On July 6, after more than two weeks of hard fighting, forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stood triumphant at the Nasib gate. The gate, which lies on the Jordanian-Syrian border on the edge of Syria’s southwestern Daraa province, controls the highway leading from Amman to Damascus; its seizure by anti-government rebels in April 2015 had been a serious blow to Assad. Now, with the government’s recapture of the Nasib gate, Daraa—the rebel stronghold where the uprising that sparked the country’s civil war began—lay open to Damascus. A little more than a week after Nasib’s fall, the city of Daraa agreed to surrender to Assad. For southwestern Syria’s opposition, things weren’t supposed to end this way.

Rebels in Daraa once had high hopes for defeating Assad. In mid-2015, on the heels of major rebel advances throughout Syria, Daraa’s armed opposition was convinced that it could expel the regime from its corner of the country. In June of that year, forces led by the Southern Front of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) launched an offensive, dubbed Southern Storm, to evict the regime from the province’s capital city, also called Daraa. Although trumpeted by Syria watchers, Southern Storm garnered little in the way of attention from the international media and barely any support from the opposition’s main foreign backers, Jordan and the United States. And despite initial advances, the rebels failed to take the city. Within a month the offensive had ground to a halt—a de facto defeat for the opposition.

After the failure of Southern Storm, the battle for southwestern Syria—including the provinces of Daraa, Quneitra, and opposition-held areas of Sweida—settled into a stalemate. Neither Assad nor the opposition could make major gains, although Russia’s September 2015 military intervention on behalf of the regime made it nearly impossible for the rebels to win by military means. Although they did not know it at the time, Southern Storm had been the last, best hope for the rebels in Daraa.

A government soldier at the Nasib border crossing, July 2018. Omar Sanadiki / Reuters

In July 2017, Jordan, Russia, and the United States agreed to create a “de-escalation zone” covering Daraa, Quneitra, and Sweida in order to halt the fighting between government and opposition forces and avoid a humanitarian catastrophe. The agreement achieved a type of equilibrium in southwestern Syria that had kept the regime out of rebel-ruled areas while assuring Assad that he would not have to worry about a rebel offensive launched from the region. The de-escalation zone more or less held for most of the year, as the Syrian government, its Iranian allies and their proxy militias, and the Russians focused their attention on conquering what one European diplomat based in Amman described to us as “the low-hanging-fruit areas of Syria.” Between the late summer of 2017 and the spring of 2018, Assad won took large swaths of the lightly populated deserts of eastern Syria back from the Islamic State (ISIS) and crushed stubborn rebel-held pockets in the spine of western Syria, most notably north of Homs and in the Ghouta region east of Damascus.

But throughout this period Assad continued to keep an eye on Daraa, waiting for an opportunity to reassert control over the southwestern border regions, restart trade with the wider Arab world via overland traffic through Jordan, and remove the Jordanians’ ability to back his enemies. At first, Assad tried to win back southwestern Syria through Russian-led reconciliation talks. These talks, which broke down in early June on the eve of the regime’s offensive, reportedly would have given the opposition local authority in its areas and a share of the revenue from the Nasib border crossing in exchange for the rebels’ agreement to surrender most of their weapons and recognize Damascus’ authority. When the opposition balked at these terms, Assad decided to win southwestern Syria with force. With the Russians agreeing to provide air support for the regime offensive, the battle was, for all intents and purposes, decided before it began.

On June 17, the regime, supported by Russian airpower and Iran-backed foreign militias, launched an offensive to crack the stalemate in the southwest. The fighting had displaced over 325,000 civilians from their homes, more than 70 percent of whom had fled to areas near the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, according to the United Nations. ETANA, a Syrian-led research organization based in Amman, counted 352 civilians killed and over 630 wounded as a result of the offensive, and the UN estimated that more than 720,000 residents of southwestern Syria were at direct risk of being displaced by the fighting.