Attention to the Unseen

The Times of Israel reports: Syrian rebel forces on Saturday made major advances in their offensive against Syrian government forces, with reports saying rebels were closing in on the capital Damascus from the north, east, and south, as regime troops reportedly pulled back from bases around the country to fortify positions around the capital city. CNN reported Saturday that the US was increasingly believing that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime could collapse within days. Reuters similarly cited American and other…

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Hassan Hassan writes: The stunningly successful offensive by Syrian rebels last week accomplished what years of bloodshed by larger factions could not. Within four days, the rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, captured much of Aleppo, one of Syria’s largest cities, and now controls most of Aleppo Province and all of Idlib Province. Long-entrenched front lines held by government forces and fortified by Russian firepower crumbled. Underlying the success of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is a crucial development: It has evolved from…

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Middle East Eye reports: Iraq’s Shia forces, including major Iranian-affiliated armed factions, have unanimously decided not to send fighters to Syria to defend Bashar al-Assad from the rebel advance, officials and commanders told Middle East Eye. Last week, Syrian rebels led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham launched an offensive on Assad’s forces, seizing the major cities of Aleppo and Hama in a matter of days. The advance, which is now bearing down on Homs, has greatly concerned Iraqi leaders, who consider…

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Alexey Kovalev writes: “Spare people” with low “social value” is how Russian parliamentarian Aleksandr Borodai described his compatriots sent as cannon fodder to Ukraine in a leaked tape, the authenticity of which he later confirmed. Expendable manpower, he explained, can be thrown at Ukraine’s “bravest [and] boldest,” and “exhaust the enemy to the maximum.” Borodai isn’t just anybody: He’s a political consultant from Moscow who declared himself prime minister of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic in Ukraine in 2014, and…

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The Guardian reports: Islamist insurgents have captured the Syrian city of Hama in a battle to seize a vital location on the road to Damascus, marking the latest challenge to Bashar al-Assad’s control of the country. Militants led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) entered the city from the east on Thursday after surrounding it during five days of fighting with forces loyal to Assad. Video circulating online suggested that the insurgents had captured a military airport outside Hama,…

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Pjotr Sauer writes: The walls of the military office in Aleppo were adorned with pictures of the Kremlin, flanked by Russian and Syrian flags hanging side by side. On the desks, documents detailing the cooperation between the two nations lay abandoned – telltale signs of Bashar al-Assad’s forces’ hasty retreat as rebels closed in on Syria’s second-biggest city over the weekend. The short clip circulating online was recorded in the office of Russian advisers at Aleppo’s military academy after it…

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Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss write: Aleppo was never meant to fall. A stunning offensive waged by two Turkish-backed forces over the space of the last five days has resulted in the conquering of Syria’s second-largest city and industrial hub, doing in under a week what more numerous and well-resourced anti-Assad rebels never managed. Yet Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Syrian National Army (SNA) found themselves the beneficiaries of neighboring conflicts, an opportunistic patron in Ankara, the recent election…

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Robin Yassin-Kassab writes: The rebels advanced out of the narrow strip of Idlib in which they and millions of Syrians from around the country had been crammed for over four years. ‘The rebels’ here means a military alliance under the umbrella of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – the greatly moderated and better organised reincarnation of Jabhat al-Nusra. It’s still an authoritarian Islamist militia, but it’s not at all ‘like ISIS’ as the uninformed are saying. It broke definitively from the ISIS…

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Phillips Payson O’Brien writes: Joe Biden filled his administration with geniuses: Rhodes scholars; Ivy League graduates; people with extensive global experience; a national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, whom the president has described as a “once-in-a-generation intellect.” The president himself has been immersed in foreign policy for half a century. Yet despite all of those impressive résumés, the Biden administration has badly mishandled the war in Ukraine, not only hampering a beleaguered ally’s ability to fend off a Russian invasion but…

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The New York Times reports: Syrian rebels breached the major city of Aleppo on Friday, according to the fighters and a war monitor, reigniting the country’s long-running civil war with an intensity not seen in years. The rebels, including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, took control of “more than half of Aleppo” within hours on Friday without resistance from Syrian government forces, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group based in Britain. Independent Syrian media shared images…

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Reuters reports: Britain’s foreign spy chief accused Russia on Friday of waging a “staggeringly reckless campaign” of sabotage in Europe while also stepping up its nuclear sabre-rattling to scare other countries off from backing Ukraine. Richard Moore, head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service known as MI6, said that any softening in support for Ukraine against Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion would embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies. In what appeared a message to incoming U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration…

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Rolling Stone reports: Within Donald Trump’s government-in-waiting, there is a fresh debate over whether and how thoroughly the president-elect should follow through on his campaign promise to attack or even invade Mexico, as part of the “war” he’s pledged to wage against powerful drug cartels. “How much should we invade Mexico?” says a senior Trump transition member. “That is the question.” It is a question that would have seemed batty for the GOP elite to consider before, even during Trump’s…

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