In the eyes of Syria’s new leaders, the foreign fighters who battled alongside their rebel groups to oust the Assad dictatorship are loyal allies “who have stuck beside the revolution.”
For the United States, many of these fighters conjure images of terrorist groups like the Islamic State.
Thousands of foreigners flocked to Syria to fight in the multi-sided civil war that began in 2011 and lasted nearly 14 years. Some joined rebel groups like the Islamist faction formerly led by Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Shara, and helped them to unseat President Bashar al-Assad in December.
Now, the foreign fighters who remain in Syria have become a point of contention as the Trump administration takes steps to warm relations with the country. Over the past couple of months, American officials have variously suggested expelling them or excluding them from senior positions in the government and military.
But as Syria’s government rebuilds its military after the devastating war, it has already begun folding some of these foreigners into the army, according to government officials and some of the fighters themselves. The defense, foreign and information ministries did not respond to requests for comment on the matter.
Mr. al-Shara’s rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, included many foreign combatants. He now finds himself in the difficult position of trying to balance his loyalties to them with his focus on establishing diplomatic relations with countries that want the fighters either marginalized or gone.
If the government were to sideline the battle-hardened foreigners, that could also create internal challenges for Syria’s fledgling military.
The New York Times interviewed more than a half-dozen foreign fighters from Egypt, Russia and Iraq recently, and all said they did not plan to leave Syria. Some have married Syrian women and had children, and have opened businesses. They risk arrest or worse if they return to their home countries. Some spoke of seeking Syrian citizenship.
“It’s impossible for al-Shara to sell us out because we were in front of him, behind him, next to him,” Abdullah Abrek, 36, a foreign fighter from the Dagestan region of Russia, said recently at a cafe in the capital, Damascus.
“We were one body,” he added. “And he knows we are good fighters. Maybe tomorrow he will need us.”
Mr. Abrek, who is starting his own import business, said he wanted to stay and get a Syrian passport.
Mr. al-Shara draws a distinction between foreigners who fought with rebel groups like his and those who came to join the Islamic State, which conquered a large swath of Syria during the war and ruled over it for years.
The president’s former group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, fought the Islamic State as well as the Assad regime and it is still formally designated by the United States as a terrorist group because it was once affiliated with Al Qaeda.
And since Mr. al-Shara and his rebels seized power, some foreign fighters close to his government have been accused by human rights group of involvement in sectarian-driven killings of Alawites, the religious minority that the Assad family belongs to.
Mr. al-Shara told The New York Times in an interview in April that his government could consider giving citizenship to foreign fighters “who have stuck beside the revolution” and lived in the country for years.
“As long as none of those individuals pose a threat to any foreign country and respect Syria’s internal policies and laws, then the matter isn’t really that pressing,” he said.
Mr. Trump said last month that he was suspending economic sanctions on Syria, throwing the economically devastated country a lifeline. A day later, he met Mr. al-Shara in Saudi Arabia, and his press secretary said Mr. Trump had asked for “all foreign terrorists to leave Syria.” But it was unclear who exactly this was referring to.
U.S. officials now appear more understanding of Mr. al-Shara’s view. The U.S. envoy to Syria, Thomas Barrack, said recently that Washington was seeking “transparency” from Syrian authorities as to where foreign fighters are placed.
It is not clear whether the United States is linking the issue of foreign fighters to a permanent lifting of sanctions. And Syrian officials have not publicly commented on what, if anything, the government has agreed to in exchange for sanctions relief.
Islam Shakhabanov, 39, does not fit the typical image of a foreign fighter.
Sitting in a smoke-filled cafe in the city of Idlib in northwestern Syria recently, he wore tight gray slacks and a fitted, collared shirt, unbuttoned halfway, over a T-shirt. He had a trim goatee and carried a shoulder bag with a Louis Vuitton logo.
Like Mr. Abrek, his partner in an import business, he said he was from Dagestan and came to Syria in 2015 to join the rebels. He showed The Times his law degree from Dagestan.
Mr. Shakhabanov said some foreign fighters feared Mr. al-Shara’s government might hand them over to the United States or deport them back to their own countries.
“Where will they go if they are accused of being terrorists in their own countries?” he said. “Where else can they go?”
Mr. Abrek said he and a Chechen friend both fought in Mr. al-Shara’s rebel group. Now, he said, they were considering joining the Syrian military.
Mr. Shakhabanov said he fought with a different rebel group, Faylaq al-Sham, made up mostly of mainstream Syrian rebels. He said he was unsure whether he would join Syria’s military.
But he did say he would “defend my country” if clashes broke out between the government and armed remnants of the Assad regime.
There are 3,000 to 5,000 foreign fighters remaining in Syria, regional experts and diplomats estimate, with the largest number being Uyghurs. Not all will join the military and those who do will amount to only a fraction of the total forces.
Those figures do not include thousands of other foreigners imprisoned as members of the Islamic State. An estimated 9,000 to 10,000 Islamic State fighters in all are detained in prison camps in Syria and about half of them are believed to be foreign fighters.
Until last year, rebel groups like Mr. al-Shara’s were concentrated in more religiously conservative parts of Syria. Now, some foreign combatants who have been integrated into the military are stationed in more diverse cities like Damascus.
That has raised religious and sectarian tensions at times.
Days after Mr. al-Assad’s ouster on Dec. 8, Timaa Eissa, 28, a woman from Syria’s Alawite religious minority, was in her neighborhood of Qudsaya in Damascus, her long curly hair uncovered, falling below her shoulders. She said a fighter at a checkpoint stopped her and demanded to know: “‘Where is your hijab?’”
She said she knew he was foreign by his accent.
“I told him, ‘I don’t wear the hijab,’” said Ms. Eisaa, who works with the United Nations. “He called me ‘safira,’” she added, using a derogatory word that can mean naked.
She said she began to yell at the fighter before another soldier, a Syrian, pulled him away. The Syrian soldier apologized for the foreigner’s behavior.
Such interactions, she said, have made some Syrians fear the foreign fighters and their religious ideology. The idea of giving them Syrian citizenship did not sit well with her.
In March, hundreds of people were killed in sectarian-driven violence that shook Syria’s coastal provinces, the heartland of the Alawite minority. Mr. al-Assad’s regime was dominated by Alawites, some of whom enjoyed privileged status under his rule.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights has reported that local armed groups and Islamist foreign fighters affiliated with the new government were primarily responsible for the killings, motivated by revenge and sectarianism.
The foreign fighters who spoke to The Times said they were committed to abiding by Syrian law.
One Egyptian fighter said he came to Syria in 2013 and was a member of a rebel group made up of mostly foreigners, many from places where Russian is spoken.
He spoke from his home in his Syrian wife’s rural village, in the northwestern province of Idlib. He said he is now a sniper in a battalion that is part of the new Syrian military.
He asked not to be identified for fear of putting his family back home in danger and said he could not return to Egypt without risking arrest.
Nodding toward his daughter and son, who were practicing Arabic calligraphy on the sofa next to him, he wondered what would happen to his children if he left.
Christina Goldbaum, Dayana Iwaza and Omar Haj Kadour contributed reporting.
Raja Abdulrahim reports on the Middle East and is based in Jerusalem.
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