Syria's Rebels Reach "Capital of the Revolution" Against Assad

An Islamist-led rebel offensive reached Syria's third city Homs on Friday after seizing swathes of the country from President Bashar al-Assad's control in a rapid offensive.

Early in the civil war, which was sparked by a crackdown on democracy protests in 2011, Homs was dubbed the "capital of the revolution" by activists who dreamt of a Syria free from Assad's rule.

The crackdown was especially fierce in Homs, strategically located on the main north-south route connecting central Syria to Damascus, and home to a sizeable Alawite minority who share Assad's faith.

The fighting ravaged its historical centre, where the bloodiest sectarian violence occurred.

It was in Homs that armed anti-government factions first took up arms, and it was also there that a brutal siege left people trapped with no food or medical supplies.

It was also in Homs that Al-Nusra Front, the Al-Qaeda-linked precursor of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rebel alliance behind the offensive launched last week, carried out deadly attacks on the Alawite community.

Prior to the conflict the city's population was estimated at 800,000. An important commercial hub, it is home to an oil refinery.

Homs province borders Lebanon and Iraq.

After non-violent protests inspired by the Arab Spring began nationwide in March 2011, Homs city saw the first rebel factions take up arms to fight off the army's brutal crackdown.

Homs's Baba Amr neighbourhood became, for a time, the bastion of the rebel Free Syrian Army, a rag-tag collection of army defectors and civilians joining the fight.

The army recaptured Baba Amr in March 2012, and subsequently besieged and bombarded the Old City, which had also fallen out of government hands.

The siege lasted two years, and killed around 2,200 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor.

The historical centre was left in ruins by the bombing and fighting, and it took survivors of the siege months, if not years, to overcome the trauma of being left with nothing to eat but grass and dried foods.

In May 2014, most of those who had been trapped by the siege left the city, evacuated under the first deal of the war with the government.

In May 2016, the government took back control of the last remaining rebel area of Homs, Waer neighbourhood, in an operation supervised by Assad ally Russia.

Since the end of the fighting in Homs, tens of thousands of people who had fled were able to return.

In Homs, two Western journalists, Marie Colvin from the United States and French journalist Remi Ochlik, were killed on February 22, 2012.

They were in an opposition press centre in Baba Amr when it was targeted by a bombing widely blamed on the army.

In 2019, a US court found the Syrian government culpable in Colvin's death, ordering a $302.5 million judgement for what it called an "unconscionable" attack that targeted journalists.