Qunfuz

You know the multiverse theory, that there are many parallel universes, and that they may contain alternate versions of ourselves and our conditions in this universe…. Well, the last couple of days feel like we’ve jumped from one existence into a parallel universe, one in which a lot more is possible. This universe is a flexible, more cheerful place, in which the Syrian Revolution may even be resolved. (As it happens, we went the day before yesterday on a trip to Edinburgh to see my son. He bought us tickets to the Museum of Illusions. We walked through an arrangement of swirling lights called The Vortex, and we lost our balance. Was that when it happened? When we got home we heard the news that Aleppo city had been liberated.)

The rebels advanced out of the narrow strip of Idlib in which they and millions of Syrians from around the country had been crammed for over four years. ‘The rebels’ here means a military alliance under the umbrella of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – the greatly moderated and better organised reincarnation of Jabhat al-Nusra. It’s still an authoritarian Islamist militia, but it’s not at all ‘like ISIS’ as the uninformed are saying. It broke definitively from the ISIS stream in 2014. It has a much more positive policy towards sectarian and ethnic minorities than ISIS. It allows far greater space for pluralism, disagreement and consultation than ISIS did (though it still arrests and detains some political opponents, and tortures them). Unlike ISIS, it doesn’t field a Hisba Diwan (or morality police) to interfere in people’s daily lives. Its focus is Syrian rather than transnational. It doesn’t threaten the west.

Its ‘Fath al-Mubeen’ military alliance also incorporates lots of members of other less authoritarian groups that were displaced to Idlib and then gobbled up by HTS. HTS has not been popular among people in Idlib – they’ve been demonstrating against it for months – but its offensive is wildly popular, because the people want to be rid of Assad and his foreign backers, and to return to their homes.

I didn’t expect the offensive, at least not on this scale. Nobody did. At first it looked to me like a controlled operation to restore the agreed Astana lines – that is, the division of north west Syria agreed upon at Astana by Russia, Iran and Turkey. Russia had pushed Turkey to normalise and negotiate with Assad, and Turkey had tried hard to do so. Assad had refused to budge from his maximalist positions, the Russians don’t want to alienate Turkey (given their difficult position attacking Ukraine), and Turkey needs more Syrian territory to which to send Syrian refugees. So perhaps the Turks and Russians were scaring Assad into negotiating by taking a few towns in the Aleppo countryside.

But the offensive went much further than that, far beyond the Astana lines. News came, meanwhile, that the Turks had prevented the Syrian National Army – comprised of former Free Army militias now under Turkish control – from moving towards eastern Aleppo. This allowed the PKK-dominated SDF to take areas in Aleppo abandoned by collapsing Assad forces – surely the opposite of what Turkey wanted. Turkey was not, therefore, in control of events. Turkey clearly didn’t know what was going on.