The extremist group HTS, led by the USA and the UN, which leads the uprising against the regime, launched a surprising offensive last week. First, the major city of Aleppo fell, and then several other major cities in Syria.
On Saturday evening, the rebels captured the important major city of Homs, after government forces had left the city, and early on Sunday, HTS announced that the authoritarian President Bashar al-Assad's time was over.
"We declare Damascus free from the tyrant Bashar al-Assad," the group writes in a statement.
The organization has been the strongest force against al-Assad's regime in recent times.
In Idlib, in the northwestern part of the country, HTS has been the dominant military actor, fighting both against rival armed groups and Syrian government forces.
They also have a political administrative branch that handles the administration of the areas they control. It's everything from social welfare to school, healthcare, and infrastructure. But all power is controlled from the judicial system, which is based on a strict interpretation of Sharia laws, and they have religious courts that apply Sharia laws, says terrorism researcher Magnus Ranstorp.
The ultimate goal is, just like for other similar groups, to establish an Islamic state based on Sharia.
Announced Break
HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani made a name for himself as the leader of al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, Nusra Front, as early as 2011. He quickly established a strong organization that attracted followers, carried out attacks, and secured income through donations, taxes, and seizure of assets in the territories where they had taken control, writes think tank CSIS.
But in 2016, Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani officially announced that his organization would break with al-Qaeda, although many believe that the organizations have continued to maintain contact.
Then came a new transformation, they absorbed various jihadist groups. They tried to distance themselves from global jihadism and connections to al-Qaeda and act more pragmatically, but it's still an extreme group, says Ranstorp.
It was during that transformation, in 2017, that Nusra Front was dissolved and HTS was formed.
"Independent"
The group's goals have changed somewhat since the announcement of the break with al-Qaeda. Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani has softened the strict jihadist ideology to try to make the group more appealing to broader groups, writes BBC. Among other things, the organization is now trying to avoid jihadist expressions and Islamist references in its official statements.
HTS claims today that the organization is completely independent and does not follow al-Qaeda or other parties, but the US government still believes that some communication continues between them.
The movement is terrorist-listed by several countries, including the USA and the UN.
Corrected: In an earlier version of the text, there was an unverified claim about the terrorist listing of HTS.
Syria is a relatively young state, founded in an area where humans have lived for thousands of years – both the capital Damascus and Aleppo are among the world's oldest cities.
Until the end of World War I, today's Syria was part of the Ottoman Empire, which has since shrunk and transformed into today's Turkey. Between the wars, the Syria area was ruled by France, which then withdrew so that the country could become independent after the end of World War II.
But even since then, the Syrians have had a turbulent and often brutal political existence. The country has waged war against Israel several times since the end of the 1940s and briefly formed the United Arab Republic with Egypt and the Gaza Strip in the late 1950s. After several coups in the 1960s, the al-Assad family took power, first the father Hafez al-Assad and after his death in 2000, his son Bashar al-Assad. The latter has managed to hold on to the presidential post, largely thanks to Russian support, even during the civil war that has ravaged the country since the "Arab Spring" in the early 2010s.
