New Delhi: Thirteen years after the civil war began in Syria, the Bashar Al-Assad regime collapsed after a 10-day offensive launched by the rebel forces, who began with the seizure of Aleppo, the biggest Syrian city, on 30 November.
The armed coalition, led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), ended the 50 year-rule of the Assad family, after their fighters laid siege to the capital city of Damascus.
The rebel forces made strategic use of drones to secure victory and in turn, power.
Lieutenant Colonel Hassan Abdul Ghani, the Syrian rebel commander, recounted the success of Shaheens on social media platform ‘X’, stating that the drones struck a meeting of the Syrian Republic Guards in the city of Masyaf in the Hama province.
He also stated that a Syrian helicopter which took off from the Hama military airport was destroyed in another Shaheen attack. The drones have been used by the rebels to attack airports, tanks, vehicles and government forces. It was also used in an operation that killed Brigadier General Uday Ghasa, the head of the Military Security Branch in Hama, in the town of Souran.
In a report, the UK–based media outlet Middle East Eye states that the locally made suicide drone, Shaheen, provided a strategic edge to the rebels in coordinated assaults on government targets. The Falcon Brigade, the HTS’s special force, operates these drones against its rivals.
The fighters loaded ammunition onto a drone—a fibre-reinforced, wireless suicide unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a front-facing camera—before they launched it, according to the report.
Capable of streaming live footage to a screen, the drone allowed the operators to guide it toward its target using precision, it added. The drones are said to be capable of destroying armoured tanks, armed vehicles and enemy fighters with a “less than five percent error”.
The rebels are also known to have captured the Iranian and Russian suicide drones that had failed to explode and used them as prototypes to create their own UAVs. Parts of these UAVs were said to have been sourced from black markets around the world, including Turkey.
These UAVs made it possible for the Syrian rebels to set targets, which went beyond the firing line. The drones, in fact, are known to have neutralised armour vehicles eventually helping in the collapse of the frontline troops.
According to a report by British daily Financial Times (FT), the rebels manufacture drones in “small workshops based in houses, garages or converted warehouses, relying on 3D printers when they cannot access parts”.
Around the world, the sophistication of rebel forces is being seen as a gamechanger in their tactics to secure victory. As is noted by FT, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group was a jihadist force fighting for survival against the Assad-backed regime barely five years ago.
The rebel group, however, moved towards creating institutional structures. In its stronghold of the Idlib province, it built a military academy, a centralised command; rapidly deployable specialist units including infantry, artillery, special operations, tanks, drones and snipers.
It also went on to build a local weapons manufacturing industry, FT stated in its report. Quoting an expert, Aaron Zeline, from the Washington Institute think-tank, FT stated that the group transformed itself over the past five years into a “polished proto-military”. The group’s manufacturing of drones and missiles, enabled it to pose new threats to a regime that lacked significant anti-drone capabilities.
The rebel group, with the help of defected former officers, planned out military training for its personnel. It established nine-month training which included the basic, intermediate and advanced curriculum.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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