Rebel forces have entered the Syrian capital Damascus with reports that President Bashar al-Assad has fled the country by plane to an unknown location.

In a televised announcement, the group said the city had been "liberated, the tyrant Bashar al-Assad has been toppled".

"Long live a free and independent Syria for all Syrians of all sects," they added.

The lightning offensive, led by Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, began with the sudden capture of Aleppo in late November. It appears to have brought down the end of the regime in less than two weeks.

In many instances, it is reported that the Syrian military either left their posts or defected to the opposition.

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The initial attack was led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) - which has a long and involved history in the Syrian conflict.

HTS is designated as a terrorist organisation by the UN, US, Turkey and other countries.

Who are Hayat Tahrir al-Sham?

HTS was set up under a different name, Jabhat al-Nusra, in 2011 as a direct affiliate of al-Qaeda.

The leader of the self-styled Islamic State (IS) group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was also involved in its formation.

It was regarded as one of the most effective and deadly of the groups ranged against President Assad.

But its jihadist ideology appeared to be its driving force rather than revolutionary zeal - and it was seen at the time as at odds with the main rebel coalition under the banner of Free Syria.

And in 2016, the group’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, publicly broke ranks with al-Qaeda, dissolved Jabhat al-Nusra and set up a new organisation, which took the name Hayat Tahrir al-Sham when it merged with several other similar groups a year later.

For some time now, HTS has established its power base in the north-western province of Idlib where it is the de facto local administration, although its efforts towards legitimacy have been tarnished by alleged human rights abuses.

It has also been involved in some bitter infighting with other groups.

Its ambitions beyond Idlib had become unclear.

Since breaking with al-Qaeda, its goal has been limited to trying to establish fundamentalist Islamic rule in Syria rather than a wider caliphate, as IS tried and failed to do.

It had shown little sign of attempting to reignite the Syrian conflict on a major scale and renew its challenge to Assad’s rule over much of the country - until now.

 

Why is there a war in Syria?

In March 2011, pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in the southern city of Deraa, inspired by uprisings in neighbouring countries against repressive rulers.

When the Syrian government used deadly force to crush the dissent, protests demanding the president's resignation erupted nationwide.

The unrest spread and the crackdown intensified. Opposition supporters took up arms, first to defend themselves and later to rid their areas of security forces. Mr Assad vowed to crush what he called "foreign-backed terrorism".

Hundreds of rebel groups sprang up, foreign powers began to take sides and extremist jihadist organisations such as the Islamic State (IS) group and al-Qaeda, became involved.

The violence rapidly escalated and the country descended into a full-scale civil war drawing in regional and world powers.

More than half a million people have been killed and 12 million have been forced to flee their homes, about five million of whom are refugees or asylum seekers abroad.

How did the rebel offensive come about?

The war in Syria had for the past four years felt as if it were effectively over.

President Bashar al-Assad’s rule had essentially been uncontested in the country’s major cities, while some other parts of Syria remained out of his direct control.

These include Kurdish majority areas in the east, which have been more or less separate from Syrian state control since the early years of the conflict.

There had been some continued, though relatively muted unrest, in the south where the revolution against Assad’s rule began in 2011.

In the vast Syrian desert, holdouts from the group calling themselves Islamic State still pose a security threat, particularly during the truffle hunting season when people head to the area to find the highly profitable delicacy.

And in the north-west, the province of Idlib has been held by militant groups driven there at the height of the war.

HTS, the dominant force in Idlib, is the one that has launched the surprise attack on Aleppo.

For several years, Idlib remained a battleground as Syrian government forces tried to regain control.

But a ceasefire deal in 2020 brokered by Russia, which has long been Assad’s key ally, and Turkey, which has backed the rebels, has largely held.

About four million people live there - most of them displaced from towns and cities that Assad’s forces won back from rebels in a brutal war of attrition.

Aleppo was one of the bloodiest battlegrounds and represented one of the rebels’ biggest defeats.

To achieve victory, President Assad could not depend on the country’s under-equipped and poorly motivated conscript army alone, which soon became dangerously stretched and regularly unable to hold positions against rebel attacks.

Instead, he came to rely heavily on Russian airpower and Iranian military help on the ground - mainly through militias sponsored by Tehran.

These included Hezbollah.

There is little doubt that the setback Hezbollah has suffered recently from Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, as well as Israeli strikes on Iranian military commanders in Syria, has played a significant part in the decision by jihadist and rebel groups in Idlib to make their sudden, unexpected move on Aleppo.

In the past few months, Israel has intensified its attacks on Iranian-linked groups as well as their supply lines, inflicting serious damage on the networks that have kept these militias, including Hezbollah, operative in Syria.

Without them, President Assad’s forces were left exposed.

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What we know about Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel group that led the offensive to oust Syria's leader

• Bashar Assad's government in Syria collapsed on Sunday, ending his 24 years in power.

• Rebel forces led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham swept through Syria, seizing Damascus.

• Here's what we know about HTS.

Bashar Assad's 24-year rule came to an end on Sunday as rebels swept into Damascus, the Syrian capital.

Shortly after insurgents declared the city "free," Russia's foreign ministry announced Assad had resigned his position and left the country. Russian state news later reported that Assad had arrived in Moscow, where he was granted asylum.

The collapse of Assad's government came after a coalition of opposition forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham launched a surprise offensive, seizing control of major cities like Aleppo, Hama, and Homs in a matter of days.

Syrians around the world celebrated the end of Assad's rule, which was marked by brutal suppression. His violent crackdown on peaceful anti-government protests in 2011, part of the Arab Spring uprisings, sparked a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions, straining neighboring countries like Turkey and Lebanon.

World leaders conveyed cautious optimism after news of Assad's ouster, but uncertainty remains around what kind of government and leader will replace him.

One major player will almost certainly be HTS, which is led by Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, a Syrian who fought against US occupation in Iraq alongside a branch of Al Qaeda.

Jolani later returned to Syria, his homeland, where he fought with Jabhat Al-Nusra — an Al Qaeda offshoot formed in 2012 — and other rebel groups against Assad's forces.

Jolani severed his ties with Al Qaeda in 2016 and formed a new group, which eventually became HTS in 2017. Since then, Jolani has portrayed himself as a more moderate leader to gain international legitimacy. Both the United States and the United Nations still list HTS as a terrorist organization.

In one 2021 interview with PBS Frontline, Jolani called the group's terrorist designation a "political label that carries no truth or credibility."

"Through our 10-year journey in this revolution, we haven't posed any threat to Western or European society: no security threat, no economic threat, nothing. That's why this designation is politicized," he said.

In recent years, HTS has controlled Syria's northwestern Idlib Province, where analysts say it worked to consolidate power and transform its image while pursuing its ultimate goal of toppling Assad.

In Idlib, Jolani established the so-called Syrian Salvation Government, which has acted as a showcase for what his leadership could bring to a wider area.

Speaking about the Salvation Government in the PBS interview, Jolani said that while the situation in Idlib was not ideal, there was "a self-asserting model that was capable of running the affairs of a whole country under an Islamic rule."

While some have remained doubtful that the group has fully cut its links with Al Qaeda, it has put forth a message of inclusiveness and unity in recent days, calling for a peaceful transition of power and reassuring religious and ethnic minorities in Syria.

"In the future Syria … diversity is our strength, not a weakness," the group said in a statement to the Kurdish minority in Aleppo.

Aron Lund, a fellow at Century International and a Middle East analyst at the Swedish Defense Research Agency, told Sky News that while Jolani and his group had changed, they remained "pretty hardline."

"It's PR, but the fact they are engaging in this effort at all shows they are no longer as rigid as they once were," he said, referencing video footage showing Jolani forbidding fighters from entering homes and telling them to protect citizens. "Old-school Al Qaeda or the Islamic State would never have done that."

HTS is only one part of an ideologically diverse opposition, and it remains to be seen if the coalition can peacefully share power and extend unified control over the whole country.

"If not, intra-Syrian territorial fragmentation, and the potential emergence of regional warlords and fiefdoms, will quickly grow," Jonathan Panikoff, the director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council's Middle East Program

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