Rebel army seizes one of Syria’s biggest cities as government forces retreat

Rebel forces entered the Syrian city of Hama and forced out government troops Thursday, in a development that may have significant consequences in the country’s 14-year-long civil war.

Both the Syrian Defense Ministry and an official from the militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, known as HTS, said that insurgents had gained access to the country’s fourth-biggest city and that despite fierce fighting, the troops of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had left the city.

Hassan Abdul-Ghani, senior commander of the HTS-led forces, told NBC News, that tanks had been used during the incursion and fighters had “entered the Hama Central Prison and freed hundreds of unjustly imprisoned individuals.”

In a statement posted on Facebook, Syria’s defense ministry said that rebel groups “managed to penetrate several positions within the city and enter it,” and that “to safeguard the lives of the civilian population in Hama and to avoid involving them in urban combat, the military units stationed there have redeployed and repositioned outside the city.”

NBC News was unable to independently confirm claims by either side because independent journalism is very difficult in Syria, owing to the rapid changes in territory held by different groups and the repression of media by the official government.

Syria’s civil war has dragged on for almost 14 years but had died down since 2020, when battle lines between the forces of President Bashar al-Assad and a patchwork of insurgent groups became solidified. 

But that all changed last week, with HTS — which grew out of the former al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the United Nations among others — seizing the country’s most populous city of Aleppo in a surprise offensive.

The taking the city of Hama by HTS-led forces could prove pivotal in shifting the balance of the civil war. The city has never before been in rebel hands and has been the site of more than one bloody crackdown by both Assad’s regime and that of his father Hafez.

The city would prove a significant loss for the government, due to its status as “a real bastion of military resources,” said Charles Lister, director of the Syria program at the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank. 

Lister told NBC News in a Wednesday telephone interview that if the city were to fall to the rebels, their next target will be the strategically important and central city of Homs, which sits around 30 miles south of Hama. 

One feature of the battle for Hama — and the broader Syrian civil war — has been fierce aerial attacks from government forces.

The air superiority of Assad’s forces — which have long received heavy backing from Russia and Iran — was on display Thursday before government forces left Hama. Helicopter gunships carried out aerial bombardments with barrel bombs, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.