Syrian rebel forces on Thursday captured the central city of Hama, days after seizing the country’s commercial hub Aleppo in a lightning offensive against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

The rebels led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched their offensive little more than a week ago, just as a ceasefire took hold between Israel and Assad’s ally Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Following overnight clashes, the rebels stormed Hama “from several sides” and engaged in street battles with Assad’s forces, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor.

The rebels said they seized Hama’s prison and released its inmates. By the afternoon, Syria’s army admitted losing control of the city, strategically located between Aleppo and Assad’s power base in the capital Damascus.

“Over the past few hours, with the intensification of confrontations between our soldiers and terrorist groups … these groups were able to breach a number of axes in the city and entered it,” the army said in a statement, adding units had redeployed outside Hama.

In a video posted online, HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani said his fighters had entered Hama to “cleanse the wound that has endured in Syria for 40 years”, referring to a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982, which led to thousands of deaths.

“I ask God almighty that it be a conquest with no revenge,” he added.

The rapid fall of the city came despite shelling and strikes by the Syrian and Russian air forces, as reported by state media late on Wednesday.

Maya, a 22-year-old student who gave only her first name for security concerns, said earlier on Thursday that she and her family were staying at home as the fighting raged outside.

“We have been hearing non-stop the sounds of explosions and shelling,” she told AFP by telephone from Hama. “We don’t know what’s going on outside.”

Rebel leader tours citadel

The Observatory, which relies on a network of sources in Syria, says 727 people, mostly combatants but also 111 civilians, have been killed in Syria since the violence erupted last week.

It marks the most intense fighting since 2020 in a country already ravaged by civil war, which began with the repression of pro-democracy protests in 2011.

Key to the rebels’ successes since the start of the offensive last week was the takeover of Aleppo, which in more than a decade of war had never entirely fallen out of government hands.

Jolani, the HTS chief, on Wednesday visited Aleppo’s landmark citadel where images posted on the rebels’ Telegram channel showed him waving to supporters from an open-top car.

While the advancing rebels found little resistance earlier in their offensive, the fighting around Hama has been especially fierce.

Assad ordered a 50 per cent rise in career soldiers’ pay, state news agency SANA reported, as he seeks to bolster his forces for the counteroffensive. Rebels drove back the Syrian armed forces despite the government’s sending in “large military convoys”, according to the Observatory.

The monitor said the fighting on Wednesday was close to an area mainly populated by Alawites, followers of the same offshoot of Shia Islam as the president.

‘Scorched-earth counteroffensive’

The rebels launched their offensive in northern Syria on November 27, the same day a ceasefire took effect in the war between Israel and Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon.

Both Hezbollah and Russia have been crucial backers of Assad’s government, but have been more recently mired in their own respective conflicts.

The United Nations on Wednesday said 115,000 people had been “newly displaced across Idlib and northern Aleppo” by the fighting.

Human Rights Watch warned the fighting “raises concerns that civilians face a real risk of serious abuses at the hands of opposition armed groups and the Syrian government”.

Until last week, the war in Syria had been mostly dormant for years, but analysts have said the violence was bound to flare up as it was never truly resolved.

Spearheading the rebel alliance is HTS, which is rooted in Syria’s Al-Qaeda branch. “HTS has had a lot of time and space and resources to organise itself and to prepare for this,” said analyst Sam Heller, of the US-based Century Foundation think tank.

How the fighting unfolds now “depends on whether the Syrian government can regain its footing”, Heller said.

“Opposition forces currently pushing south will likely get stuck somewhere in Syria’s centre, when they run into really motivated and intractable loyalist resistance,” he said.

“At that point, it will be a question of whether Damascus has the means to mount the type of scorched-earth counteroffensive I assume it would like to execute.”