Syria’s military said it has withdrawn its forces from the central city of Hama after intense fighting with insurgent forces, marking another major defeat for President Bashar al-Assad in the country’s ongoing civil war.
The army issued a statement Thursday that it was redeploying its troops outside Hama to protect the city’s civilian population.
The rebels said earlier Thursday they had entered the city and seized its prison, freeing detainees.
The capture of Hama comes days after the rebels seized the main northern city of Aleppo, the largest in Syria. It was the first major attack on Aleppo since 2016, when Syrian government forces, supported by Iranian-backed militias and the Russian air force, pushed out rebel factions from the eastern parts of the city during the height of Syria’s civil war.
The insurgents are made up of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army. Their capture of Aleppo and Hama has reignited the civil war that broke out in 2011 following a popular uprising and comes as Assad’s allies are preoccupied with their own wars — Russia with its invasion of Ukraine, and Iranian-backed Hezbollah fighting Israeli forces in southern Lebanon.
Hama is strategically located about 200 kilometers north of the capital, Damascus, between Aleppo and Damascus. The city was the scene of an Islamist uprising in 1982 against then-President Hafez al-Assad, the current president’s father and predecessor, which ended with a brutal crackdown by Syrian security forces that left thousands of people dead.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
