00:00For more, let's bring in Marina Miron,
00:02post-doctoral researcher in
00:04the War Studies Department at King's College.
00:06She joins us from Munich.
00:08Marina, some analysts have described this group,
00:12acronym HTS, as Islamists.
00:15Yet, there are reports the group has cut
00:18deals with local Druze and Christian groups.
00:21I know this is a hard question,
00:22but generally speaking, who are they?
00:27Good evening. Well, it's a good question.
00:31The group is fairly new,
00:32so it was formed or rebranded in
00:352017 by Abu Muhammad al-Jilani.
00:39But it's an offspring of a more radical group,
00:44which existed since 2011,
00:47the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, Jabhat al-Nusra.
00:50That group did have ties to Al-Qaeda.
00:54It is a very interesting concoction here because,
00:57on the one hand,
00:59this group is preaching Salafi Islam,
01:05so that's a Sunni branch of Islam, a radical Islam.
01:07On the other hand, according to al-Jilani himself,
01:11he wants to unite all the opposition,
01:15and he doesn't want any sectarian violence
01:17in order to challenge the Assad government.
01:19That being said, this group has been put on
01:23the foreign terrorist organization
01:25list by the United States in 2018,
01:27because the US thinks it covertly works with Al-Qaeda,
01:33even if it overtly denounced
01:35Al-Qaeda and arrested some of the fighters.
01:38It was in the group linked to Al-Qaeda.
01:41The rebel forces are advancing
01:44towards the city of Hama in the south.
01:47Do we know when they will stop?
01:49Have they articulated what their ultimate goal is?
01:54Well, if you look at the military
01:57and the political strategy of HTS,
01:59their goal is to get rid of the Assad regime.
02:02Essentially, the goals haven't changed
02:06since its predecessor in 2011,
02:09when 120 different factions were
02:12fighting for power in the Syrian civil war.
02:15I think the primary target will,
02:19of course, be the Idlib province,
02:21but that said, they might go further.
02:24What we have to keep in mind is that
02:27we don't know the exact size of this group,
02:29and there were estimates of about
02:30some 20,000 fighters as of 2018.
02:33So do they actually have the ability
02:37to recruit more support amongst other factions
02:41to achieve this goal,
02:43and how the government then will look if they succeed?
02:46And of course, it depends on what the others will do,
02:50such as Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and Turkey, of course.
02:55I mean, that leads to the next question I had in mind.
02:57I mean, this offensive is happening
02:59at a very momentous time geopolitically.
03:02In the region, we have Israel fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon,
03:05fighting Hamas in Gaza, and even Iran directly at times.
03:10We know that Russia has supported Bashar al-Assad for years.
03:14Russia is now preoccupied with its invasion of Ukraine.
03:18Is any of this connected in terms of the timing
03:21of this offensive?
03:25Well, it is connected in a way that this group, of course,
03:29looked for an opportune moment
03:31where all the key players or backers
03:33are very much busy with their bigger issues.
03:37They have bigger fish to fry.
03:40And so for the Russians, of course, this is bad news
03:43because they are fighting in Ukraine right now,
03:47and they don't want to commit any ground troops to Syria.
03:52They didn't want to do so in 2015.
03:54They reluctantly joined the fight
03:56because of the longstanding tradition
03:58and ties between the Soviet leadership
04:01and Hafez al-Assad, who is Bashar al-Assad's father.
04:04So they cannot drop Syria.
04:06They have military bases in Tartus,
04:08a naval base and Khmeimim, an air base.
04:11So they cannot drop Syria,
04:12but they will have to somehow send in capable units
04:18in order to support the Syrian Arab army.
04:21We have to be very careful with names
04:22because there are many Syrian armies within Syria right now,
04:27the Assad's army, essentially.
04:30And of course, it opens up another battlefield
04:33because the Ukrainian military intelligence
04:36has been said to be operating in Syria,
04:38supporting government opposition.
04:41So the HDS, interestingly enough,
04:45has some capabilities that have been seen in Ukraine,
04:48such as the use of FPV drones.
04:50So it looks like there is a spillover
04:53of the Ukrainian war into Syria as well in this scenario.
04:57Marina Mehran, thank you so much for joining us.
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