Who Are HTS, the Rebels Leading the Syria Offensive?

Syrian rebels shocked the nation with a lightning offensive on its greatest metropolis and the encircling area beginning final week, upending a 13-year-old civil struggle that had been dormant for a number of years. By seizing that metropolis, Aleppo, occupying massive stretches of the countryside and advancing on the western metropolis of Hama, the rebels have been capable of develop their territory to incorporate a lot of the northwest nook of Syria. And they’re nonetheless on the march.

The fighters against President Bashar al-Assad’s autocratic rule all the time included a motley patchwork of insurgent factions who had been typically at odds with one another. But this time, the rebels have united beneath the management of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a former Al Qaeda affiliate that broke with the older group years in the past and got here to dominate the final stronghold of Syria’s opposition.

Once seen as one of many rebel’s strongest extremist factions, the group later tried to minimize its radical features and targeted on constructing one thing like a civilian authorities — albeit an authoritarian and conservative one — in its patch of territory.

Now the group might lengthen its management to a a lot bigger zone. Here’s a primer on the way it shaped, the way it advanced and why it staged this assault.

How did Hayat Tahrir al-Sham begin?

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whose identify means Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, started across the similar time as Syria’s civil struggle, which broke out in 2011 after Mr. al-Assad’s troops violently suppressed widespread antigovernment protests. As the struggle intensified, skilled jihadists linked to a precursor of the Islamic State crossed from Iraq into japanese Syria, forming what they referred to as Al Nusra Front to combat pro-Assad forces.