Syria\u2019s army said it is withdrawing from Hama, a symbolic and strategically important central city, marking a second major gain for a newly formed rebel coalition that also captured Aleppo last week. <\/p>\n
\u201cOver the past few hours, with the intensification of confrontations between our soldiers and terrorist groups and the rise of a number of martyrs in our ranks, these groups were able to penetrate several parts of the city and entered it,\u201d the Syrian military said in a statement carried by state news outlet SANA. <\/p>\n
Rebels said they freed hundreds of those \u201cwrongfully detained\u201d from the central prison. <\/p>\n
Aleppo, Syria\u2019s second-largest city, was recaptured last week by rebel groups after a surprise offensive overran President Bashar al-Assad\u2019s forces and allied militias. <\/p>\n
The offensive was a major setback for Assad and his backers in Iran and Russia, and has reignited a civil war that had been largely dormant for years. <\/p>\n
Hama is strategically located at a key crossroads in western-central Syria, providing direct supply lines between the capital Damascus and Aleppo. Rebels had been unable to capture the city since the Syrian civil war began in 2011. <\/p>\n
Abu Mohammad Al Jolani, the leader of Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) \u2013 the main rebel group leading the offensive \u2013 said his forces entered Hama to \u201ccleanse a 40-year-old wound.\u201d <\/p>\n
The city holds symbolic significance as it was the site of one of the country\u2019s largest and most brutal massacres in 1982, when President Hafez al-Assad \u2013 the current ruler\u2019s father \u2013 ordered his military to quash a revolt. A 1983 Amnesty International report put the death toll on both sides as between 10,000 and 25,000. <\/p>\n
HTS was formed by Jolani after he dismantled Al-Qaeda\u2019s Syrian affiliate al-Nusra Front in 2016 over ideological differences. Jolani then formed HTS in early 2017 and has attempted to rebrand it into a moderate Islamist group. <\/p>\n
Despite Jolani\u2019s effort to distance his new group from al Qaeda and ISIS, the United States designated the HTS a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2018 and placed a $10 million bounty on him. <\/p>\n
The rebels vowed to advance further south, to the city of Homs, another major city about 165 kilometers (100 miles) from the capital Damascus. <\/p>\n
\u201cOur heroic people in Homs, your time has come. Declare it a revolution against oppression and tyranny,\u201d said Hassan Abdulghani, the spokesperson for the rebels. <\/p>\n
Syria\u2019s civil war began during the 2011 Arab Spring as the government suppressed an uprising against Assad, who has been president since 2000. The country plunged into a full-scale civil war as the protests turned into an armed rebellion. <\/p>\n
Hama was the site of some of the first protests against the Syrian regime during the Arab Spring. <\/p>\n
This is a developing story and will be updated. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Syria\u2019s army said it is withdrawing from Hama, a symbolic and strategically important central city, marking a second major gain for a newly formed rebel coalition that also captured Aleppo last week. \u201cOver the past few hours, with the intensification of confrontations between our soldiers and terrorist groups and the rise of a number of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6056,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6055\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}