Who are the main rebel groups in Syria?

WHEN REBELS reached Syria’s capital, Damascus, on December 8th, they did so from two directions. Fighters from the south were the first to arrive. From the north came members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former affiliate of al-Qaeda that had led the push against the country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, over the preceding fortnight. The Syrian National Army (SNA) and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), two other important groups, were also involved in the fight to topple Mr Assad. This was the culmination of 13 years of bloody civil war. Soon after rebels reached the city, the president fled, ending more than 50 years of his family’s rule.

Mr Assad is a member of Syria’s Alawite minority: he terrorised both the Sunni majority and other minorities, including Kurds, Christians and Druze. Over the course of the civil war, hundreds of militias sprang up. Rebel groups with disparate aims were united in their opposition to him. Now that he is gone, those militias may find that they lack a common purpose. Who are Syria’s main players and what do they want?

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham

This group, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa (also known as Abu Muhammad al-Jolani), is believed to have 10,000-30,000 fighters. It is an Islamist movement rooted in Salafism, an ultra-conservative branch of Islam. HTS was founded in 2011, under the name Jabhat al-Nusra, as an affiliate of al-Qaeda. It broke with the group in 2017 and has sought to distance itself from jihadism, purging al-Qaeda loyalists from its ranks. Since that year HTS has ruled a slice of Idlib governorate, in Syria’s north-west, pushing the bulk of Islamic State (IS) fighters out of the area. It established the Syrian Salvation Government there, which taxes residents, provides social services and issues identity cards. Syria’s new prime minister, Muhammad al-Bashir, previously served as the head of that administration. Mr Sharaa has sought to present HTS as a religious nationalist group tolerant of minorities: it does not impose dress codes on women and permits church services. But America, Britain, Europe and the United Nations still classify HTS as a terrorist group (though they are pondering whether to change that).

Syrian Democratic Forces

East of Idlib governorate, in the north of the country, the SDF runs a fief that encompasses roughly a quarter of Syria. The SDF is Kurdish-led, though it also has Arab and Christian fighters. Its military wing is led by the People’s Protection Units, many of whom are veterans of the Kurdistan Workers Party, a militant group that fought for years inside Turkey for an independent Kurdish state. Turkey considers the SDF a terrorist group, and the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, sees the presence of a Kurdish force on his doorstep as a threat. But the SDF is backed by America, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars training and arming the group to help it fight IS. In recent years the SDF has spent more time fighting the SNA than the Islamists. It has played a role in the recent offensive, pushing government forces out of Deir ez-Zor, the main city in the north-east. But the SDF has also come under attack from the SNA in Manbij and Raqqa in recent days, as both groups aim to bolster their power bases in the north. Kurds fear the rebellion will be used to push them out of areas they have held for years. Hours after Aleppo fell on November 30th, HTS negotiated an SDF withdrawal from Kurdish suburbs. There are reports of Kurds retreating east, deeper into their (safer) heartland.

Syrian National Army

HTS may have led the offensive, but the SNA’s role has also been decisive. It too is influential in the north. Mr Erdogan established the group in 2017, bringing together a network of anti-Islamist militias who opposed Mr Assad. Many SNA fighters were once members of the Free Syrian Army, a collection of opposition groups made up of defectors from Syria’s armed forces, and the group remains fairly decentralised. Turkey, which funds, trains and arms it, uses the SNA as a proxy to fight the SDF. The SNA has created “safe zones” along the Turkish border, to which Turkey has repatriated some of its 3m Syrian refugees. The group is also a sometime enemy of HTS, but joined forces with the Islamists to oust Mr Assad. Many Syrians criticise the SNA for serving Turkey’s aims at the expense of domestic peace. Already, the group is turning its attention to Kurdish-held areas: in recent weeks it has seized important towns from the SDF.

Other rebels

Daraa, in southern Syria, is often called “the cradle of the revolution”. It was there that Syria’s popular uprisings began. In the early days of the recent offensive, a ragtag group of Druze, Christian and Alawite rebel groups from the south took control of towns and cities, including Sweida, the heartland of Syria’s Druze minority. Some are backed by Jordan, which shares a border with southern Syria. By December 7th southern rebels were poised to enter Damascus. (They were joined by Maghawir al-Thawra, a small group of limited importance that holds territory near the Al-Tanf deconfliction zone, and relies on the American military base there.) In recent days they have branded themselves as the “Southern Operations Room”. That name refers to about 50 militias of varying capacity, and with diverse goals, who joined the fight against Mr Assad. Until a few weeks ago, these groups were often fighting each other: they carried out tit-for-tat kidnappings in the Sweida governorate this year. They may now share a name, but they have little else in common.

Islamic State

IS is a diminished force in Syria—but the uncertainty created by the overthrow of Mr Assad could provide it with an opportunity. The jihadist group originated in Iraq, where its members fought alongside al-Qaeda as part of the Iraqi insurgency that sprang up after America and Britain deposed Saddam Hussein. In 2014 IS seized a large chunk of north-eastern Syria, as well as territory in Iraq, where it imposed an extremist interpretation of Islamic law. By 2019 its caliphate had been dismembered: the land it had held was divided between rebel groups and its fighters retreated to small pockets of rural Syria. Some 10,000 of its fighters are imprisoned by the SDF. If fighting in Kurdish areas intensifies, and leads to their escape or release, IS could pose a renewed threat to Syria and the West. ■