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Last week, the world was taken by surprise by the lightning offensive against Aleppo in northern Syria. Since then, the rebels have continued to advance south. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), the rebels in the south now control more than 90 percent of the Deraa region. Deraa is located approximately 10 miles south of the Syrian capital Damascus, and has both strategic and symbolic importance in Syria. On Friday, the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad also had to lose the big city of Hama. Hama is the country’s fourth largest city and home to around one million inhabitants. On Telegeram, the rebel command writes that fighting is ongoing on several fronts in the countryside outside Hama and Homs, as well as in southern Syria. Rebel forces gather among civilians near one of Hama’s water wheels, or norias, after forces captured the city of Hama on December 6. Photo: OMAR HAJ KADOUR \/ AFP This means that the uprisings have now taken a heavy toll both north and south of Damascus. The rebels’ goal is to overthrow the Syrian president. They write that they are fighting to “liberate their country from tyranny”, and ensure that displaced people can return home in safety. Towards Damascus According to the news agency Reuters, rebel sources say that they have reached an agreement that the army will withdraw from Deraa, and that military officials will be given safe passage to the capital Damascus – about 100 km away. The red cities are controlled by rebels. The blue ones are under the control of the regime. Clips on social media show rioters on motorcycles and others mingling with residents on the streets. People shot into the air in the city’s main square in celebration, according to the videos. With the fall of Deraa, Assad’s forces have surrendered four key centers to the rebels in a week. In just over a week, the offensive has led to Syria’s second largest city Aleppo and strategically located Hama falling out of Assad’s control for the first time since the civil war began in 2011. Now they have also taken control of most of the Deraa region in the south. Photo: OMAR HAJ KADOUR \/ AFP Deraa, which had a population of more than 100,000 before the civil war began 13 years ago, has symbolic importance as the cradle of the rebellion. It is the capital of a province of approximately 1 million people, which borders Jordan. Homs’ next Deraa capture followed rebel claims late on Friday that they had advanced to the outskirts of the central city of Homs. The city is an important crossroads between the capital and the Mediterranean coast. AP Fighting the Assad regimeGovernment forces Led by President Bashar Al-Assad, he belongs to a Shia Muslim minority that has held power since the 1970s. Russia has supported the rebels by carrying out airstrikes. In addition, they have supplied weapons to Assad and used their veto power in the UN Security Council to block sanctions against the regime. Iran has trained Assad’s forces and supported Hezbollah, which fights on the regime’s side. OMAR HAJ KADOUR \/ AFP \/ NTB Fighting against the Assad regime Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) HTS is a Sunni Muslim military group, founded in 2017, and consists of former Al Qaeda groups. The group has mainly had control in the north of the country, especially Idlib – region. Has made major advances in the last week, and taken over control of cities such as Aleppo and Hama. Approaching Homs. AFP Other actors against the Assad regime The Kurds and the USA There are approximately 2 million Kurds living in Syria. Kurdish groups, especially the YPG, have fought against the Islamic State (IS) and at the same time worked for self-government in their areas of the country. The USA has supported the Kurds in the fight against IS , which has created tension with NATO country Turkey. AP Other actors against the Assad regimeTurkeyTurkey believes that the Kurdish groups are associated with the PKK, a Turkish Kurdish separatist group that Turkey considers a terrorist organisation. Therefore, Turkey has carried out military attacks in northern Syria to weaken these groups. AFP Brief on the civil war in Syria Started in 2011 with protests as part of the Arab Spring. The protests were met with violence by the government forces of the president. Over 500,000 people have lost their lives, and thousands of children have lost their parents. Millions of people have fled to the neighboring countries of Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Germany took in around one million Syrian refugees during the refugee crisis in 2015. – The march starts from the countryside in Homs and Daraa towards the Syrian capital, the rebel forces write on Telegram on Saturday. If the rebels capture Homs, Damascus will be cut off from the coastal bastion of Assad’s Alawite minority, as well as from a naval base and air base of his Russian allies there, writes Reuters. Interested in abroad? Listen to the foreign affairs editor’s podcast: Published 07.12.2024, at 08.40 Updated 07.12.2024, at 11.25 Last week, the world was taken by surprise by the lightning offensive against Aleppo in northern Syria. Since then, the rebels have continued to advance south. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), the rebels in the south now control more than 90 percent of the Deraa region. Deraa is located approximately 10 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":103521,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[23073,18,16,1194,14,15,17,5943,686,4400],"class_list":["post-103520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-advancing","tag-country","tag-news","tag-north","tag-norway","tag-overview","tag-parts","tag-rebels","tag-south","tag-syria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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