric forces equipped with drone technology and night-fighting capabilities can overwhelm conventional militaries, and that the network of alliances propping up the Assad regime — Russian air power, Iranian ground forces, and Hezbollah fighters — was far more fragile than almost anyone had anticipated.

The situation carried a very high likelihood of getting much worse before it got better. With HTS pushing toward Hama and potentially Homs, with Kurdish forces reassessing their posture, with southern insurgencies eyeing new opportunities, and with the Islamic State lurking in the desert, Syria stood on the brink of a broader conflagration that could reshape the entire Middle Eastern security landscape. The speed of Aleppo’s fall — accomplished in under four days by a force that most analysts had written off as a contained regional militia — served as a stark reminder that in the Syrian conflict, the only constant was the capacity for sudden, dramatic, and deeply consequential change.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What triggered the HTS offensive on Aleppo in November 2024?

The immediate trigger was a Syrian regime artillery barrage on the city of Ariha on November 26, 2024, which killed sixteen people including two children and wounded twelve more including eight children. However, HTS had been planning the offensive for months in response to escalating regime pressure through artillery barrages and suicide drone strikes on Idlib province.

How quickly did Aleppo fall to rebel forces?

Aleppo fell in under four days. The offensive began on November 27, 2024, and by November 29, regime forces were fleeing the city and rebels had captured major government buildings, intelligence directorates, the ancient citadel, and positions around the international airport.

What military capabilities did HTS demonstrate during the offensive?

HTS demonstrated sophisticated military capabilities including elite units like the Thermal Brigades equipped with thermal night-vision scopes for night operations and the Red Bands for daytime operations. They deployed first-person-view suicide drones and consumer-grade quadcopters for reconnaissance, used an indigenously produced cruise-missile-like projectile called Zawam or Qaysar with a 200-kilogram warhead, and captured significant quantities of advanced weaponry including T-55 and T-72 tanks, armored personnel carriers, and anti-tank missiles.

What is the strategic significance of the M5 highway?

The M5 highway is Syria’s main north-south artery, providing direct or indirect access to all five of Syria’s biggest cities. Starting in Aleppo, it runs south through Hama, Homs, and ultimately reaches Damascus. Control of this highway allows forces to threaten multiple major population centers and is essential for moving troops and equipment. HTS’s advance along the M5 toward Hama and potentially Homs represents a direct threat to the regime’s heartland.

How did the Syrian regime and its allies respond to the offensive?

The regime’s initial defensive lines collapsed rapidly, with forces retreating from Aleppo by November 29. Major General Suhayl al-Hassan, known as “The Tiger,” was deployed to command the defense but ultimately withdrew forces to minimize losses. Russia and Syria launched airstrikes against rebel positions and claimed to have killed about 300 rebels. Russia relieved General Sergei Kissel of command and pledged additional military aid.

Iran-backed militias were reported moving to reinforce defensive lines, though an IRGC Brigadier General was killed during the fighting.

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