Al Qaeda-linked rebels have advanced south towards Damascus after capturing Aleppo as a Russian commander propping up the dictator has reportedly been fired.

Thousands of Syrian insurgents fanned out inside Aleppo in vehicles with improvised armor and pickups, deploying to landmarks such as the old citadel on Saturday, a day after they entered Syria’s largest city facing little resistance from government troops.

Syria’s armed forces said in a statement Saturday that to absorb the large attack on Aleppo and save lives, it has redeployed and is preparing for a counterattack.

The jihadist-led rebels seized Aleppo airport and dozens of nearby towns on Saturday after overrunning most of Aleppo, a war monitor said.

Damascus-ally Moscow responded with its first air strikes on Aleppo since 2016 as the jihadists and their Turkish-backed allies pressed a lightning offensive they launched on Wednesday as a ceasefire took effect in neighbouring Lebanon.

The rebels are understood to be moving towards Damascus, with unconfirmed reports of shootings in the outskirts of the city, as rumours of a coup on al-Assad’s regime swirling.

They faced little to no resistance from government troops, according to fighters and activists. The swift and surprise offensive is a huge embarrassment for Syria’s President Bashar Assad and raised questions about his armed forces’ preparedness. The insurgent offensive launched from their stronghold in the country’s northwest appeared to have been planned for years.

Lieutenant General Sergey Kisel, who commands the Russian forces in Syria, has allegedly been removed from his post following the rebel storm on Aleppo.

‘What you find is that whenever things start to go wrong, they will start to round on the leaders and start the blame game,’ Colonel Philip Ingram, a former British Army intelligence officer, told MailOnline.

‘One of the indications of it going very badly wrong is whenever you get reports coming out of generals being sacked. If this shows how concerned Putin is with everything, it’s quite clear that the Syrians and Russians that are backing them have been caught off guard.’

He added: ‘It is a typical response from dictatorships to deny that there’s any problem that’s going on when the complete opposite is out in the public domain. Again, it suggests that things for the Assad regime are in a very bad position.’

Bassel al-Assad was the first-born son of former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and the older brother of current president Bashar. He was expected to succeed his father as Syrian leader but he died in a January 1994 car crash in Damascus.

Due to his sudden death, his lesser-known brother Bashar, who was training as an ophthalmologist in London, assumed the mantle of president-in-waiting. He then officially became president in 2000 following the death of his father.

The fighting has killed at least 327 people, most of them combatants but also including 44 civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

‘Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and allied factions… took control of most of the city and government centres and prisons without meeting great resistance,’ the UK-based war monitor said.

They also overran Aleppo airport after government forces withdrew, and took control of ‘dozens of strategic towns without any resistance’, it added.

Putin-ally Bashar al-Assad is said to have fled to Russia with his wife and children earlier this week, according to unconfirmed rumours.

‘What we will definitely see [in the next couple of days] is an increase in attacks against Aleppo and other areas where the Russians and Assad’s forces believe that the rebels are holed up, but they’ll be indiscriminate attacks, so there’ll be a large number of civilians caught up in this,’ Colonel Ingram said.

‘The next couple days will tell us where the momentum lies, whether there is a coup.

‘Certainly the speed with which everything is happening and the fact that the Russians and Assad forces have been caught effectively [off guard] suggests that this is not going to be a good outcome for Assad, who is in Moscow with his family. Maybe he thought he knew that this was coming so kind of tried to take himself and leave everyone else.’

He added: ‘This is almost the perfect moment for the rebel forces to attack into Assad. Russia is suffering. Hezbollah, in many cases, are suffering after what Israel has done.

‘Therefore they’re pretending, their ability to conjure the attack by the rebels is have been hugely diminished.’

Colonel Ingram called the rebel attack on Aleppo a ‘significant move’, especially considering that ‘there’s been very, very little moving on the front line for the last eight years’, but said it was ‘too early to tell’ whether it meant the end for Assad’s regime.

‘What we’re seeing at the moment is an impact caused by Hezbollah not being as strong as they were beforehand, and Russia being distracted, but the indications are that Assad’s regime is under significant pressure, and there’s been reports that they are advancing on Damascus now as well. Their advance is rapid,’ he said.

It comes after the Islamist insurgents in Syria were seen toppling a statue of Bashar al-Assad’s brother after they stormed Aleppo.

Insurgents were filmed outside police headquarters, in the city center, and outside the Aleppo Citadel. They tore down posters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, stepping on some and burning others.

In footage posted to X, rebels can be seen tearing down the statue of the president’s brother Bassel al-Assad, who died in a car crash in 1994.

The video shows how insurgents manage to yank at the statue by tying it to rope that is attached to a moving truck.

As the figure topples over and smashes onto the hard floor, rebels can be heard cheering and chanting as they fire gunshots into the air.

Cars driving by join in on the celebration as they honk their horns.

Other videos documenting the rebellion have been shared online too.

One clip shows how men dressed in camouflage uniforms holding weapons pull down the Syrian flag from a monument in Aleppo.

The surprise takeover is a huge embarrassment for al-Assad, who managed to regain total control of the city in 2016, after expelling rebels and thousands of civilians from its eastern neighborhoods following a grueling military campaign in which his forces were backed by Russia, Iran and its allied groups.

Aleppo has not been attacked by opposition forces since then.

The 2016 battle for Aleppo was a turning point in the war between Syrian government forces and rebel fighters after 2011 protests against al-Assad’s rule turned into an all-out war.

Edmund Fitton-Brown, former British ambassador to Yemen, said that A number of armed opposition groups are involved in the attack on Aleppo but Abu Muhammad Al-Jawlani and HTS/the Al-Nusrah Front are the key players’.

‘They have consolidated their power in other areas of NW Syria and have the resources and strategic awareness to take advantage of Assad’s depleted support,’ Fitton-Brown added.

‘Jawlani is trying to sound statesmanlike and magnanimous towards the defenders of Aleppo.

‘He will have half an eye on not alienating Turkey, which has its own interests in the region and helped broker the uneasy status quo that existed from 2020 until the current offensive.’

Fitton-Brown said that his former colleagues at the UN monitoring team for the Taliban ‘have consistently argued that Assad would never be able to get the genie back in the bottle and that the majority who oppose him would eventually resurge.’

‘This is why ISIS and AQ affiliated groups have stayed, regardless of how many have been arrested or killed.’

On Saturday, Syrian rebels had taken control of large parts of the city of Aleppo.

The offensive is being led by Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which has long been involved in the ongoing Syrian conflict.

The group was set up in 2011 under a different name, Jabhat al-Nusra, as a direct affiliate of Al Qaeda.

In 2016 it broke its links with the jihadist groups and became HTS.

The rebel group is considered one of the deadliest organisations going against President al-Assad.

The alleged coup comes at a time when Assad’s allies were preoccupied with their own conflicts.

Turkey, a main backer of Syrian opposition groups, said its diplomatic efforts had failed to stop government attacks on opposition-held areas in recent weeks, which were in violation of a de-escalation agreement sponsored by Russia, Iran and Ankara.

Turkish security officials said a limited offensive by the rebels was planned to stop government attacks and allow civilians to return, but the offensive expanded as Syrian government forces began to retreat from their positions.

The insurgents, led by the Salafi jihadi group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and including Turkey-backed fighters, launched their shock offensive on Wednesday.

They first staged a two-pronged attack in Aleppo and the Idlib countryside, entering Aleppo two days later and securing a strategic town that lies on the highway that links Syria’s largest city to the capital and the coast.

By Saturday evening, they seized at least four towns in the central Hama province and claimed to have entered the provincial capital. The insurgents staged an attempt to reclaim areas they controlled in Hama in 2017 but failed.

The push into Aleppo followed weeks of simmering low-level violence, including government attacks on opposition-held areas.

Turkey, which has backed Syrian opposition groups, failed in its diplomatic efforts to prevent the Syrian government attacks, which were seen as a violation of a 2019 agreement sponsored by Russia, Turkey and Iran to freeze the line of the conflict.

Mustafa Abdul Jaber, a commander in the Jaish al-Izza rebel brigade, said their speedy advance had been helped by a lack of Iran-backed manpower to support the government in the broader Aleppo province.

Iran’s allies in the region have suffered a series of blows at the hands of Israel as the Gaza war has expanded through the Middle East.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, in a phone call with his Syrian counterpart on Friday, accused the United States and Israel of being behind the insurgent attack.

The opposition fighters have said the campaign was in response to stepped-up strikes in recent weeks against civilians by the Russian and Syrian air forces on areas of Idlib province, and to preempt any attacks by the Syrian army.

Opposition sources in touch with Turkish intelligence said Turkey, which supports the rebels, had given a green light to the offensive.

Turkey’s foreign ministry said on Friday that the clashes between rebels and government forces had resulted in an undesirable escalation of tensions.

The offensive came as Iran-linked groups, primarily Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has backed Syrian government forces since 2015, have been preoccupied with their own battles at home.

A ceasefire in Hezbollah’s two-month war with Israel took effect Wednesday, the day the Syrian opposition factions announced their offensive.

Israel has also escalated its attacks against Hezbollah and Iran-linked targets in Syria during the last 70 days.

Witnesses said two airstrikes on the city’s edge late Friday targeted insurgent reinforcements and hit near residential areas. A war monitor said 20 fighters were killed.

More than 300 people have been killed since fighting broke out on Wednesday, according to a war monitor.

It comes as the Syrian army said today said that dozens of its soldiers had been killed in a major attack by rebels.

Russia has launched air strikes on part of Aleppo in response – the first since 2016 – according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The surprise rebel offensive has put the 13-year-long Syrian war back into the spotlight.

The conflict has killed an estimated half-million people, while some 6.8 million Syrians have fled the country, a refugee flow that helped change the political map in Europe by fueling anti-immigrant far-right movements.

The roughly 30 per cent of the country not under al-Assad is controlled by a range of opposition forces and foreign troops.

The US has about 900 troops in northeast Syria, far from Aleppo, to guard against a resurgence by the Islamic State.

Both the U.S. and Israel conduct occasional strikes in Syria against government forces and Iran-allied militias.

Turkey has forces in Syria as well, and has influence with the broad alliance of opposition forces storming Aleppo.

Coming after years with few sizeable changes in territory between Syria’s warring parties, the fighting ‘has the potential to be really quite, quite consequential and potentially game-changing,’ if Syrian government forces prove unable to hold their ground, said Charles Lister, a longtime Syria analyst with the U.S.-based Middle East Institute.