The stunning speed with which Syrian rebels overran Syrian army troops to reconquer the city of Aleppo over the past week is yet another geopolitical shock with potentially enormous implications. Prior to last week, the widespread consensus among officials in the U.S., the European Union and the Gulf states was that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian regime had proven resilient enough to withstand any challenger. Nevertheless, a coalition of rebel groups dominated by the former al-Qaida affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, demonstrated remarkable military professionalism in overwhelming Syrian armed forces and seizing control of the city of 2 million people, which was Syria’s primary economic center before the start of the civil war in 2011.
Yet rather than coming out of nowhere, the dynamics that led to the rise of HTS and the collapse of Assad’s position have been building for a long time in rural villages and urban neighborhoods across northern Syria, the product of bitter historical legacies reaching back over decades as well as more recent social change that has accelerated over the past four years.
Those deeper historical factors stem from the fact that many of the same regions in Aleppo and Idlib governates that rebelled against Assad in 2011 were also at the heart of massive revolts against the state in 1980, which were viciously suppressed by his father, then-President Hafez al-Assad. Though the city of Aleppo has substantial Christian and Kurdish areas, both regions are dominated by a Sunni Muslim population that never reconciled itself to a Baath Party regime dominated by the Assad family and other members of the much smaller Alawite community.