Syrian rebel forces take Aleppo | Ian Bremmer's Quick Take

A new front in the Middle East war has just opened up in Syria. Ian Bremmer unpacks what’s going on in a new Quick Take.

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Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:

Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take, post-run, on a Sunday because the news does not wait for us to get back from our extended Thanksgiving weekend.

I want to talk about a new front in the Middle East war that has just opened up in Syria, a country that is far from stable and not really a country, really a patchwork of different controls in the best of times. But now we have active war fighting, a new front opening up with lots of territory being taken from Bashar al-Assad, his dictatorial regime from Syria Rebels, particularly a group called HTS, which is the most powerful of the military opposition groups in the country. They have swept, in a matter of hours, through the country, taking over Aleppo, the major city, and moving towards Hama. There is lots of humanitarian concern here. Not a surprise. You don't have hospitals functioning in Aleppo. You've got all sorts, thousands and thousands of people fleeing and nowhere obvious to go.

This should not be an enormous surprise in the sense that HTS has been agitating the Turkish government who support them to march on Aleppo for months. And in the same way that the Iranians had been green-lighting support for all of their proxies across the region to engage in strikes against the United States, against Israel, against shipping, all of that, Turkey did not want to do that. They didn't want to back and offensive. They were pretty split on it. The hawks inside Erdogan's government in Turkey, like the idea in order to expand opposition, put more pressure on a side, facilitate the return of more Syrian refugees from Turkey back into Syria, and also strengthen Erdogan's hand in bringing Assad back to the negotiating table for a normalization of ties under Turkey's terms. But a lot of people inside Turkey were saying that Russia would carpet bomb Turkish-backed forces and Turkish forces on the ground in Syria, of which there are thousands, which would humiliate Erdogan and cause broader tension with Russia that could well have major economic implications. We've seen that before, and this is a time when Turkey doesn't really want to afford that. They're trying to rebuild their economy from what has been a lot of damage.

It looks like now Ankara has given the go ahead to these militants in Syria, in part because the geopolitics of the region is changing. The Russians, of course, are themselves very distracted, not just with an ongoing war in Ukraine, which has been happening for three years now, but specifically because they've got two months to take as much land as possible, put the Ukrainians in the worst possible position before Trump is president and says he wants to end that war. So in other words, everything they have, they're really now putting into that fight against Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the Iranian-supported proxies across the region are getting utterly hammered, as we've seen from the United States, and more importantly from Israel and the successful war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Read full transcript: https://www.gzeromedia.com/quick-take...

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