GoPro footage released by the extremist faction known as Hayʼat Taḥrīr aš-Šām captures a brutal raid against a Syrian Arab Army checkpoint in Western Aleppo. This footage was recorded a week ago.

Inghimasi fighters from Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham, better known as HTS, conduct a break-neck raid against a position in Western Aleppo that was being held by the Syrian Arab Army. According to HTS, six regime Soldiers were killed during the attack along with two HTS guerilla fighters. The exact date of this assault is unknown, but it is the seventh attack of this scale conducted by HTS in the region since the beginning of 2023, marking a resurgence of violent combat in the brutal decade long Syrian Civil War.

While it's currently easy to overlook wars that are happening around the world in favor of watching the unfolding situation in Ukraine, our mission at Funker530 is to always maintain a holistic look at war everywhere. The situation in Syria is currently able to rapidly decline due to the lack of Russian ground troop presence in Syria. It was through direct Russian aid and intervention that the Assad regime was able to finally begin putting a lid on the Syrian Civil War. That leverage has quickly deteriorated as Russia has had to focus more attention on their efforts and objectives in Ukraine.

On top of this degradation of Russian capabilities, Syria has hurt their own combat power throughout the country in favor of assisting Russian forces with rear-echelon security work during their war with Ukraine. As of this writing, somewhere between 500 and 5,000 Syrian troops are deployed to rear-echelon positions in places like DPR and LPR where they're working in a mostly non-combatant capacity. While that may not seem like a large number, it is likely that the Assad regime sent their best troops to conduct this work in order to represent themselves in a better light to their allies.

For those of you who are out of the loop on who Hayʼat Taḥrīr aš-Šām is, they're a Sunni Islamist organization formed from the groups Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, the Ansar al-Din Front, Jaysh al-Sunna, Liwa al-Haqq and the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement. You may recognize them more from the group's acronym which is simply HTS. The merged group is currently led by Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and former Ahrar al-Sham leaders with a spattering of other group's leaders currently sitting on the organizations high command. Their objective is ousting the Assad regime and its Hezbollah partners from Syrian territories and they want to form an entirely Islamic government. This is also one of the only groups not currently supported by any entity who has a vested interest in the long-term Syrian Civil War.

The world stage is deeply entangled. A conflict in one part of the planet often directly impacts conflicts happening elsewhere in the world. For that reason, it's important to always keep your eyes open and watching everything that is happening. We're just one source of this information. We've also heavily documented the war in Syria over the past decade and you can easily access that information by hitting the search bar up top.

Stay informed. Further escalation in places like Syrian and Afghanistan can create power vacuums that impact the entire world on a massive scale. These places and vacuums are often all that is required for groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to stage large scale terror attacks that could further destabilize the entire world.