What’s happening in Syria? How an old conflict in the Middle East erupted again
Syria's civil war has exploded back into life after Islamist rebels launched a lightning offensive on the northern city of Aleppo.
In the messy patchwork of conflicts raging across the Middle East, one country has been absent from the spotlight: Syria.
A civil war that dominated international headlines for more than a decade has now been reignited after a coalition of Syrian rebels launched a lightning offensive last week, seizing Aleppo, the country’s second-largest city, from President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
The rebels took only hours to recapture territory that Assad’s forces had spent years reclaiming. Fighter jets from Syria and its ally Russia soon began bombing the area — killing hundreds of the rebels but civilians, too, according to a leading monitoring group.
“This is a very unstable situation with a huge amount of flux,” said H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.
Anti-government fighters in Aleppo on Saturday.Omar Haj Kadour / AFP - Getty Images fileSome anti-Assad activists hope it could herald the crumbling of a depleted regime; others fear the brutality of the Russia-Syrian response — as well as the hard-line ideology of the Islamist rebels themselves.
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