Syria’s new leaders try to unite rebel factions under a single government
JERUSALEM — Syria’s new leadership has taken steps to try to unite disparate rebel factions under a single government, the latest move to try to assert authority over the country in the wake of Bashar Assad’s ouster.
A number of rebel factions have agreed to dissolve themselves and be integrated under the Defense Ministry, according to SANA, the Syrian state-run news service.
Beyond dissolving rebel factions, Ahmad al-Sharaa, the leader of the offensive that overthrew the Assad dictatorship, has taken other actions recently aimed at building a new state. His administration has appointed a caretaker prime minister to lead a transitional government until March and has promised that a legal committee would draft a new constitution.
Disbanding the country’s armed factions was a logical step for a leadership trying to establish a single national military.
“They are trying to build a state,” said Dareen Khalifa, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, which researches global crises. “You can’t build a state while you have a million and one militias running around doing their own things.”
Khalifa, who met al-Sharaa this week, said she was under the impression that dissolving the rebel factions was a top priority for Syria’s new leaders because “wayward factions” were acting outside their command in parts of rural Syria.
The agreement to unite the rebels was reported Tuesday. Pictures posted on social media the same day showed al-Sharaa meeting with dozens of rebel faction leaders, many of them clad in military uniforms.
Al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani, has participated in official meetings recently wearing a business suit rather than a military uniform. Since his faction, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, routed Assad, he has presented himself as more of a statesman and less of a rebel leader, and has espoused relatively moderate political positions despite past links to Islamist extremists.
On Sunday, he said at a news conference that the “logic of a state is different from the logic of a revolution.” He spoke standing alongside Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan.
“We absolutely will not allow for weapons outside the framework of the state,” al-Sharaa said, adding that he was referring both to rebel groups and to a Kurdish-led militia, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, who are separate from the rebels.
The Syrian Democratic Forces control an autonomous region dominated by Kurds in northeastern Syria, while the rebel groups hold sway in other parts of the country. A rebel alliance with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the lead helped topple the Assad dictatorship.
The SANA report said all rebel factions signed on to Tuesday’s unity agreement. But The New York Times was not able to independently verify that. The Syrian Democratic Forces did not appear to have signed on.
Farhad Shami, a new media official with the Syrian Democratic Forces, said his group wasn’t opposed in principle to being integrated into a new Syrian military, but the matter required discussions with the new leaders in Damascus, the Syrian capital, without the intervention of regional powers.
He said the Syrian Democratic Forces would like to speak with their counterparts in Damascus about fighting the Islamic State group, writing a new constitution that guarantees the rights of all Syrians, holding elections and forming an inclusive government.
The Kurdish-led force has been battling the Islamic State in Syria for years with U.S. military backing. Neighboring Turkey is hostile to the Kurdish force, viewing it as an extension of a Kurdish group in Turkey that has been fighting the Turkish state for decades.
On Wednesday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said Kurdish forces in Syria must either put down their weapons or “be buried.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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