After fall of Aleppo, Idlib likely to be next in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s cross hairs

The battle for Aleppo has gripped the world but it is hardly the only active front across war-torn Syria. One of the next targets for the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will probably be the heartland of rebel territory, the neighbouring province of Idlib.

The province west of Aleppo is a stronghold of al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate and is now also packed with tens of thousands of rebels, many of them evacuated from other parts of the country, making it likely to be an even more bloody theatre than Aleppo.

Idlib has direct links to the Turkish border, and is located only a few kilometres north of Hama, a central province and key point for defending Assad’s coastal strongholds and nearby Russian military bases.

“Identifying which city comes next depends on which city contains the largest number of terrorists and which city provides other countries with the opportunity to support them logistically,” he told Russian media outlets in an interview in Damascus this week.

“Currently, there are direct links between Aleppo and Idlib because of the presence of Jabhat al-Nusra inside and on the outskirts of Aleppo and in Idlib,” he said, a reference to the al-Qaeda affiliate, formerly known as the Nusra Front, now the Fatah al-Sham Front. He added that the decision about what comes next will be made through discussions with his Russian and Iranian allies.

The government’s loss of Jisr al-Shughour, in the westernmost corner of the province, and with it the whole of Idlib province, in the summer of 2015, was what prompted Russia to intervene to shore up Assad’s forces, eventually turning the war’s momentum back in his favour.