By Athena Papakosta

Eight years ago, Russian air strikes helped his regime Bashar al-Assad to recapture Aleppo, a city of strategic importance and its second largest urban center Syria. This victory of Assad came after the strategy obeyed the rule of “surrender or starve”. As history has shown, it was the turning point in the Syrian civil war, which until last Wednesday seemed frozen. The wound was reopened and the nightmare, four years after the “Astana Process”, woke up. However, today’s facts are different.

The president of Syria looks like his back is against the wall. The advance of her rebels Hayat Tahrir al-Shamof the past al-Qaeda’s Syrian armwas very fast. Suffice it to note that it took just three 24 hours for them to arrive, together with Turkish-backed rebels, in Aleppo. Russian warplanes, along with the Syrian air force, are launching airstrikes to stop the surprise attack which will mark one week tomorrow, Wednesday.

However, Assad knows – as, indeed, do his enemies – that his allies are either weakened or absorbed in their own conflicts. On the one hand, Iran and Hezbollah are counting their wounds, since Israel has managed to “bend” them. And on the other hand, Moscow seems to have its hands tied because of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

At the same time, Israel, in recent months, has managed to repeatedly strike from the air targets of either the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, or Hezbollah on Syrian soil, or even government forces with the aim of further weakening the so-called Axis of Resistance. Analysts have already pointed out that the timing of the start of the attack was not a coincidence, as it coincided with the first day of the Israel-Hezbollah truce.

But the spotlight is also on Turkeythe country that for some is the player responsible for upsetting the already delicate balance of power in Syria.

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoganwaiting for the new page on the other side of the Atlantic. THE Donald Trump he’s on the doorstep of the White House and in a month something will be back in the Oval Office. The hope of the president of Turkey is the withdrawal of US forces from Syria, which since 2015 have been cooperating with the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to prevent ISIS and for Ankara it is nothing more than an extension of the PKK, and therefore, a terrorist organization

In recent months, the Turkish president, traditionally opposed to Assad remaining in power, has tried to re-approach his Syrian counterpart. Assad, however, tightly closes the door to him by demanding the withdrawal of Turkish forces from his country.

At the same time, Turkey is the country that hosts the most Syrian refugees than any other country in the world and the reasons for choosing escalation, on the part of Ankara, are increasing with the Turkish president seeking a regional role at a time when the map in the Middle East is changing and the region hangs just… a thread away from the prospect of a regional war.

“Recent developments show once again that Damascus will have to reach a compromise with its own people and the legitimate opposition,” Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said yesterday to reject Ankara’s encouragement of the attack, stressing that “it would be wrong at this point to explain the events in Syria by any foreign intervention.”

At the moment, the advance of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham continues but at a lower pace, according to Al Jazeera, and Syria, which already looked like a country – a puzzle of forces and balances, counts, in the last 24 hours, more than 500 dead. Aeolos’ sac has been opened and the situation in the country is expected to be discussed at the extraordinary meeting of the UN Security Council.