Swathes of Syria still out of Assad’s hands

beirut — By ousting rebels from Daraa, the cradle of the Syrian uprising, President Bashar Al Assad strengthened his grip on the country — but large swathes of territory remain beyond the regime’s control.

Following Russia’s military intervention at the end of 2015, the regime secured a series of victories with additional support from its Iranian ally.

This year it secured the capital Damascus and its surroundings for the first time since 2012, before launching the offensive to take Daraa in the south of the country.

Loyalist forces now control more than 60 per cent of Syria, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor.

Syria’s main cities — Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Hama and Daraa — known as “useful Syria”, are all in regime hands.

Government-held territory accounts for 72 per cent of the population, according to Fabrice Balanche, a political geographer

specialising in Syria. The northwestern province of Idlib, on the border with Turkey, is the main bastion of Syria’s insurgents.

The area is dominated by Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, a militant coalition led by Syria’s former Al Qaeda branch, although regime forces have made gains in some parts of the province.

In the north and north-west, Ankara-backed rebels control the town of Al Bab in Aleppo province and other areas near the Turkish border.

With their rebel allies, Turkish

forces seized the town of Afrin in March, ousting Kurdish fighters who pledged an insurgency to retake it.

In the south, rebels remain in Quneitra province which borders the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Overall the insurgents — both Hayat Tahrir Al Sham militants and rebels — control no more than nine per cent of the country, according to the Observatory.

In addition to the military defeats, groups have split geographically and have also broken up into smaller factions over the years of war.

The semi-autonomous Kurdish zone, established during the war, represents the largest part of Syria outside of regime control.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-Arab coalition backed by the US, controls 27.4 per cent of the country, Observatory figures show.

Within this are important oil fields in northeastern Syria.

The SDF has played a fundamental role in the fight against the Daesh group during the war.

With the backing of the anti-militant coalition led by Washington, last year the SDF drove Daesh out of Raqqa, which the group had declared its de-facto capital in Syria.

After mounting a lightning offensive across Iraq and Syria in 2014, the Daesh group has seen its territory drastically reduced.

Daesh now holds just a few pockets in eastern Syria, along the Iraqi border and close to the Euphrates, and it is also present in desert areas such as Homs province.