The last time the Syrian opposition controlled Aleppo, I was holed up in a backup apartment I kept on the fringes of Yonkers: Monarch at Ridge Hill. You can look it up.

It’s a quasi-upscale development (or it counted as one at the time) and it’s out of place, as is the halfway decent shopping center built beside it. Suffice to say Yonkers isn’t a place you want to live, but if, for whatever reason, you have to live in Yonkers for a spell, Ridge Hill’s tolerable.

It was 2015, and I was engrossed in Syria’s conflict which, by then, was entering its fifth year. Qassem Soleimani had flown to Moscow, flouting an international travel ban, to make the case for Russian intervention to prop up Bashar al-Assad, whose depleted army was fighting (and losing to) a dizzying hodgepodge of Sunni resistance elements which ran the gamut from “moderate” (a highly relative term in this context) to al-Qaeda affiliates to ISIS. Some of those groups were backed by Turkey, and the US funneled arms to groups seen as less extreme. At the same time, the country’s Kurds took advantage of the melee to claim for themselves more autonomy than ever, to the chagrin of the Erdogan government in Turkey.

After convening with Vladimir Putin in person, Soleimani convinced the Kremlin to send the Russian air force to Latakia, and shortly thereafter, Soleimani, along with a hodgepodge of high-ranking IRGC commanders, led a coalition of Quds-loyal Shiite militia, including Hezbollah (there in force, from Lebanon) and Al-Nujaba on an ultimately successful, multi-month campaign to recapture Syria’s largest city.

In 2016 and 2017, Russian general Sergei Surovikin earned his macabre nickname, “General Armageddon,” by turning the city into a charred moonscape. (Surovikin ran the Aleppo playbook in Ukraine in late-2022, but was ultimately relieved of his command. Two years later, Surovikin was implicated, rightly or wrongly, in Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed coup.)

For most of 2015 I “worked” in a kind of geopolitical advisory role for a man who knew next to nothing about the Mideast. Trying to explain the situation in Syria to him would’ve been easier if he knew nothing at all, but he was committed to a couple of talking points which were misguided and non-sequiturial at best, and just flat-out wrong at worst. I did the best I could, and he came to rely on me pretty heavily for his analysis of the conflict.

And so it was that I spent a cold, snowy New York winter immersed in one of the most horrific wars in modern history. I drank copiously and ate carry-out from the Whole Foods hot bar pretty much every evening. I’d take breaks to go to the movies in the shopping center across the street, and for haircuts at Big Al’s barbershop.

Soleimani and Hezbollah, with whatever help Assad’s forces could muster, and with a big assist from a brutal Russian air campaign, advanced on Aleppo and ultimately reclaimed it for the Assad regime in 2016, marking the beginning of the end for the resistance and the early stages of what became a “frozen” civil war. This week, that war began to thaw.

When the US assassinated Soleimani in 2020, then Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif offered a word (several words, actually) of caution: The US, he said, had just killed “the most effective force fighting ISIS, al-Nusra and al-Qaeda.” That, he warned, was “extremely dangerous.”

Al-Nusra, some of you may recall, was al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, and it was a major player — frequently it was the major player — in the fight to topple Assad. The optics of alliances with al-Qaeda were challenging, to put it mildly, for a lot of Western governments keen to arm and otherwise support the resistance, and al-Nusra anyway claimed it didn’t want any outside help.

Very long story, very short, in the years after Aleppo was recaptured by the Assad government, al-Nusra undertook a series of rebranding efforts, beginning when Abu Mohammad al-Jolani — the group’s long-time leader and a wanted man the US would ostensibly love to capture — refused to swear allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri (Bin Laden’s No. 2 and successor at the top of al-Qaeda). Around that time, al-Nusra began calling itself Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and eventually rolled itself up into an umbrella group with a handful of like-minded militias to form Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

Over the past several days, that umbrella group — Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — launched an offensive from rebel-held Idlib, where they hold sway, to recapture Aleppo. The maneuver largely succeeded, reportedly with some help from groups affiliated with Turkey. Aleppo is, according to reports and as of this writing, mostly controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

The group now seems bent on pressing their advantage. Although Assad’s army and whatever Russian warplanes are still stationed in the country, may be able to stymie the advance, without Hezbollah to call on, and with the IRGC’s capacity to intervene severely restricted, it’ll be a tough fight.

Al-Jolani — who’s keen to suggest Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has no global ambitions, isn’t interested in any caliphate, only seeks to “liberate” Syria and aims to create a government which is a semblance of moderate and tolerant even as it adheres to Islamic principles — reportedly instructed his foot soldiers not to cut down any trees and to avoid scaring local kids as the group seized control of the city.

Whatever al-Jolani says publicly, a government run by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham would almost surely resemble Sharia law. This is, by and large, still a Salafi outfit that behaves more like a Sunni terrorist operation than a political movement. Assad’s the same murderous dictator he always was, but it’s not a stretch (at all) to call the specter of a Hayat Tahrir al-Sham government terrifying: Al-Jolani’s PR efforts aside, it’d be a brutally oppressive, fundamentalist regime.

To state the obvious, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s taking advantage of a hopelessly degraded Hezbollah, a stretched Russian air force and an IRGC which knows its commanders are viewed as fair game by Israel when they’re on Syrian soil. Iran’s fierce network of Shiite militias which won the war for Assad is in tatters. Syria’s Sunni rebels saw an opportunity and they seized it.

If you’re wondering whether this means Israel opened the door, however slightly, to the establishment of a Sunni jihadist state in Syria by decimating the deterrent — Hezbollah — the answer’s an unqualified “yes.” That’s certainly not to suggest Israel didn’t have some kind of “right” to wipe out Hezbollah, but as Javad Zarif warned in 2020, when you eliminate the Shiite deterrent, you leave a vacuum, and it won’t be long before it’s filled by Salafi-jihadists.

The US doesn’t have a lot to say about this so far. “The Assad regime’s ongoing refusal to engage in the political process, and its reliance on Russia and Iran, created the conditions now unfolding, including the collapse of Assad regime lines in northwest Syria,” the White House said. “At the same time, the United States has nothing to do with this offensive,” a short statement went on, reminding the world that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is a US-designated terrorist organization.

In “Turning Point,” while editorializing around Israel’s decision to assassinate Hassan Nasrallah, I drew a distinction between “these” terrorists (where that meant Nasrallah, Soleimani, Mahdi al-Muhandis and so on) and “those” terrorists (where that meant Osama Bin Laden, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Abdelhamid Abaaoud and so on). Whatever he says to the world while trying to clean up Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s image, Al-Jolani is, was and always will be, one of “those” terrorists.

One former Trump administration official captured the gravity of the moment in remarks to the Wall Street Journal. “It’s a tectonic shift,” Andrew Tabler, who served Trump as the White House’s Syria director said. “Regional and international powers intervened in Syria over a decade ago, and now the conflicts of Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon all come together and overlap in Aleppo.”

In a 2021 interview with PBS, his first with Western media, al-Jolani was asked why the world should trust a terrorist to run Syria. He called the terror designation unfair. “Through our 10-year journey in this revolution, we haven’t posed any threat to Western or European society: No security threat, no economic threat, nothing,” he said.

Asked if he’d commit, on the record, to never carry out attacks against the US and Europe, he was more than happy to oblige.

“Our involvement with al-Qaeda has ended, and even when we were with al-Qaeda, we were against external attacks,” he said. “It’s completely against our policies to carry out external operations from Syria to target European or American people. This was never part of our calculations at all.”