Lawmakers see ‘bad guys on both sides’ in Syria offensive 

Senators on both sides of the aisle are holding back from cheering rebel gains against Syrian President Bashar Assad, following a lightning offensive over the weekend led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a U.S.-designated terrorist group.

HTS’s surprise capture of Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo, and large swaths of territory in the northwest over a few days has punctured the idea that Assad, backed by Iran and Russia, had a firm grasp over territory. 

“Nobody here spends a second rooting for Bashar al-Assad,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on the Middle East. 

“We’re all assessing what the agenda of this rebel group will be. It has some real dangerous elements that are part of this group.”

The U.S. is largely absent from Syria, except for 900 troops stationed in the Kurdish-held northeast territory — fighting against the resurgence of ISIS in the region. And while the U.S. presence has often served as a check against Iranian and Russian ambitions in the country, both the Biden and first Trump administrations have sought to draw down troops.

Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho), the incoming chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said it’s too soon to tell if the fighting in Syria complicates efforts to draw down U.S. troops. 

“I think the jury is still out on that question,” he said. “They operate in a different part; they don’t operate near Aleppo or Damascus. I don’t think it’s a concern at the moment. It could become a concern,” he said.  

Risch described the rebel offensive as being hijacked by terrorist organizations, which makes it difficult to support.

“You got bad folks on both sides of this right now. I don’t know what the path forward is there, but I don’t see a path that looks good.”

Syria’s civil war, which erupted in 2011, had largely stalemated by 2020. At that time, Turkey and Russia helped negotiate a ceasefire to preserve Assad’s grip on power. In recent years, he was slowly being integrated back into the Arab world — despite his multiple uses of chemical weapons against civilians, documented torture of thousands of people in secret prisons and hundreds of thousands killed over the course of the war.

“Let’s look at the glass that’s half full — a weakened Assad will weaken Iran further, and weaken Russia in the Middle East, which is good news for the United States,” said Randa Slim, fellow with the Foreign Policy Institute at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

“But then, what will be our position? Because part of the equation are these Islamist forces which are designated by us as terrorist organizations. … Is this the kind of opposition that the United States wants to push forward? The conundrum, bad people versus bad people, how do we position ourselves here in this fight?”

The Pentagon has carried out airstrikes in southeast Syria over recent days against Iranian-backed groups but stressed these are not related to the fighting in the northwest. 

“To be clear, these self-defense actions successfully eliminated imminent threats to U.S. personnel and were not linked to any broader activities in northwest Syria by other groups,” Pentagon press secretary Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters Tuesday. 

“Let me underscore that the U.S. mission in Syria remains unchanged as U.S. and coalition forces continue to focus on the enduring defeat of ISIS. However, we remain fully prepared to defend and protect our personnel and assets deployed in the region, to include our forces deployed to Syria.”

The U.S. listed HTS as a terrorist group in 2014, and its roots link back to the Islamic State and al Qaeda. The opposition Syrian National Army, an umbrella group of fighters backed by Turkey, is also part of the offensive and includes groups also sanctioned by the U.S. as terrorist organizations. 

“Certainly, it took everyone by surprise,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), the incoming ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said of HTS’s shock offensive. 

“It’s particularly distressing because it’s not clear whose interests the opposition groups are representing — and for civilians who have been through so much, it’s created an even worse situation for them.”

On Sunday, the Biden administration, alongside France, Germany and the United Kingdom, put out a joint statement calling for “de-escalation by all parties,” protection of civilians and delivery of humanitarian assistance, and urged a political solution in line with the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254. 

“What we are afraid of with HTS, they are designated as a terrorist organization — so far they didn’t do anything in Aleppo, but we don’t know what will happen,” said Sinam Sherkany, chief of mission in the U.S. for the Syrian Democratic Council, a Syrian Kurdish political group that represents the Kurdish-held, northeastern part of Syria, where U.S. troops are based, and also has Kurdish groups in Aleppo.

Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who researches Sunni jihadi groups, has documented HTS’s evolution and that of its leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani. 

In an analysis for War on the Rocks, a national security online media outlet, Zelin said HTS disavowed the global pursuit of Islamic rule to focus on controlling local territory and, since its shock offensive, has issued edicts for its soldiers not to harm civilians — in particular minorities. 

“Put together, these are efforts to assuage the fears from minority communities now under the Liberated Areas rule. However, we will have to see how things play out in the longer term,” he wrote. 

Anas Barbour, Syria representative for Med Global, a nonprofit group providing emergency humanitarian relief, said Russian and Syrian aerial strikes had targeted civilian centers and hospitals in Aleppo and the northwestern city of Idlib, also under the control of rebel forces. 

“Now the situation is very challenging to the humanitarian sector, to humanitarian workers, because the airstrikes are coming and attacking directly the health facilities on both sides, as usual,” he said. Several reports have documented Russian and Syrian army airstrikes hitting hospitals and health facilities in Idlib and Aleppo. 

Aid groups have long accused the Syrian government and Russian forces of targeting hospital and civilian facilities whose locations were shared with the United Nations as a way to avoid targeting. 

“The primary target in any escalation is the hospitals and sometimes schools and education facilities, so this is the situation now,” Barbour continued.

The U.N. has warned that tens of thousands of people are on the move, many being displaced for the second time. Renewed fighting and airstrikes are killing civilians and traumatizing a population that had endured 13 years of one of the world’s bloodiest civil wars, with estimations of more than half a million deaths. 

But it’s not yet clear what HTS control over Syrian cities and towns actually means — and whether it is holding true to claims of respect for minority and religious groups, to include Shiites, Christians, Kurds, Yazidis and others.

“The last few days have been very shocking and surprising. In a matter of two days, revolutionaries have been able to take all of Aleppo city and completely rid it of any Assad regime, Russian or Iranian presence,” Bishop Hanna Jallouf, vicar apostolic of Aleppo, said in a video call from the city with reporters in Washington, D.C.

“Some of us in our community were a little bit fearful; we didn’t know what was going to happen. None of us left our homes, we all stayed home, but very quickly we realized there was nothing to fear and things were getting better than a few days ago.”

Mouaz Moustafa, who organized the call with Jallouf and is executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, an American humanitarian organization, said that despite concerns with HTS’s Islamist ideology, the group’s successful pushback against Assad, Iran and Russia could help renew efforts toward a political resolution in Syria. 

“I’m not here to defend HTS; I’m not a fan. But I don’t want us to miss the forest for the trees,” he said. 

“Syria was nothing but forgotten under the Biden administration on multiple levels. Now, we have them asking for de-escalation of what should be something that is celebrated – the liberation of Syria from Iran,” he said.