The mystery of how Hayat Tahrir Al Sham could topple Assad so suddenly

With so many regional powers wrong-footed by the seismic events of the last two weeks, attention has shifted to the question of who was backing the rebels

Members of the Al Qaeda-linked Jabhat Al Nusra in Syria are one of the many groups fighting to control the country. Khalil Ashawi / Reuters

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The shock offensive by Syrian rebel militant group Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, which toppled the Assad regime in just 10 days, has revived theories of the hidden hand of US meddling.

A former CIA officer close to an effort to help rebels, Operation Timber Sycamore, told The National that, in his view, the regime crumbled due to previous efforts of groups backed by the US. Some observers, not realising how weak the regime had become, were stunned by the success of the Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, formerly Jabhat Al Nusra, once an ally of Al Qaeda and ISIS.

“We know they sent in the CIA to overthrow Assad,” US economist Jeffrey Sachs said, adding a US “proxy war destroyed Syria" over seven years.

The reality, according to experts, was a failed effort to build a moderate armed force in Syria, with limited aims.

“Was it a failed covert action? They didn't want Assad to be overthrown, so I don't know if it failed. What they wanted to do is weaken Assad. It was quite clear early on that the United States and others, despite rhetoric, did not want Assad to be overthrown,” says Natasha Hall, an expert on Syria at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

The US-led arms effort lasted less than four years of the country’s 13-year conflict, before support was ended by Donald Trump in 2017. Operation Timber Sycamore saw a trickle of arms from the US and several European and regional allies, slowed down by US vetting requirements meant to ensure arms didn’t reach extremists and lagging far behind efforts of countries such as Qatar and Turkey.

Eventually, the arms pipeline became a flood of several thousand tonnes of weapons, but it was too late. Extremists proved more organised than western-backed efforts and recipients of US help suffered defeats at the hands of Jabhat Al Nusra, and Syrian forces, bolstered by Russia’s September 2015 intervention.

“The rebels and the communities that they controlled were sitting ducks for Russian and Syrian aerial power. It's hard to see that any of the weapons provided were effective regarding the most difficult part of the war, on the plains,” Ms Hall says.

The US and allies refused to send anti-aircraft weapons, fearing they would fall into the hands of terrorists.

Timber Sycamore was therefore widely regarded as a disaster. Jabhat Al Nusra was able to hold on to Idlib, partly after obtaining weapons supplied through the operation, defeating government attempts to take back the province. It eventually benefitted from a Turkish plan to shield northern Syria from the war, after a 2020 de-escalation agreement with Russia.

Weapons, in particular deadly TOW anti-tank missiles, would prove important for boosting Hayat Tahrir Al Sham’s already strong combat power, which made extensive use of suicide bombing.

“Operation Timber Sycamore is a compelling case study in the limitations of short-term, fragmented strategies in addressing a conflict as multidimensional as Syria’s,” says Haian Dukhan, a political scientist at the University of St Andrews.

“The intervention was not studied well in terms of knowing who to arm exactly and how those dynamics would evolve, resulting in broader consequences – including the empowerment of groups like Jabhat Al Nusra and the escalation that brought in Russia – which underlined the need for more thoughtful, long-term planning in such interventions," he says.

But the Syrian army was nonetheless greatly weakened by foreign efforts to help the rebels – although experts say the blundering also boosted the rise of ISIS.

The Syrian arms pipeline

The 2011 uprising’s slide into mass violence, driven by regime atrocities, was fuelled by large-scale foreign involvement in the war.

An early entrant to the proxy war was Qatar, which announced its intention to arm rebels in February 2012. Qatar later denied sending arms, but most experts say 2012 was a critical year for foreign involvement as some poorly armed rebels had to use petrol bombs. By the end of 2012, new weapons enabled the rebels to capture Syrian army bases.

Before foreign aid, rebel commanders said most of their weapons came from captured regime stockpiles, a huge mix of weaponry from deadly Kornet anti-tank missiles to in some cases guns not used in combat since WW2.

Modern arms would follow. Qatari and Turkish operations supported factions with alleged ties to radicals – groups such as Jaish Al Islam. The latter met with other rebels in Doha in 2016 for talks on uniting the insurgents.

Hillary Clinton would say the US response involved “responsibly training and equipping a non-extremist rebel force,” and in 2012, US special forces commissioned a study on Syrian rebels were, as many as 1,000 groups.

In September 2013, the first detachment of 50 trained and armed rebels crossed the Turkish border, months after Timber Sycamore was given the green light by Barack Obama.

But the US and allies were already playing catch up. According to analysis by Nate Rosenblatt and David Kilcullen, the effort was stymied by their slow vetting of Syrian opposition groups.

This was a problem militant backers of the rebels did not suffer from, and they were soon lavishly equipped with Belgian FAL rifles, which according to the Small Arms Survey, had been shipped from Libya. The US effort was also stymied by the fact that most funds went to arms, while rivals also sent development aid, helping militants recruit more fighters.

The net result was an avalanche of weapons to often competing groups. By early 2014, UN experts warned that “extremists have become better equipped than other groups and are controlling more territory.”

Hayat Tahrir Al Sham's rise

Jabhat Al Nusra, formed as an ISIS offshoot in around 2011, was quickly seen as the most effective force, leading many other fighters to join its ranks. As infighting among rebels spread, it absorbed or defeated US-backed groups such as Division 13.

“The unit went to pick up their weapons up and immediately got ambushed the moment they were inside Syria and lost them all,” says Michael Stevens, an expert on militants who closely tracked the war. The incident was one of several that saw heavy weapons supplied by the US and allies fall into the hands of Jabhat Al Nusra and ISIS, including TOW missile launchers.

The anti-tank guided missile was lethal against Syria’s Russian-supplied tanks, but also used against lighter vehicles and bunkers. According to conflict analyst Jakub Janovsky, the missiles were critical for blunting regime offensives which were “tank heavy”, including in Idlib. Hundreds, if not thousands of tanks and troop carrying armoured vehicles were destroyed.

Mr Janovsky's data tells a part of the story – much video evidence of armoured vehicle losses went missing in 2015 after YouTube deleted videos of the Syrian war.

“The CIA effort (as opposed to the military, smaller Pentagon effort) was very effective. It may have inadvertently led to Russia becoming involved, precisely because it was a serious challenge to the Assad regime, says a former CIA Officer close to the operation.

“Once support for them was pulled and the covert programme was ended, they still fought on. Some of the forces backed by the operation were actually the first group into Damascus,” he says, referring to Free Syrian Army offensives which reached the city’s outer suburbs.

“HTS is the group everyone is talking about, but it wasn’t the only group. The regime was always fragile without direct support from Russia.”

The Syrian endgame

Some experts say that while the operation seriously weakened the regime, several critical events put distance between the effort and the fall of Damascus.

“US support for the rebels from late 2013 onward contributed to energising the insurgency, resulting in an overall intensification of the conflict, in particular in Idlib and in the suburbs of Damascus. However, Timber Sycamore ultimately failed to unseat Assad, and after Russia’s military intervention in September 2015 the rebels began to experience a series of major battlefield losses,” says Federico Manfredi Firmian, author of War in Syria and the Middle East: A Political and Economic History.

“The insurgency ultimately retrenched in pockets of territory in north-west Syria, with the support of Turkey, which in 2017 and 2018 almost single-handedly prevented the total collapse of all rebel fronts.”

Mr Stevens agrees. “HTS survived basically because the Turks let them survive, and set up the Watch Tower system around Idlib. Without that I suspect that they would have been ground to dust by relentless Russian air power Hezbollah and Shabiha,” he says, referring to regime militias.

Mr Manfredi Firmian says that while the end of the US-backed arms was a setback, by 2017 the country was awash with guns.

“In more recent years, the widespread availability of small arms in Syria made it relatively easy for HTS to acquire weapons, either from other rebel groups or through corrupt regime forces. But what has really boosted HTS’s combat capabilities has been its ability to manufacture artillery shells, drones, rockets, and long-range missiles.”

Mr Dukhan says the failure of Timber Sycamore offers important lessons for how the West deals with the new government.

“Its overemphasis on military solutions and tactical objectives during the civil war often sidelined the deeper political, social, and economic challenges that underpinned the conflict.”

“That left a vacuum that extremist groups and external actors were quick to exploit. Syria must not be reduced to a security problem."