This is the Popular Front podcast with me Jake Hanrahan.

We're focused on the niche details of modern warfare and underreported conflict all across the world.

Popular Front is completely independent.

Today we're speaking to the excellent Aaron Zelen. He's a top level researcher and founder of Jihadology.

He's going to be speaking to us about Hayat Tarir al-Sham,

the Islamist rebels who just took over Syria,

and with the help of Turkish-backed mercenaries,

drive out the tyrant that is Bashar al-Assad.

Zellin's going to give us an idea of who HDS actually is.

If you like what we're doing here at Popular Front, support us and get much more at

patreon.com slash Popular Front.

Thank you. dot com slash popular front I think before we get into kind of HTS if you can just briefly explain this shock mission they've been on into appo. What's happened? It all started on

November 27th. HTS's new body that they called the administration of military operations announced

that they were beginning this offensive. And we started to see them, you know, going into

different villages and quickly taking them over. And even those who have been following HTS and, you know, going into different villages and quickly taking them over. And even those who have

been following HTS and, you know, watching this for years, we're quite surprised at how quickly

this was happening. We're like, okay, is Aleppo on the table now? And then as we saw, four days later,

they took Aleppo. And then another four days after that, we've now seen them taking Hama and now at least today December 6th there are only five kilometers from Homs which is now the

third largest city in the country after Aleppo being the second and Hama being the fourth so we've

seen this you know lightning strike in many respects a lot of it has to do with the surprise of the

regime and its allies in Iran and Russia

because they probably didn't think that the, you know, HTS and its allies were able to do something

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