Rebel forces have swept through Syria and forced former President Bashar al-Assad out of the country where his family had ruled with an iron fist since the early 1970s.
The rapid offensive marked a dramatic breakthrough for the many factions that have been trying to unseat the president for more than a decade of civil war. Many of the fighters in Syria shared a desire to topple Mr. al-Assad’s government, but not much else: Their ideologies, political beliefs and international backers are very different.
In the fallout created by Mr. al-Assad’s downfall, there are big questions about who will step in.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whose name means Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, is a former affiliate of Al Qaeda that broke with the older group years ago and came to dominate the last stronghold of Syria’s opposition.
It was the main rebel group leading the latest offensive, launching a surprise assault in late November out of its base in northwestern Syria that quickly led to the fall of the Assad government.
Members of the group had early links to the Islamic State, and then to Al Qaeda. In 2016, they tried to shed their extremist roots, banding together with several other factions to establish Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. The United States and other Western countries still consider it a terrorist group.
The group’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani — who as of Monday shed that nom de guerre and is now going by his real name, Ahmed al-Shara — told The New York Times that his primary goal was to “liberate Syria from this oppressive regime.” He has tried to gain legitimacy by providing services to residents in his stronghold of Idlib Province.
Because of its roots and its designation as a terrorist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has struggled to raise funds, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington research institute. The group raises money from border tariffs, collecting taxes on residents and holding a monopoly over utilities. Analysts say it has also been involved in trafficking the synthetic stimulant captagon.
Syrian Democratic Forces
Forces from Syria’s Kurdish ethnic minority, which makes up about 10 percent of the population, became the United States’ main local partner in the fight against the Islamic State in Syria, under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces.
After the Islamic State was largely defeated in 2019, the Kurdish-led forces consolidated control over towns in the northeast, expanding an autonomous region they had built there. But Kurdish fighters still had to contend with a longtime enemy, Turkey, which regards them as linked to Kurdish separatist insurgents inside Turkey.
Even as rebels took control of Damascus, fighting flared between Turkey and the Kurds in the northeast of Syria, centered on Manbij, a Kurdish-controlled city near the Turkish border. At least 22 members of the Syrian Democratic Forces were killed in and around Manbij, and 40 others were wounded, according to the Kurdish group.
The Syrian National Army
This umbrella group includes dozens of groups with different beliefs. It receives funding and arms from Turkey, which has long been focused on expanding a buffer zone along its border with Syria to guard against the activities of Kurdish militants based in the region that it sees as a threat.
Turkey wants to create an area where it can resettle some of the three million refugees who have fled Syria and are living within its borders. But it has struggled to harmonize the ragtag groups that make up the Syrian National Army.
The group is largely composed of the dregs of the Syrian civil war, including many fighters whom the United States had rejected as criminals and thugs. Some received training from the United States early in the war, but most were dismissed as too extreme or too criminal. Most have no clear ideology and had turned to Turkey for a paycheck of about $100 a month when the group was formed.
On Monday, there were fierce battles in the northern city of Manbij between the Syrian National Army, supported by Turkish airstrikes and artillery, and the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group based in Britain, the city was captured by the Syrian National Army. A spokesperson for the Syrian Democratic Forces said fighters with the Syrian National Army had taken only 60 percent of the city. The claims could not be independently verified.
The Druse militia
Syria’s Druse minority is concentrated in Sweida, an area in the southwest of Syria that has seen rare antigovernment demonstrations over rising costs of living, and many Druse men have refused military service. This week, Druse fighters joined the push to topple the Assad regime, launching an offensive in the southwest and clashing with government forces, according to media reports.
The Druse fighters are part of a newly formed group of Syrian rebels, which includes fighters from other backgrounds, working under the name the “Southern Operations Room.”
The Druse are a religious group that practices an offshoot of Islam, developed in the 11th century, that contains elements of Christianity, Hinduism, Gnosticism and other philosophies. There are more than one million Druse across the Middle East, mostly in Syria and Lebanon, with some also in Jordan and Israel.
The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, better known as ISIS, seized vast stretches of territory in Syria and Iraq in 2014, establishing a brutal regime before it was beaten back by a U.S.-led coalition. Now its members are largely in hiding.
Lately, there have been signs of the group’s resurgence in Syria amid wider instability in the region. The Pentagon warned in July that Islamic State attacks in Syria and Iraq were on track to double compared to the previous year. The group has repeatedly tried to free its members from prisons and has maintained a shadow governance in parts of northeastern Syria, the U.S. said.
President Biden announced on Sunday that the U.S. military has been conducting airstrikes in Syria to keep the Islamic State from reasserting itself in the power vacuum created by Mr. al-Assad’s ouster.
The United States has about 900 troops in Syria to help contain and defeat what remains of ISIS there. The U.S. has not given a date for ending its presence in the country, saying it was contingent on conditions within the war-torn country. Those conditions have now changed dramatically.
“We’re cleareyed about the fact that ISIS will try to take advantage of any vacuum to reestablish its capability, to create a safe haven,” Mr. Biden said. “We will not let that happen.”
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