“Since taking Aleppo, HTS has “said all the right things,” said Ford, noting that Christian services were held on Sunday. The group has published a statement proclaiming “diversity is our strength” and calling for solidarity with Aleppo’s Kurdish population.
Alhamdo, the activist from Aleppo, told Vox he was not a supporter of HTS’s ideology, but gave them credit for their tactical leadership on the battlefield and felt that “they are developing their mentality.”
Ford, who spearheaded the move to designate the group — under its former name — as a terrorist organization when he served in the Obama administration, told Vox he “would be hard-pressed now, in 2024, to legally justify a listing” for the group in its current incarnation.
Of course, not everyone is likely to buy the group’s rebranding effort. That includes the Biden administration as well as regional governments, like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which used to staunchly back the Syrian opposition, but are fearful of the overtly Islamist turn some opposition groups have taken. These are the governments that have also been reaching out to try to normalize relations with Assad.
“For the UAE especially, HTS is Islamist. It is the Muslim Brotherhood. It is evil incarnate, no matter how many permutations it has undertaken,” Slim said. “This group was al-Qaeda, and it’s going to take a lot of change to convince the US, or the Saudis, or the Egyptians that it really has changed.””
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“Another group involved in the rebel coalition is the Syrian National Army (SNA), which despite its name is a Turkish-backed proxy militia. Turkey has a more wary relationship with HTS, but reportedly gave the green light to the SNA’s involvement in the operation due to Assad’s unwillingness to engage in talks earlier this year.
Turkey’s bigger concern, though, is the Kurdish-dominated statelet that has emerged in Syria’s northeast. The Syrian Kurdish forces, known as the SDF, have been America’s primary allies in the ongoing campaign against ISIS, but Turkey views them as a branch of the PKK, the Turkey-based Kurdish militant group that has fought a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish government. The Turkish military and its proxy forces have launched several incursions over the border into Syria to push the Kurdish forces back.
The SDF also controlled some pockets of territory in and around Aleppo but has withdrawn from these as the rebels have advanced. Sinam Mohamad, the representative in Washington for the Syrian Democratic Council — as the predominantly Kurdish government in northeast Syria is known — said she believes Turkey is “planning to occupy some Syrian lands in order to destroy the autonomous administration of northeast Syria.” Despite the HTS’s assurances that Kurds have nothing to fear from Aleppo’s new rulers, she told Vox the group is a “terrorist organization” and that “we are really afraid about the minorities, especially the Kurdish people, in Aleppo city.””
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“Iran and Russia — even in their diminished capacity — are unlikely to completely abandon a regime they see as strategically vital.
But even if the rebel offensive does not get much farther than the area it currently controls, their rapid success demonstrates a couple of important lessons. One, the war in Syria is not over. Many of the fighters who entered Aleppo this week were young children when the uprising against Assad began more than a decade ago, and there could well be years more fighting to come.
Second, it’s a mistake to consider conflicts like Syria in isolation. The Syrian conflict is often called a “civil war,” which generally means a war fought by factions existing within one country. But at the conflict’s height, it drew in countries from around the region, as well as the United States and Russia, presaging similar lines of conflict in Ukraine. Through the rise of ISIS, the massive global refugee crisis, and the spread of illegal drugs, it has had truly global ripple effects. Like a feedback loop, events abroad — particularly in Lebanon and Ukraine — are now helping drive events on the ground in Syria.
The latest offensive will have its own ripple effects. Optimistically, it could allow for refugees from Aleppo living abroad and elsewhere in Syria to return home, and weaken or even topple a truly odious regime, one that has used chemical weapons on its own people and is believed to have killed tens of thousands of civilians.
Pessimistically, it could lead to more chaos and displacement. HTS may yet go back to its former jihadist ways, the horrific levels of violence we saw years ago could return, more regional actors could be drawn in, and jihadist groups like ISIS could take advantage of the chaos to reconstitute themselves.
The world may have thought it was done with Syria. But Syrians themselves are not done, and the world has no choice but to pay attention again.”
“A new study by the Costs of War Project at Brown University pinned down exactly what that cost is: at least $22.76 billion from October 7, 2023, to September 30, 2024. The bulk of the money, $17.9 billion, was spent on U.S. aid to the Israeli military—both financial grants given to Israel to purchase weapons, and the cost of replacing munitions such as artillery shells sent directly from American stockpiles to the Israeli army.”
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“The study only counts the direct burden on the U.S. military budget. It doesn’t include indirect costs, “such as increased U.S. security assistance to Egypt, Saudi Arabia or any other countries, and costs to the commercial airline industry and to U.S. consumers.” Nor does it count the $1 billion in U.S. humanitarian aid to Palestinians.”
“The RUSI team argues that Western sanctions should target the artillery supply chain rather than primarily focusing on blocking advanced tech like microelectronics from reaching Russia.
“It is more difficult to secretly transfer thousands of tons of chromium ore into a country than to smuggle in a few thousand microchips,” the report said; chromium is used in artillery barrel manufacturing.
Endowed with vast natural resources and a huge Soviet-era defense industrial base, Russia is self-sufficient for many of its military needs. But the RUSI team zeroed in on two requirements where Russia depends on imports: Machine tools and raw materials that are essential for casting or refurbishing artillery barrels, and for producing artillery shells.
Until 2022, Russia depended on Western-supplied machine tools, especially advanced computer numerical control, or CNC, automated systems. Sanctions imposed in 2023 slashed imports of Western equipment, but China has been able to fill much of the gap, though “Russian companies have historically preferred Western machine tools over Chinese equivalents, as they are more precise and higher quality,” the report noted. However, China and other nations re-export Western tools to Russia. RUSI identified at least 2,113 companies that supplied Western tools to Russia in 2023 and early 2024, including equipment from Germany, South Korea, Italy, Japan and Taiwan.
Manufacturing artillery barrels is a rigorous task that requires highly specialized manufacturing facilities. Just as US defense manufacturing has consolidated into a few prime contractors who can build jets and ships, only four Russian companies can forge artillery barrels: Zavod No. 9 in Yekaterinburg; Titan-Barrikady in Volgograd; MZ/ SKB in Perm; and the Burevestnik Research Institute in Nizhny Novgorod, according to the report. Each company has its own supply chain of subcontractors, such as factories that make special steel.
As for raw materials, Russia imports about 55% of the high-quality chromium needed to harden gun barrels. It also depends on Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to supply much of the cotton cellulose that is a crucial ingredient in the nitrocellulose used to make explosives. There are three primary manufacturers of artillery ammunition in Russia — NIMI Bakhirev, the Plastmass Plant and KBP Shipunov — which also rely on a web of contractors and suppliers.
Evidence suggests that sanctions on these links in the supply chain can work. For example, Khlopkoprom-Tsellyuloza, a Kazakh company that was a major supplier of cotton cellulose to two Russian propellant factories, slashed its exports when those factories were sanctioned, RUSI pointed out. Indeed, Kazakhstan is now supplying cotton cellulose for NATO ammunition.
Current Western sanctions tend to be too broad and sporadic to cripple Russian defense production. A better approach would be a mixture of economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure focused on Russia’s artillery supply chain, concluded the report. “A concerted approach, with additional resources dedicated to enforcement and disruption, will have a greater chance of success.””
“Charities have been essential to meeting these needs. No one knows precisely how many items they have donated, but the figure is likely in the millions. The donations were particularly sizable in the war’s first year. “We were sending primarily drones, night-vision equipment and optics, plates, helmets, carriers and uniforms,” said Tallat-Kelpša, whose group raised over $1 million in the first 10 months of the invasion. United Help Ukraine, which raised tens of millions of dollars in 2022, told me they sent 5,000 bulletproof vests and 100,000 tourniquets. Hope for Ukraine, a New Jersey-based group that raised over $6 million in 2022, was able to stuff a shipping container with aid — including food and medical supplies — every week or two.
“The entire war is crowdfunded,” said Matthew Sampson, a former U.S. soldier who serves in Ukraine’s International Legion, a unit of the Ukrainian armed forces composed of foreign volunteers. Like many NATO veterans now fighting in Ukraine, he is acutely aware of what Kyiv lacks. Foreign donors, Sampson said, allowed his unit to purchase food and fuel. They gave them cars. They even helped pay for housing. “For our safe houses, we had to pay rent, utilities and repairs,” Sampson told me. “Ukraine doesn’t have the money for any of that stuff.”
But today, almost every group helping the country — big and small alike — is taking in less money than before. During the first year of the war, Come Back Alive raised roughly $38 million in non-Ukrainian currencies. In the more than 18 months since, it has raised less than half that figure. United Help Ukraine also said donations had decreased, although they didn’t provide details. Hope for Ukraine said they raised roughly a third as much in 2023 as they did in 2022. “It was like a big roller coaster,” said Yuriy Boyechko, the group’s leader. “There was a big high, and then there was a big drop.””
“South Korea’s spy agency said Friday it believes North Korea has already begun deploying four brigades totaling 12,000 troops, including special forces, to the war in Ukraine.”