Charles Lister

Since March 2020, Syria’s conflict lines have been frozen, as Russia, Turkey, Iran and the United States held together a series of ceasefires and security understandings. That all changed this week, when a broad coalition of armed opposition groups launched a surprise and daring offensive west of Aleppo city. As 'Operation Deter Aggression' was launched on Wednesday morning, the goal was to expand opposition control of Aleppo’s western countryside, from where Syrian regime forces had been indiscriminately shelling civilian areas for years. Many would have assumed that goal was ambitious, but within three days, more than 80 villages and towns had been captured.

At 4 a.m. on Monday, when the earthquake hit, most of the 4.5 million people living in northwestern Syria were asleep. Thousands of buildings collapsed, burying their residents alive. The majority of those living in this small corner of Syria had already been displaced from their homes in other parts of the country by the civil war. The northwest is the final stronghold of Syria’s opposition and is the main target of president Bashar al-Assad’s grim campaign to retake full control of the country. Before the earthquake, some two thirds of the area’s basic infrastructure ­– public housing, water and sanitation, hospitals and medical clinics, roadways and power generation – was already destroyed or damaged. The people living there could not have been more vulnerable.

You thought Isis was old news. The world celebrated its territorial defeat nearly four years ago. The group that once controlled an area the size of the UK had been battered by more than 30,000 airstrikes, and tens of thousands of its militants had been killed. It was over. Really, though, the war against Isis never stopped. The US military has just announced that last year some 700 Isis militants were killed and 400 captured in operations in Iraq and Syria. The group was responsible for more than 500 attacks on Iraqi and Syrian soil. Isis is not going away. When Isis was ‘defeated’ at Baghouz in eastern Syria in March 2019, the group was left weaker than it had been in a decade.

Yesterday David Cameron told Parliament that there are ‘about 70,000 Syrian opposition fighters on the ground who do not belong to extremist groups’ who could help fight Islamic State.  The Prime Minister’s number was the result of an internal assessment made by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), backed up by serving British diplomats overseas whose jobs focus on the Syrian opposition. Such a large number struck many as political exaggeration. The chairman of the Defence Committee, Julian Lewis, said he was 'extremely surprised'. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn may issue a formal demand for clarification. So do these fighters exist and who are they?