HTS jihadists stormed the lavish residence amid their ongoing offensive against government forces
Video footage has emerged showing jihadist gunmen roaming the halls of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s palace in Aleppo. Insurgents stormed into the city in a surprise offensive on Thursday.
The Hayat Tahrir-al-Sham (HTS) terrorist group and allied militias attacked government-controlled territory in northern Syria on Wednesday, entering Aleppo the following day as the Syrian military scrambled to regroup and launch a counteroffensive. By Saturday, the Syrian General Command acknowledged that the army had lost dozens of service members, but said that HTS fighters had failed to establish fixed positions amid relentless airstrikes by Syrian and Russian warplanes.
A video purportedly filmed by HTS members and shared on social media on Sunday showed the militants entering the Presidential Guest Palace in Aleppo. The jihadists could be seen wandering through darkened dining rooms and climbing a marble staircase to reach the palace’s upper levels.
إدارة العمليات العسكرية لفصائل المعارضة السورية تواصل انتصاراتها ضد النظام النصيري الطائفي في سوريا وتستولى على القصر الرئاسي في حلب ومطارات وقواعد عسكرية ومخازن أسلحة وذخيرة والنظام المهزوم يفجر مخازن الذخيرة والسلاح في المناطق التي يفر منها حتى لا تقع في يد المعارضة #حلب_تتحررpic.twitter.com/UKhsNGo86x
The palace appeared to have been unoccupied before the video was filmed. Although the Syrian government regained full control of Aleppo in 2016 and held the city until this week, Assad uses numerous residences, and at the time the video was filmed, was meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Damascus some 350km to the south.
Araghchi pledged that Tehran would provide all necessary support to help Assad’s forces defeat the insurgency. “The Syrian army will once again beat these terrorist groups as in the past,” he told Iran’s IRNA state news agency before the meeting.
According to reports by both pro- and anti-Assad Telegram channels, Iranian military advisers and volunteers entered Syria on Saturday and are currently helping the Syrian army organize a counteroffensive from the city of Hama, around 80km south of Aleppo.
On Sunday, Syria’s state-run SANA news agency said that the army “was able to secure a number of areas” around Hama and inflict significant casualties on the terrorist force, without providing further details. On Saturday, Syrian officials estimated HTS losses at around 1,000 fighters.
Before adopting its current name in 2017, Hayat Tahrir-al-Sham was known as Jabhat al-Nusra. Indirectly armed by the US and formerly backed by Türkiye, Jabhat al-Nusra was one of the main factions opposing Bashar Assad’s government during the Syrian Civil War. Russia intervened in the conflict in 2015, helping Assad retake much of the country from Jabhat al-Nusra, Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), and dozens of US-supported armed groups termed “moderate rebels” by Washington.
