Syria’s rebels advance on key city

The flareup of Syria’s civil war continues to expand, as the Turkey-adjacent Islamist rebels who took the city of Aleppo from Bashar Assad’s regime over the weekend are now advancing southward, setting their sights on the strategic, and highly symbolic, city of Hama. (For a brief explainer of who’s who in Syria’s kaleidoscopic civil war, see here.)

If you know “Hama,” it could be because you love medieval wooden water wheels – the city boasts some of the world’s largest and oldest. But more likely it’s because you know that in 1982, Bashar’s father Hafez massacred tens of thousands of people there to quell an uprising by the Islamic Brotherhood against the Soviet-backed dictatorship of the Assad family. The operation gave rise to what Tom Friedman coined “the Hama rules,” meaning that any challenge to the regime is met with immediate, ruthless violence.

Losing Hama today would not only mark a major rebel advance along the road toward Damascus, but it would also be a big symbolic challenge to Assad and his key backers, Iran and Russia. Both countries will be under immense pressure to step in more forcefully if it looks like Assad is in danger of losing his grip. The Hama rules say: The war is about to get worse.