Lawfare Archive: The Return of the Syrian Civil War

for June 14th, 2026.

“Next week, Syrian President Ahmed Al-Shara will attend the G7 Summit in France, representing”

Syria as a gas nation at the summit.

Al-Shara's presence, just 17 months after the fall of the Assad regime, will continue our remarkable term for Syria. For today's Archive, I chose an episode from December 3rd, 2024, in which Daniel Bowman sat down with Charles Lister, director of Syria, encountering terrorism and extremism programs at the Middle East Institute.

For an update on the end of the civil war as it unfolded, why the rebels were able to break through when they did, and predictions about what might happen next. It's the Lawfare podcast, I'm Daniel Bowman, the foreign policy editor of Lawfare, and a professor at Georgetown University, with Charles Lister, senior fellow and director of the

Syria, covering terrorism, and extremism programs at the Middle East Institute.

So the fact that it is now under HTS and the opposition's control is no insignificant thing, so even if these frontlines freeze where they currently are, we are likely talking about a very significant, months if not years long to the Terry campaign, if the regime ever wants to take it back. Today we're talking about the return of the Syrian civil war into an all-out conflict.

Charles, let me begin by asking you simply to lay the groundwork for what's been happening. I can you describe the conflict extremely complex one, and relatively short amount of time, just to give us a sense of where other parties stood before the latest outbreak in hostilities. Yes, complicated is one word for it, in the period before this major outbreak of hostilities,

Syria has been described by many as a frozen conflict.

“I think to the extent that the lines of territorial control were frozen, that's true, but”

the conflict and hostilities in general couldn't have been further from the truth in describing it as frozen. In fact, for the last two to three years, anywhere between 30 and 100 people have died per week, every week for the last two to three years, in conflict and hostilities in every corner of the country.

So on a hostilities level, Syria has remained a hot conflict, in fact, multiple hot conflicts. Since 2020, which was when Turkey and Russia agreed to a ceasefire in the north of the country, I mean, beyond that, beyond the conflict itself, the humanitarian crisis in Syria is worse than it's ever been, even at the height of nationwide conflict in 2014 and 2015, the humanitarian crisis, or arguably double as bad today, in terms of the humanitarian need.

At the same time, the international community has stretched as it is by Ukraine and war in Gaza and Lebanon and elsewhere.

“The international community's ability to respond to that aid crisis is worse than it's”

ever been. So the UN which runs the whole aid response is only 27% funded for the next calendar year. So you can only imagine the kind of destabilizing consequences that that has nationwide. The regime has emerged as the biggest narco-state in the world, manufacturing tens of billions of dollars of illegal ampheter means and trafficking them around the world, but particularly

around the surrounding region. The refugee crisis remains as bad as it's ever been. The latest UN polling indicated that just one percent of Syrian refugees would consider returning to a Syria ruled by Assad. So no matter where you look, no matter what angle you're looking at, the crisis was in a really

bad place. It just wasn't getting the kind of international attention that perhaps we were used to in early years and that laid the groundwork for what we saw developed just in the last week or so. So let's now go to the present moment, you said that although the conflict has been quite

intense, the humanitarian conflict has been even more disastrous for the most part the frontlines have been relatively frozen for the last few years. How are they different now? Let's change. Well, beginning on Wednesday morning, a very broad coalition of armed opposition groups operating

out of the northwest of the country, launched an offensive. They called it at the time Operation Detour Aggression. They used that terminology because initially, the plan here was pretty limited. The plan was to take control of the country side that is lays to the west of a lepocity from which the Syrian regime had a number of significant artillery launching points from

That was the initial plan.

“Incidentally, this offensive was meant to happen in mid-October.”

That time Turkey discovered the plans and put a stop to them.

So of course, it's interesting that they never the less took place a number of weeks

afterwards. But the map has changed, as you say, in the sense that a lepocity is now fully under opposition control, a remarkable, the city fell in and of itself within 24 hours of fighters first entering the west and out skirts, but it's gone further than that. So to put a very complicated picture, very straightforwardly as possible, all of Idlib province

is now controlled by the opposition. They had seeded a fair bit of the south of that province in 2020. Almost the entirety of a lepo province is now controlled by the opposition including a lepocity. And a significant portion of the north of Hamma, which lies underneath both of those, is also

now under opposition control.

And so we are in many ways, we have kind of pressed rewind to where the conflict was in perhaps 2017 and 2018 in the space of five days, which is really quite extraordinary. The regime of front lines just collapsed one after the other and have only just begun to show some signs of stabilizing in the last 24 hours. But that collapsed for me, at least, was a tremendous surprise and your work among others

as documented the times, you know, building by building nature of the fighting in the past and how both sides when they made advances were doing so at really slow paces. Either the opposition is significantly stronger than least I thought it was or the regime much weaker up, can you kind of give your sense of both sides why the significant advances

were possible at this particular time?

“Yes, I think it's both of what you've just said.”

I think that on our tackle one side and before tackling the other, in the opposition led by not led by, but the most dominant group, HDS or Hector Usham and many other allied and partnered groups, both on the extreme end of the spectrum and the more mainstream, have spent the last four and a half years intensively training and sort of for one to a better term kind of professionalizing their capabilities, their structures, their command and control.

They've been showing it off, so none of it is a secret, but, you know, to take HDS as an example, they now have an entire dedicated unit that specializes in nighttime operations, so every single of their nearly 250 fighters are equipped with assault rifles, sniper rifles, RPGs and others all with night vision scopes and their training regimen over the last four years has only ever taken place at night, so they are nighttime specialists.

That is a capability, that is a breadth of equipment just in terms of thermal scopes that the regime doesn't have.

“Another example, HDS has developed an entire suicide drone unit with hundreds of very capable”

suicide drones, the like of which we see a new crane, from the Ukrainian military, directing them into Russian tanks, into concealed artillery positions, is exactly what we've seen play out in their dozens per day over the past four or five days. They have dedicated quote unquote special forces units that operate only behind enemy lines, so we've seen a senior IRGC, Brigadier General and a senior Syrian regime military intelligence

commander both assassinated way behind enemy lines by some of these units, I mean infiltrating 50 kilometers inside Syrian regime territory to assassinate high value targets within the regime. These are the kind of capabilities that no one in the opposition had prior to the 2020 ceasefire and it has made a very significant difference on the ground. Can I interrupt and just ask, was the self-training was tricky involved like was responsible

for this increase in capacity? It is self-trained. I mean, you'd be amazed at the sort of democratization of information and experience you can gather by using the internet these days. There are a number of so-called Jehadi mercenary, Jehadi private military contractors in North Western Syria, most of them have Central Agent Origin, manned by former government soldiers from Central Asia

who have made it their sort of mission over the past five years to provide training for a fee to HTS and other groups, but by and large it is self-trained. You know, the other aspect that has made a significant difference is HTS and other groups have developed an indigenous weapons production capability. So they're producing their own suicide drones. One of the things that was also just revealed was that they've produced this kind of

improvised cruise missile with a range of about 80 kilometers and a huge explosive munition on the front. That has removed the need for what you might have seen five years ago when

missiles have been filmed flying over and creating these massive front-line explosions before the

ground troops move forward. The regime on the other hand has been totally stagnant. They haven't developed any new capabilities of any meaningful effect on the ground. The regime's security apparatus writ large from the army to the air force to the intelligence directorates have also

“been, I guess, co-opted and corrupted by organised crime over the last five years, which I think”

is really kind of torn away the cohesiveness of a already very kind of disold and challenged military, but now we're seeing the cost of that. So when there is kind of crisis mode on the battlefield, there was no cohesiveness. Every front-line fell with little or no coordination and from what I have heard speaking to contacts on the ground who have the frequencies of the walkie-talkies of all

of the of all of the regime's front-line units, it was total chaos. They had absolutely no idea what

they were doing, fall back, fall back, fall back, fall back, fall back, but no coordination. And so yeah, and an ironic kind of way, we've seen one side significantly enhance its capabilities and another significantly degrade, and we're watching some of that play out on the on the battlefield. A lot of the commentary right now focuses not really the actors in Syria, but the actors outside it. So looking at Iran, his below Russia, and explaining the timing and the success in part

because the regime doesn't have access to the same level of support in my Japan five or six years ago. How much credence do you give that? So I don't give so much credence to the idea that they don't have as much practical support. I mean, like material support, you know, they have the same. So, you know, there's been a lot of reporting, particularly an Arabic language media that then melts into English media that has suggested, for example, that since the war in Ukraine,

Russia has pulled out hundreds, if not thousands of forces from Syria, it's removed air defense systems and fighter jets. None of that's the case. Russia retains exactly the same troop levels, they've conducted the same number of air sorties over Syria with the same geographical breadth that they did prior to the war in Ukraine. Now, the one difference on the Russian side is that the professionalism, the level of officer class, the kind of West Point equivalent,

officers and generals that were running the Syrian campaign before Ukraine, aren't spending nearly as much time on the ground in Syria as they used to. So Russia's ability to kind of strategically influence and direct the trajectory of the Syrian crisis on the ground has reduced, but they still have the same number of resources on the ground on the front line.

And incidentally, on the first morning of this offensive West of Aleppo, there were Russian

special forces on the front line. They were all ambushed. So it wasn't that they weren't there. On the side of Iran and has bothered no question that they have been distracted by events in in Gaza, particularly in Lebanon. So no question about that, but they also maintained the same front line positions. And many of the front lines that were attacked were heavily staffed by Hezbollah and Iranian militias, one of the reason why we had a very senior IRGC Brigadier general

killed on day one, and a number of Hezbollah fighters killed on the front line. So the distraction,

“I think, probably did play a role. But not in terms of their quantitative and qualitative”

ability to influence and support the regime on the ground. What made the difference was that they had lost the cohesiveness and they'd spent four and a half years thinking that they had won. Only suddenly to be attacked in a very dramatic way by the enemies that they assumed had become more or less irrelevant or were becoming more or less irrelevant with time. I want to go back to your description of the rebel groups. And you mentioned that one of the

elite groups is HTS. And that's the one that's gotten a lot of attention in made from U.S. media. Are there other words you would highlight though, would that you feel haven't gotten the attention they deserve? Well, so I mean, this is an important question. HTS is by a country mile the dominant actor here. They develop the plans. They've coordinated the front line maneuvers. It's been their specialist units that have been the kind of tip of the spear.

“And it is important to acknowledge that. But they are part of a wider coalition,”

the various factions that belong to a coalition called the National Liberation Front, which are sort of, I would guess I would describe them as a broad spectrum of both nationalist and nationally-oriented Islamists, kind of Muslim brotherhood type factions. The National Liberation Front's been around for a long time. Those were factions that opposed HTS in its early days, but were willing to stay in Idlib and to be kind of living alongside HTS nevertheless.

spectrum than HTS, the Turkestan Islamic Party, which is a more internationally-known jihadist outfit has a sizable presence and have been on the front lines. Another large group called Ansar Al-Talhid, which is also similarly more internationally-oriented and have developed quite a specialism in indigenous weapons capabilities. But again, just to stress, yes, it is a broader coalition, but HTS is the act that really is making the difference here and they are the ones

calling the shots. So HTS, of course, previously was, even previously, it's difficult to describe but had a relationship with Al-Qaeda and since then there's distance itself. How would you describe the relationship today? With Al-Qaeda, broken. The falling out that developed in 2016 in 2017 was really quite significant. It was very public. Al-Qaeda's leadership right up to and including Amin Al-Zawahari made it very publicly clear that HTS had severed its ties and in

so doing had broken their kind of religiously binding oath of allegiance and according to some of Al-Qaeda's most prominent scholars around the world, HTS had become apostates. So the falling out was very, very real and very bitter and very personal and as I said, it played out in public. Now none of that is to say that HTS has become some moderate actor in the years that have passed. It remains religiously very conservative but it has unquestionably done away

with its global agenda. That has made a difference in terms of it being able to slowly recoup some of the kind of credibility losses or insufficiencies that it had inside Syria. And it's also done a lot. I mean, it's run a kind of PR effort, frankly, to try to sell its images as a change actor, including to Western audiences, a whole feature documentary on PBS Frontline in which

it's leader revealed his face for the first time. Although undercled, HTS has an ongoing line of

“dialogue with a number of key European governments and I have very little doubt there's been contact”

with with parts of the US government as well. The United Nations has established a permanent office in HTS's capital in Idlib and they work together on a daily basis to coordinate humanitarian aid delivery in Northwestern Syria. HTS and its leader, Jolani, have spent a couple years intensively engaging Idlib's more Christian community, including rebuilding Christian churches and bringing in clerics who had previously exiled from Nusra control. So again, none of this is to soften

what this group represents, but it is to underline that it has changed and that change has allowed it as we're seeing play out to co-opt and to work and coordinate alongside actors that previously were essentially its enemies. And it has also, frankly, accomplished the kind of victories

that the more mainstream part of the opposition never did. And so they are starting to curry

more credibility and favour in circles that years ago had very much burnt those bridges.

“Now, are those kind of, if you want to call them, moderating steps, going to sustain themselves”

when Jolani realizes that he can be a much bigger kind of godfather figure than he previously thought and there's no doubt he has big ambitions. He's smart, he's young and everybody knows who knows him is that he wants to do more than he already is doing. So will he be able to restrain those original more aggressive and problematic tendencies? I would say that remains to be seen. Some of the early signs in the Lepocity are encouraging. They've opened up a hotline for public

complaints, which has already been active and responded to a number of complaints about criminal activities. They have made a point to welcome the Christian community of Lepo, including allowing them to celebrate a number of recent festivals just in the last 48 hours. But again, the tests

not in the first five days, the tests will come three months from now when things have settled down

and that remains to be seen. Given the pace of advances and I know it's hard to predict the future, but is the next step for the opposition bully to consolidate their remarkable gains or do you think they have a chance of pressing significantly further and that the regime is quite brittle

“and they can continue to make very rapid advances? Well, I mean, I think on questionally the”

regime has revealed itself to be very brittle, but they still rely or they can still rely on a handful of more capable military units. The fourth division, another one called the special, the 25th special

were significantly present in the Northwest just immediately prior to this offensive, but they've

“all been sent to the Hammer front line, which I mentioned earlier, and that I think is where we're”

starting to see a front line hard in a little bit. But I think for now, no question the opposition and HTSF front appears to want more, you know, the lines in other areas are still moving forward, but, you know, there's there will come a point when they're 30,000 fightersish will simply not be able to continue to take territory and hold it sustainably. It's not, frankly, I don't think really realistic to expect them to continue to seek to march towards Damascus as, you know, we might

be hearing from from some. So, I suspect we're at that slow point now when the surge has, has slowed and it may come to a stop. And let's not forget that when, in, for example, 2015, the Syrian opposition and the Syrian regime each held about half of a leprosity, it took the regime five years of ferocious conflict to retake half of a leprosity. So, the fact that it is now under HTSF and the opposition's control is no insignificant thing. So, even if these front lines freeze where they

currently are, we are likely talking about a very significant, months if not years long military campaign, if the regime ever wants to take it back. On the other hand, they may not, and what I suspect

“here is that Turkey, who hasn't really played a direct role until now, I think they've allowed”

this to happen rather than directed it. This is great from Turkey's interests, and it really significantly strengthens their negotiating hand, which everyone knows they have wanted to, for a while, and I think Turkey at some point will step in and say it's time to negotiate. What that negotiation will be over, I think, remains to be seen and will depend a little bit on whether the U.S. and the Europeans decide, as well as the regional states, that we want or don't

want to be part of some kind of a Syrian negotiation. So, whether this becomes a Syrian Turkish or Turkish Russian bilateral negotiation, or an international process, is up to the international community, and I would certainly say it should be an opportunity for us, but with a change of administration here in the U.S., I'm not counting off my bets for anything so soon.

“So, if the administration were to eat your advice, what would they be doing?”

I mean, for starters, the international community just needs to get together to talk about Syria.

Finally, enough, I'm convening a meeting like that at the Doha Forum in a week's time,

where we'll have the U.S. government, all the key European governments, the U.N. and the regional Arab states, all in the same room for the first time in a couple years, to talk about Syria policy. But something official, not convened by, I think, tank, is what's sorely needed. It's been sorely needed before these latest hostilities. But otherwise, we'll be in a place where what we saw happen last year, where a majority of the Middle East decided to re-engage the Syrian regime,

and it just catastrophically backfired. I mean, every aspect of the Syrian crisis deteriorated after Assad was brought back into the Arab League. Nothing got better, and there's been no political process to speak of. And there's a reason for that, and that is because Turkey and the U.S. hold the most leverage. The U.S. through its partnership with the SDF holds 25% of the country in

80% of the energy resources, as well as our sanctions basically holding the Syrian economy around

its neck. And then Turkey controls about another 15% to 20% of Syrian territory and about 45,000 armed opposition fighters in total. That is real leverage that hasn't been brought to the table, since John Kerry was the Secretary of State. So, first of all, it's just getting at the table, convening conversations and dialogue that come up with shared interests, shared priorities, shared positions and principles, and then taking those to whether it's through a UN process,

or through parallel bilateral U.S. Russian dialogue that then leads to something else. It could go in a number of different directions, but the first thing is, is just to get involved. The U.S. has spent too many years disengaging from this issue and it frankly, it needs to catch up. So, some of those who are, while listening to us may not remember much about the U.S. relationship with the SDF, especially because it has not been in the headlines. Can you talk a little bit about

relationship, but also the role, if any, the SDF has been playing in the latest round of conflict? Yeah, it's good question. So, I mean, the U.S. has had an open, cooperative, effective relationship

in terms of working together to combat ISIS. That relationship has probably only strengthened

“with time, although there was some bumps along the road, through the first Trump administration,”

a number of withdrawals and then returns, or withdrawal, but not quite a withdrawal. But it is a, it is a vital relationship. The U.S. has 900 troops on the ground in a number of military positions. We also, through the SDF, have a part in controlling about 55,000 ISIS related men, women and children, so it's a vital relationship. As to the SDF's role in recent events, minimal until now, the SDF does control areas, small pockets of areas in northern Aleppo,

including a strategic town called Telriffat, which the opposition has long and consistently seen as essentially stolen, because it is an Arab majority town, long time town within the revolution, within the opposition, and there has been a move by a different opposition outfit, the Syrian National

“Army, which is much closer to Turkey, to try and retake Telriffat. Right now, there are”

negotiations between the SDF and the Syrian opposition to either secure a safe exit for the SDF, or see a whole new line of hostilities breakout. And that would then threaten to spread east where Turkey and the Syrian National Army have other territorial holdings all along SDF front lines. That's frankly a problem that I don't think the U.S. has a great deal of leverage over. Every time Turkey has launched ground incursions into northern Syria, we haven't done anything

about it. In large part, because there are a member of NATO, there are the largest second largest

standing army in NATO, and we're not going to want to get in a standing fight with the Turks any time soon. Incidentally, that is probably the biggest challenging aspect to our bilateral relationship with the SDF. So it's complicated, but more broadly, more broadly, the relationship with the SDF is increasingly vital, because ISIS is showing signs of a real resurgence in Syria, and if we do away with that relationship or God forbid if we disengage from Syria altogether, ISIS will reap

“the war worlds very quickly. So, how could through that? I think that's an important point as a new”

administration comes in and thinks about a Syria policy. Well, I mean, you know, to rewind a little bit, we as the United States, alongside other partners within the coalition, and alongside the SDF on the ground did a superb job at liberating a very large tract of territory for ISIS control. We won that territorial victory in early 2019, but at that time, ISIS had, in fact, two and a half years before then, ISIS had made a public decision to conduct what it called a retreat to the

desert, and that retreat to the desert was primarily to Syria's central body of that central desert in Syria, largely unpopulated region, a very familiar area for ISIS, and its predecessor

movements going back to Iraq war. And that retreat to the desert basically allowed ISIS to survive

over the last several years, and it's in that central desert that ISIS has very slowly rebuilt itself, taken advantage of the fact that the Syrian regime is as we've been discussing about the Northeast, militarily very weak, militarily very incapable in terms of sophistication. There's really nothing much the Syrian regime's been able to do to challenge a widely dispersed entity like ISIS operating in a vast expanse of desert, so they've rebuilt. Now, those of us who

pay very very very close attention to this have been warning for a while, but that rebuilding would eventually spill across the U.S. into the U.S. and S.D.F. control areas of the Northeast, and that

happened basically in January this year. And since then, ISIS has conducted, or ISIS is on track,

to more than triple its rate of operations in Syria compared to 2023, and equally more than triple its rate of operations specifically in the U.S. and S.D.F. held areas. So that's spillover, you know, what happens in areas that we can't control has now become a very real and very dangerous reality. There's one other element here that had an impact which was post October 7th, the surge of Iranian proxy attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria from October 2023 to February

2024 had a really significant effect on the ability of our troops in Northeast Syria to be on the ground out of their bases, conducting operations, collecting intelligence, and that brief vacuum also appears to have, you know, provided ISIS some breathing space to launch this very significant resurgence. So I guess that to sort of conclude the point, I would say, the U.S. troops, even being just

the only meaningful effort to counter ISIS in Syria. The Syrian regime has been completely incapable

“even when it's been willing to try. So much so that the U.S. has conducted three rounds of”

very heavy air strikes in the Syrian central desert in the last eight weeks or so, targeting

ISIS training camps that have sat there in the desert for the last three years and never been touched

by the Syrian regime or the Russians. So we're having to take actions into our own hands, but we're fighting a battle, a war fighting a struggle here that is like 15 steps ahead of us. So we've had over a hundred-cent corporations against ISIS in the last eight weeks and yet ISIS's resurgence continues on an upward trajectory. So if we let, if we left, really truly all hell would break loose. And that's it before we take into consideration what I mentioned a minute ago

in having a network of 26 makeshift prisons in this Northeast and region containing 10,000 ISIS fighters and two major IDP camps containing about 45,000 other mostly women and children who

“came out of the ISIS territorial state. So if those camps and prisons were to empty, truly all hell”

will break loose. So our presence remains vital and it's totally affordable. It's on a risk level, it's marginal. We've had nine combat deaths in 10 years and none for three years. When you do the numbers, as I wrote in a recent article for the Middle East Institute, you know, our troop presence represents about 0.2% of all US troops deployed abroad. About five times that number are in Spain, right now as an example. It counts for about 0.1% of the entire US military budget. So this is not

a mission we cannot afford. And it's not a mission that's taking away from great power competition or our ability to do anything anywhere else. So it should be something that we continue to invest in. Let me ask you one last question, which is really almost up. You know a broad ethical question.

When this latest offensive happened and there were the rapid gains, I'm always delighted one of

“brutal regime like like Assad's and Syria suffer a setbacks. But it also means more years of war.”

How do you think about that trade-off? As a great question, I mean, I agree with you entirely on the ethical level and how it makes you feel, especially now we're watching Russia conduct these kind of punishment-air campaigns. They've hit five hospitals in 24 hours, a number of schools and IDP camps. So that is tragic. It really, really is. But, you know, as someone who who works pretty intensively on Syria and has done for 50 years, it's also most of what we're seeing play out is also

tragically predictable. As I say, you know, the HTS and all these armed groups haven't been arming themselves to the teeth and developing all of these enhanced capabilities because they want to defend their territory. They're doing that because they want to go on the offense. And at the same time, watching the proliferation of the regime's drug trade and infighting between regime militias and all of these other things, as inevitably was going to mean that the regime was was fraying

at the seams internally on the security levels. So there was always going to be a return to

serious violence. It was always just a matter of timing. And so there's also that part of me that just had saw this coming to an extent, perhaps not quite as dramatic, but certainly saw hostilities returning. And so I kind of gained that in in my head already. But ultimately, big picture, this is just more evidence that if we don't collectively, not just as the US, but collectively as the international community work to genuinely resolve these big crises, they will always blow up again at some

point. Guards are an opt over the seventh was a lesson of that. Lebanon was a lesson of that. Yemen and what the Houthis are doing around the Gulf right now are a lesson of that. We can't paper over crises or ignore them and hope they'll just be contained or go away. The world doesn't work that way. And Syria in 2014 and 2015, as I said earlier, fundamentally transformed international security and stability and politics. There was never any reason to believe that

couldn't happen again. And you know, I'm not saying we're at that truly dramatic moment right now, but we are at a very dramatic moment inside Syria that could have an effect on the number of other things that would affect us. Words to live by, Charles Lister, this has been a fantastic primer. Thank you so much for spending your time with us. Great, thank you so much for having me done. The Law Fair podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get

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