2016 marked a dramatic turnaround compared to 2015 for the regime of Bashar al-Assad and its struggle to crush anti-regime rebels. Nearly simultaneous defeats on multiple fronts in Idlib, Daraa, and Palmyra that year convinced Iran and Russia that the regime’s deteriorating military capabilities could reach a tipping point of no return and in September 2015, Russia joined the war directly to bolster its ally. The failure of states backing the rebels to effectively counter Russia’s dramatic escalation turned the tide of the war decisively against the rebels.

Time was on the rebels’ side for most of 2015 but it was on Assad’s side for all of 2016.

Differences between Turkey’s and Jordan’s reactions to Russian intervention created a strategic divergence between a dynamic northern front where significant amounts of territory changed hands and a stagnant southern front where hardly any territory changed hands. The rebel-regime antagonism became a cold war in the south due to Jordan’s reduction of aid to the moderate rebel Southern Front alliance while it remained a hot war in the north due to Turkey’s stepped-up support for the rebels. The regime exploited this strategic divergence to strangle rebel forces in its core priority areas, Aleppo and the Damascus countryside, where it achieved a string of victories in the form of more than one dozen surrender/evacuation deals transferring thousands of rebels and civilians to rebel-held Idlib governate in the north.

The biggest prize in the regime’s victory spree this year was rebel-held east Aleppo which fell rapidly after a three-year encirclement effort beginning in October 2013 with the fall of Safira. This long-term effort reached its final stages in February when Russia, the regime, and the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) took the rebel corridor linking east Aleppo with Turkey. In July, the regime seized the last rebel road linking east Aleppo with Idlib and established a full blown siege that was interrupted by a surprising rebel victory in August that was reversed in early September. Without farm land to feed tens of thousands of civilians, east Aleppo’s fall was a question of months, not years, and fall it did in December after a series of (YPG-assisted) offensives shrinking the besieged rebel pocket.

As beleaguered northern rebels struggled to cope with a resurgent regime, YPG made dramatic territorial gains across northern Syria at the expense of both Islamic State (ISIS) and the rebels. Their hard-fought and costly victory over ISIS west of the Eurphrates river at Manbij in August nearly put connecting the three Kurdish cantons Jazira, Kobane, and Afrin (collectively Rojava) within reach. Such a step would create a territorially contiguous safe haven for the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) along most of the Syrian-Turkish border and so Turkey pre-empted this possibility by launching Operation Euphrates Shield in late August. Rebels backed by Turkish armor, airpower, and troops fought their way into ISIS’s last bastion on the Turkish border which stood between Kobane and Afrin and established a safe zone free of the regime, YPG, ISIS, and al-Qaeda. Turkey provides electricity to the Syrian city of Jarablus within this safe zone and opened a hospital there staffed with Turkish doctors. For the first time since the war began in 2011, the flow of refugees out of the country reversed and 20,000 Syrians returned to this safe zone.

Direct foreign intervention into the four-sided war between ISIS, rebels, the regime, and YPG in 2016 sharply curtailed the autonomy of Syrian actors from their respective backers. Consider the following examples:

When a skirmish in Hasakah city between the YPG and the regime’s National Defense Forces militia led to regime airstrikes, the U.S. warned the regime air force not to fly in the area again because doing so put U.S. troops on the ground assisting YPG in the fight against ISIS at risk. The regime complied, creating a de facto no-fly zone for the Syrian air force anywhere U.S. troops operate.

YPG and the regime both decried Turkey’s “aggression” in northern Syria but could do little about Operation Euphrates Shield because their respective patrons have no interest in going to war with Turkey. Without U.S. air support, YPG put up a token resistance to Turkey’s incursion and without Russian and Iranian support, the regime’s ‘anti-imperialism‘ consisted of subdued whimpering. Turkey almost certainly gained approval for Operation Euphrates Shield from Russia and Iran before launching it.

The regime and its allies have done nothing about the establishment of a U.S. base in Hasakah governate at Rmeilan.

The battle of Aleppo ended through Turkish-Russian negotiations and agreements for population transfers not only from Aleppo but besieged Fua, Kefraya, Zabadani, and Madaya as well. Attempts to spoil these agreements by parties on both sides led not to the resumption of fighting but to redoubled Turkish-Russian diplomacy. Building on these successes, Turkey and Russia are pushing for a national ceasefire and peace talks without U.S. or U.N. participation.

In practice, these developments amount to the partition of Syria by foreign powers into zones of influence and the creation of semi-independent protectorates. Hundreds of Turkish troops protect rebels in the Jarablus-Al-Bab safe zone, hundreds of U.S. troops protect YPG in eastern Rojava, and thousands of Russian and Iranian-sponsored foreign Shia troops protect the regime in western Syria. So while the regime remains by far the most militarily powerful and socially significant of the war’s four sides, it is too weak to enforce its claim to sole sovereignty over the country. Barring a radical change in U.S. policy, Assad will remain head of the internationally recognized Syrian government for the foreseeable future even as the shrunken rump state he presides over degenerates into a Russian-Iranian vassal with little political independence.

Rebel defeat in the four-year battle of Aleppo is a major turning point in the war – it marks the beginning of the end of the struggle to oust Assad. The struggle continues but strategically, rebels are on the defensive having gone from being a serious challenge to regime control over much of the country in 2012-2015 to being confined in 2016 to geographically disparate, disjointed pockets akin to present-day Rojava or the Palestinian pseudostate. The longer the regime-rebel war lasts, the more the rebels will lose. Their main task is no longer offensive (the overthrow of Assad and the destruction of the murderous military-security apparatus he presides over) but defensive (preserving and consolidating hard-won democratic gains in what Mao Tse-Tung called rear areas [Idlib, Daraa, Quenitra] and base areas [Rastan, Ghouta]).

Being the least united and most poorly led side in the war, the rebels have proven to be the least able to resist degenerating into a proxy force pursuing their backers’ aims instead of their own. However, they can exploit the U.S.-led international coalition against ISIS to further their struggle against Assad by fighting to take all ISIS-occupied areas before the regime does. This seems to be what former president of the National Coalition of Opposition and Revolutionary Forces Ahmed Jarba aims to do with his Syrian Elite Forces, an Arab tribal YPG-aligned rebel force. Liberating and successfully governing ISIS territory is a way of indirectly continuing the struggle against Assad and will give rebels leverage in negotiations ending the war.

Free Aleppo has fallen. Free Raqqa has yet to be restored.

Revolutionary War Round-Ups: