Syrian Forces Battle Rebels Outside Key City of Hama

Syrian rebels battled pro-government forces on Wednesday on the outskirts of Hama, a major city in western Syria that has become the latest target of the surprise offensive launched by opposition fighters last week, according to both sides.

The rebels have rapidly expanded the territory under their control in northwestern Syria, intensifying pressure on the country’s embattled president, Bashar al-Assad. Led by the extremist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebels now control all of Idlib Province and most of Aleppo Province. That includes much of the city of Aleppo, an economic engine of the country.

Now the rebels have set their sights on Hama, which has been a focal point of past revolts brutally suppressed by the country’s rulers. Capturing Hama would jeopardize the supply route used by Iran, a staunch Assad ally, to move arms bound for another ally, the militant group Hezbollah, in Lebanon.

Forces loyal to Mr. al-Assad have mobilized to beat back the rebel advance. But allies that the government has long turned to for support are now distracted and weakened — Russia by its war in Ukraine, and Iran and Hezbollah by the regionwide conflict with Israel.

Taking advantage of the moment, anti-Assad forces based in northwestern Syria have been expanding their offensive and fueling clashes elsewhere in the country, including in the strategic northeast, adding to the president’s troubles.

In a sign of the crisis’s urgency, Mr. al-Assad ordered salaries for his forces increased by half, Syria’s state news agency said on Wednesday. His army is filled with poorly paid conscripts, a fact that analysts said helped explain why many troops around Aleppo simply fled when the rebels arrived last week.

On Wednesday, the rebel command said that its fighters had captured several towns and villages just outside Hama, the regional capital, as well as a Syrian military base on its outskirts. That came hours after the rebels said that their fighters had control of Al-Mujanzarat Military Academy, one of the government’s largest bases, east of the city.

Neither side’s claims could be independently verified.

Hama’s history would make it a substantial and symbolic prize for the rebels. The city was the site of a massacre in 1982, when government forces under the rule of Mr. al-Assad’s father, President Hafez al-Assad, moved to crush an Islamist-led revolt.

As many as 30,000 people were killed when the elder Mr. al-Assad sent troops into the city in a nearly monthlong assault; the total death toll was never confirmed. That was the last time Syrians rose up against their autocratic government until 2011, when widespread protests drew a forceful crackdown from the younger Mr. al-Assad, and ignited the current civil war.

From 2020 until last week, the conflict had been largely frozen in place. Now, the once-static map of rebel- and government-held territory is shifting quickly as each side advances and retreats around Hama.

Syria’s state news agency reported on Tuesday that a large number of reinforcements had arrived in Hama to help repel the rebels. On Wednesday, it said pro-Assad forces were hitting the rebels with artillery fire and missiles in the countryside north of the city, killing at least 300 and shooting down at least 25 drones.

The director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based war monitor, said in an interview with French television on Wednesday that government forces had managed to push the rebels back from the city.

At the same time, Syrian and Russian warplanes were striking rebel-held territory, Syrian state media reported, citing the military. A photojournalist working for the German news agency DPA, Anas Al-Kharboutli, was killed in an airstrike in the countryside north of Hama on Wednesday morning, according to a statement from the company.

The renewed conflict was creating opportunities for other players — and generating upheaval — elsewhere in Syria’s complex battlefield.

As the rebel offensive spread, forces aligned with Mr. al-Assad from northeastern Syria, near the border with Iraq, headed to Damascus, leaving a cluster of seven villages they had occupied along the east bank of the Euphrates River. That allowed the Syrian Democratic Forces, Kurdish fighters who have for years allied with the United States to battle the Islamic State, to move in, according to a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The official said that the takeover of the villages touched off a brief confrontation on Friday between Syrian government troops and U.S. troops. After Syrian government troops fired on a local American base, U.S. forces returned fire in what the official described as a series of self-defense strikes.

The official, as well as the Pentagon press secretary, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, said that the clash had not escalated. But the events in the area underscored how the rebel offensive was shaking up the battlefield.

Kurdish forces were also clashing in northern Aleppo Province with yet another player in Syria’s conflict: rebel factions backed by Turkey. Those factions represent a different strand of opposition groups from the coalition mounting the current rebel offensive. Turkey regards the Kurds as a dangerous separatist group. The fighting there killed 12 members of Turkish-backed groups, according to a Wednesday update from the Observatory.

While some Kurdish fighters who had held parts of Aleppo Province left for the northeast when the rebels arrived and took most of the city of Aleppo, others remained in a few Kurdish-dominated neighborhoods of the city, setting the stage for more conflict, according to rebel troops in Aleppo and the Observatory.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, speaking at NATO headquarters in Brussels, reiterated the U.S. commitment to combating the Islamic State, or ISIS, which rose to rule an extremist ministate in Syria and Iraq in the mid-2010s.

The United States and its allies have “enduring security interests in Syria — particularly the interest in making sure that ISIS doesn’t resurrect and doesn’t come back,” Mr. Blinken said. “So our own engagement and presence remains important.”

Russia and the Syrian government, however, consider the rebels the paramount security threat, and the Kremlin reiterated its continued solidarity with Mr. al-Assad.

“We strongly support the efforts of the Syrian authorities to counter terrorist groups and restore constitutional order,” Maria V. Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said in a statement, echoing Mr. al-Assad’s longstanding contention that the Syrian rebels were terrorists. (The United States also considers the group leading the current rebel offensive, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, to be a terrorist organization, though other factions opposed to Mr. al-Assad are more moderate.)

On Wednesday, the Syrian military said that Russia had helped secure safe passage for government forces who had been besieged at the Assad Military Engineering Academy in Aleppo. It said in a statement that “joint Syrian-Russian military-political coordination” had helped lift the rebel siege, but did not specify whether Moscow had intervened on the ground or mediated the troops’ exit.

There was no immediate comment from the Russian Defense Ministry about the events at the academy, and it was unclear whether the academy was now fully under rebel control.

Reporting was contributed by Muhammad Haj Kadour, Eric Schmitt, Rania Khaled, Lara Jakes and Jacob Roubai.