The surprise toppling of the murderous Assad regime in December by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its coalition of armed rebels was met with a mixture of joy, disbelief and anxiety by ordinary Syrians.
Since then, the new interim government, led by HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, has promised to unite a divided country and steer Syria towards an inclusive political future. In February, hundreds of Syrians gathered at a hastily organized two-day national dialogue conference in Damascus to set out a roadmap for this historic transition.
The conference concluded with a declaration to draft a national constitution and a pledge to ban armed groups operating outside the new state structure. ‘The unity of arms and their monopoly by the state is not a luxury but a duty and an obligation,’ Sharaa told delegates. Syria’s new leadership is under pressure to win international recognition and the badly needed financial aid it will unlock. As time passes, the window for Sharaa’s government to capitalize on the country’s revolutionary spirit also narrows.
But exclusion from the conference of key armed factions, most notably the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and the new authorities’ questionable approach to military integration so far, cast doubt on President Sharaa’s ability to build a cohesive national army – a goal he himself identified as crucial to Syria’s future. Failure would risk a return to civil conflict.
Liberated but fractured
Syria’s military landscape has been shaped by a complex array of actors over the past 14 years. Even as Sharaa announced at the conference that armed factions not part of the new state should lay down their weapons, competition persists between these groups.
HTS swept into Damascus after seven years of Islamist rule in Idlib and are now the backbone of the new government, which enjoys backing from Turkey. Most of northern Syria is still under the control of the Syrian National Army (SNA), also Turkish backed.
The SDF, the armed forces of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, oversee 95 per cent of Syria’s gas and oil reserves. Since 2014, they have been backed by the United States in an effort to root out Islamic State (IS) from the territory.
The SDF’s push for federalism and Kurdish self-rule contrasts sharply with the centralized nationalist goals of the SNA and the Islamism of HTS. This has also fuelled the SDF’s resistance to military integration and its longstanding antagonism with Turkey. In the south, groups which previously reached reconciliation agreements with Assad maintain links to past Russian backers.
Syria’s new leader meets with Turkish President Erdogan in Ankara in February. Al-Sharaa is backed by Turkey, but its longstanding opposition to Kurdish independence is obstructing Syria’s military integration. Photo by Mehmet Ali Ozcan/Anadolu via Getty Images.
Sharaa first announced at the end of January plans to dissolve these Assad-era factions – which number about 100, 000 fighters – and integrate them into a formal national army. At the Damascus conference a month later, the president, who has undergone a remarkable transformation from jihadist leader to seemingly pragmatic power broker in the past five years, reiterated this pledge.
Yet despite his expressed desire to embrace representative governance and end military factionalism, Sharaa’s integration efforts to date risk exacerbating rather than resolving these divisions.
Flawed consolidation
HTS moved to integrate Syria’s armed factions into a single command before the December offensive to remove Bashar al-Assad. But even these efforts raised questions.
High-ranking positions in the country’s future national army were promised and later awarded to commanders with longstanding ties to Sharaa. For instance, Brigadier General Omar Muhammad Jaftashi, a Turkish national and close ally of Sharaa, was appointed to command of the Damascus Military Division, leading to speculation about his role as a potential communication channel with Turkish intelligence.
Since December, the ministry of defence’s restructuring process has provoked further criticism. Its efforts regarding the SNA have focused on consolidating power among the faction’s larger groups.
A security commander from Maghawir al-Sham, a faction within the SNA, told me in January: ‘This integration relies on appeasing the larger factions in the Syrian National Army, which were already cooperating with HTS before Assad’s fall. Leaders from the small factions have been ignored entirely,’ he said.
For other fighters, tribal loyalties and grievances from Syria’s civil conflict have contributed to a distrust of the new leadership in Damascus and a continued reluctance to disarm. ‘I’ll join the ministry of defence, but I will never give up my weapon,’ one SNA commander told me. ‘After 14 years of revolution, I won’t accept being sidelined or thrown into prison.’
Mistakes from Iraq
Some of Sharaa’s actions echo the errors of Iraq’s de-Ba’athification’ process two decades earlier. In Iraq, the mass expulsion of Ba’ath Party members led to the collapse of state institutions and the alienation of thousands of military officers and civil servants, many of whom later participated in a long and bloody insurgency.
In the past two months the new authorities in Damascus have dismissed hundreds of former Ba’athist state employees, with a government minister suggesting that there has been widespread corruption and as many as 400,000 ‘ghost’ names on the government’s payroll. In recent weeks, a small number of technical specialists from the former regime’s military have been allowed to return to their duties, but many remain uncertain about their future.
Some soldiers have had their salaries suspended and describe being forced to hand in their arms at newly established ‘Reconciliation Centres’, where they were issued ID marked as ‘defected’ and told they would be contacted about re-integration. Others have already moved back home to their coastal villages, fearing eviction from their government housing in Damascus.
In early March, fighters from the new Syrian government, pictured above, engaged in heavy fighting with former regime loyalists in Latakia and Tartous, coastal cities with significant populations of Alawites. Photo: Ali Haj Suleiman/Getty Images.
Sharaa has remained silent on the expulsion of ex-regime soldiers, the majority of whom are from the Alawite religious community from which the Assad family came. But should the numbers in this state of limbo grow significantly, the risk increases that their frustrations escalate into sectarian friction or worse. In early March significant clashes broke out between Alawite ex-regime soldiers and new government forces in the coastal cities of Latakia and Tartous, leaving more than one thousand dead.
Following the national dialogue conference, Druze militants in the south announced the formation of a new military coalition led by ex-regime defector, Colonel Tareq Al-Shoufi, causing concerns about growing fragmentation.
Transitional justice
At his opening address to February’s Damascus conference, Sharaa promised to form a transitional justice body to ‘heal the wounds and wash away the pains after decades of dictatorship.’ Since the outbreak of civil conflict in 2011, more than 500,000 Syrians are reported to have died. The desire that those responsible face justice is widespread – both to exercise accountability and to prevent vengeance killings.
Yet there has been little indication of what a credible framework for transitional justice would look like. This process is complicated further by the fact that various armed factions with figures in or close to the new government, including HTS, the SNA and the SDF, have been implicated in crimes and atrocities committed during Syria’s civil war. Former fighters I interviewed over the past month expressed fears about prosecution.
Meanwhile, the security situation on the ground continues to deteriorate. In Damascus, local people describe groups of masked armed security forces patrolling the city’s public spaces. A surge in arrests and kidnapping has been reported, some allegedly involving men impersonating security forces. ‘We don’t know who to trust,’ one civilian told me. ‘Security personnel are present, but they don’t have any actual control. Lawlessness rules in rural areas, and no one is protecting us.’
There are also concerns that this volatility could give way to renewed extremism. On the outskirts of Damascus and across pockets of the south, reports are increasing of IS cells attacking fighters from rival factions.
The SDF challenge
The status of the SDF remains one of the most significant challenges to forming a national army. Initially talks made some progress, with Sharaa offering to integrate Arab-majority units of the SDF and SDF leader Mazloum Abdi stating: ‘A new Syria is forming … of course the Syrian Democratic Forces must have a place in the new Syrian army.’ But negotiations have stalled in recent weeks, culminating in the SDF’s boycott of the Damascus conference.
One commander I spoke to insisted that their boycott wasn’t an indication of separatism, but rather an effort to preserve Kurdish ‘cultural and military sovereignty’ in any future agreement. Another criticised the lack of transparency in the selection process ahead of the conference, reinforcing his belief that ‘SDF forces were never truly seen as a legitimate partner.’
SDF commander-in-chief Mazloum Abdi during a press conference in December. Since boycotting the national dialogue in February, the SDF’s relations with the new leadership in Damascus have become increasingly strained. Photo: Delil Souleiman AFP/ via Getty Images.
Throughout integration talks, Turkey’s opposition to Kurdish independence has been a persistent obstacle, placing Sharaa in a difficult position. Ankara insists on the dissolution of the SDF’s military structure which it sees as an opportunity to expand its regional influence through the SNA, many of whose fighters’ salaries Ankara has been paying.
Recent interviews with HTS commanders suggest they are divided about how to tackle the SDF. One in the ministry of defence told me: ‘Only decisive military pressure can suppress SDF ambitions for autonomy. Any concessions would embolden the SDF to push harder for federal self-rule.’ Another commander suggested that if Washington’s support for the SDF diminishes, it would be left with little choice but to accept Sharaa’s conditions for integration.
PKK ceasefire
One of the SDF commanders I spoke to after the Damascus conference insisted they are optimistic about continued US support. The SDF also oversees prisons and camps securing about 10,000 IS and other jihadist fighters. ‘If Turkey attacks, we will have no choice but to redirect our forces,’ Abdi, the SDF leader, told the BBC. ‘That would give IS an opportunity to attack prisons and free its fighters.’
This month the PKK, the influential Kurdish militant group, declared a ceasefire with Turkey after four decades. While the SDF is not subject to the PKK, this raises questions about their future.
One SDF commander insisted the PKK’s announcement would not weaken the SDF’s position: ‘All options remain on the table [with regard to Ankara] – whether through continued negotiations or military confrontation,’ he said. Nevertheless, the absence of a clear path towards military integration heightens the risk of escalating tensions between the SDF and the new Syrian army.
A way forward
Yet, even with these obstacles to military unification, progress is possible. The establishment of a domestically led Transitional Justice Council will be essential. While Sharaa has assured that such a body would be established and the Damascus conference declared a commitment to transitional justice, a timeline and structure remains absent; nor are the conference pronouncements binding on the government.
Such opacity is dangerous. Unless a credible framework is created and deployed soon – before national elections due to be held in four years’ time – Syria’s new leadership will struggle under the weight of these unresolved grievances.
Drawing on successful precedents including Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission, this process must be led by local communities and supported by the Syrian diaspora and civil society organizations that have spent the past 14 years documenting Assad’s atrocities. Such a process will be complex and emotionally fraught.
Trust also needs to be built at the institutional level. The creation of an inclusive military council with representation from the southern factions, the SDF and former officers from the Assad regime, would ensure that all armed factions have a voice in shaping future security structures. SNA commanders have already proposed establishing a Revolutionary Military Council along these lines.