Iran, Russia say they support Syria in confronting rebels

The foreign ministers of Iran and Russia voiced support for Syria on Saturday during a major attack by rebel groups, Iranian state media reported.

Iran’s Abbas Araqchi told Russia’s Sergei Lavrov in a phone call that the attacks were part of an Israeli-U.S. plan to destabilise the region, state media said.

According to a statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry about the call, both sides “expressed extreme concern about the dangerous escalation of the situation in Syria due to the terrorist offensive by armed groups in the Aleppo and Idlib provinces”.

The ministers agreed on the need to intensify joint efforts aimed at stabilising the situation in Syria.

Earlier on Saturday, Russia’s Lavrov spoke on the matter with his Turkish counterpart, Hakan Fidan while the Syrian army said dozens of its soldiers had been killed in a major attack by rebels who swept into the city of Aleppo, forcing the army to redeploy in the biggest challenge to President Bashar al-Assad in years.

Syrian rebels sweep into Aleppo, army closes airport, roads

The surprise attack, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, was the boldest rebel assault for years in a civil war where frontlines had largely been frozen since 2020.

The war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced many millions, has ground on since 2011 with no formal end, although most major fighting halted years ago after Iran and Russia helped Assad’s government win control of most land and all major cities.

Aleppo had been firmly held by the government since a 2016 victory there, one of the war’s major turning points, when Russian-backed Syrian forces besieged and lay waste to rebel-held eastern areas of what had been the country’s largest city.