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It's been 13 years since a civil war began in Syria.
In a shock offensive, insurgents breached Syria’s largest city of Aleppo for the first time since 2016.
Thousands of fighters swept through villages and towns in Syria’s northwestern countryside. Residents fled neighborhoods on the city’s edge because of missiles and gunfire, according to witnesses in Aleppo. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the country’s unresolved civil war, said dozens of fighters from both sides were killed.
The surge in fighting has raised the prospect of another violent front reopening in the Middle East, at a time when U.S.-backed Israel is fighting Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both Iranian-allied groups.
Robert Ford, the last-serving U.S. ambassador to Syria, pointed to months of Israeli strikes on Syrian and Hezbollah targets in the area, and to Israel’s ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon this week, as factors providing Syria’s rebels with the opportunity to advance.
Coming after years with few sizeable changes in territory between Syria’s warring parties, the fighting “has the potential to be really quite, quite consequential and potentially game-changing,” if Syrian government forces prove unable to hold their ground, said Charles Lister, a longtime Syria analyst with the U.S.-based Middle East Institute. Risks include if Islamic State fighters see it as an opening, Lister said.
Gamblers at Polymarket aren't convinced that Syria's leader Bashar al-Assad will be toppled. In fact, some 93% of bettors believe he'll remain in power...at least until the end of this year, or the next four weeks.
The resolution source for this market will be the CIA World Factbook page for Syria, that site notes.
The conflict in Syria has killed an estimated half-million people. Some 6.8 million Syrians have fled the country.
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