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NAWA, Syria: As opposition forces raced across Syria in a surprise offensive launched in the country’s northwest late last year, officials from several countries backing either the rebels or Syria’s government met in Qatar on what to do.
According to people briefed on the Dec. 7 meeting, officials from Turkiye, Russia, Iran and a handful of Arab countries agreed that the fighters would stop their advance in Homs, the last major city north of Damascus, and that internationally mediated talks would take place with Syrian leader Bashar Assad on a political transition.
But opposition factions from Syria’s south had other plans. They pushed toward the capital, arriving in Damascus’ largest square before dawn. Those from the north, led by the Islamist group Hayyat Tahrir Al-Sham, arrived hours later. Assad, meanwhile, had fled.
HTS, the most organized of the groups, has since established itself as Syria’s de facto rulers after coordinating with the southern fighters during the lighting-fast offensive.
Wariness among the southern factions since then, however, has highlighted questions over how the interim administration can bring together a patchwork of former rebel groups, each with their own leaders and ideology.
HTS leader Ahmad Al-Sharaa has called for a unified national army and security forces. The interim defense minister, Murhaf Abu Qasra, has begun meeting with armed groups. But some prominent leaders like southern rebel commander Ahmad Al-Awda have refused to attend.
Officials with the interim government did not respond to questions.
 

Cradle of the revolution
The southern province of Daraa is widely seen as the cradle of the Syrian uprising in 2011. When anti-government protests were met with repression by Assad’s security forces, “we were forced to carry weapons,” said Mahmoud Al-Bardan, a rebel leader there.
The opposition groups that formed in the south had different dynamics from those in the north, less Islamist and more localized, said Aron Lund, a fellow with the Century International think tank. They also had different backers.
“In the north, Turkiye and Qatar favored Islamist factions very heavily,” he said. “In the south, Jordanian and American involvement nudged the insurgency in a different direction.”
In 2018, factions in Daraa reached a Russian-mediated “reconciliation agreement” with Assad’s government. Some former fighters left for Idlib, the destination for many from areas recaptured by government forces, while others remained.
The deal left many southern factions alive and armed, Lund said.
“We only turned over the heavy weapons … the light weapons remained with us,” Al-Bardan said.
When the HTS-led opposition groups based in the north launched their surprise offensive last year in Aleppo, those weapons were put to use again. Factions in the southern provinces of Daraa, Sweida and Quneitra reactivated, forming a joint operations room to coordinate with northern ones.
Defying international wishes
On Dec. 7, “we had heard from a number of parties that there might be an agreement that … no one would enter Damascus so there could be an agreement on the exit of Bashar Assad or a transitional phase,” said Nassim Abu Ara, an official with one of the largest rebel factions in the south, the 8th Brigade of Al-Awda.
However, “we entered Damascus and turned the tables on these agreements,” he said.

Al-Bardan confirmed that account, asserting that the agreement “was binding on the northern factions” but not the southern ones.
“Even if they had ordered us to stop, we would not have,” he said, reflecting the eagerness among many fighters to remove Assad as soon as possible.
Ammar Kahf, executive director of the Istanbul-based Omran Center for Strategic Studies, who was in Doha on Dec. 7 and was briefed on the meetings, said there was an agreement among countries’ officials that the rebels would stop their offensive in Homs and go to Geneva for negotiations on “transitional arrangements.”
But Kahf said it was not clear that any Syrian faction, including HTS, agreed to the plan. Representatives of countries at the meeting did not respond to questions.
A statement released by the foreign ministers of Turkiye, Russia, Iran, Qatari, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iraq after the Dec. 7 meeting said they “stressed the need to stop military operations in preparation for launching a comprehensive political process” but did not give specifics.
The initial hours after armed groups’ arrival in Damascus were chaotic. Observers said the HTS-led forces tried to re-impose order when they arrived. An Associated Press journalist saw an argument break out when HTS fighters tried to stop members of another faction from taking abandoned army munitions.
Abu Ara acknowledged that “there was some chaos” but added, “we have to understand that these people were pent-up and suddenly they achieved the joy of victory in this manner.”
 

Waiting for a state
During a visit by AP journalists to the western countryside of Daraa province this month, there was no visible presence of HTS forces.
At one former Syrian army site, a fighter with the Free Syrian Army, the main faction in the area, stood guard in jeans and a camouflage shirt. Other local fighters showed off a site where they were storing tanks abandoned by the former army.
“Currently these are the property of the new state and army,” whenever it is formed, said one fighter, Issa Sabaq.
The process of forming those has been bumpy.
On New Year’s Eve, factions in the Druze-majority city of Sweida in southern Syria blocked the entry of a convoy of HTS security forces who had arrived without giving prior notice.
Ahmed Aba Zeid, a Syrian researcher who has studied the southern insurgent groups, said some of the factions have taken a wait-and-see approach before they agree to dissolve and hand over their weapons to the state.
Local armed factions are still the de facto security forces in many areas.

Earlier this month, the new police chief in Daraa city appointed by the HTS-led government, Badr Abdel Hamid, joined local officials in the town of Nawa to discuss plans for a police force there.
Hamid said there had been “constructive and positive cooperation” with factions in the region, adding the process of extending the “state’s influence” takes time.
Abu Ara said factions are waiting to understand their role. “Will it be a strong army, or a border guard army, or is it for counterterrorism?” he asked.
Still, he was optimistic that an understanding will be reached.
“A lot of people are afraid that there will be a confrontation, that there won’t be integration or won’t be an agreement,” he said. “But we want to avoid this at all costs, because our country is very tired of war.”

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump on Wednesday re-designated Yemen’s Houthi movement, known formally as Ansar Allah, as a “foreign terrorist organization,” the White House said.
The move will impose harsher economic penalties than the Biden administration had applied to the Iran-aligned group in response to its attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea and against US warships defending the critical maritime chokepoint.
Proponents of the move say it is overdue, though some experts say it could have implications for anyone seen as aiding the Houthis, including some aid organizations.
“The Houthis’ activities threaten the security of American civilians and personnel in the Middle East, the safety of our closest regional partners, and the stability of global maritime trade,” the White House said in a statement.
The Houthis, who control most of Yemen, have carried out more than 100 attacks on ships plying the Red Sea since November 2023, saying they were acting in solidarity with Palestinians over Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. They have sunk two vessels, seized another and killed at least four seafarers.
The attacks have disrupted global shipping, forcing firms to re-route to longer and more expensive journeys around southern Africa for more than a year.
The group has targeted the southern Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, which are joined by the narrow Bab Al-Mandab strait, a chokepoint between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.
Under the Biden administration, the US military sought to intercept Houthi attacks to safeguard commercial traffic and waged periodic strikes to degrade Houthi military capabilities. But it did not target the group’s leadership.
At the start of his presidential term in 2021, Joe Biden had dropped Trump’s terrorist designations to address humanitarian concerns inside Yemen. Confronted with the Red Sea attacks, Biden last year designated the group as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” organization. But his administration held off on applying the harsher FTO designation.
British charity Oxfam said the move would worsen the suffering of Yemeni civilians, disrupting vital imports of food, medicine, and fuel.
“The Trump administration is aware of these consequences but chose to move forward anyway, and will bear responsibility for the hunger and disease that will follow,” Oxfam America’s director of peace and security, Scott Paul, said in a statement.
David Schenker, who was assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the first Trump administration, said Trump’s move on Wednesday was an obvious, early step to respond to what he described as one of Iran’s leading proxy forces in the Middle East.
“While the redesignation likely won’t have a positive impact on the group’s behavior, the measure suggests the new administration is not looking to induce (or cajole) the Iranians to negotiations through blandishment,” Schenker told Reuters.
The Trump administration said the US will work with regional partners to eliminate Houthi capabilities, deprive it of resources “and thereby end its attacks on US personnel and civilians, US partners, and maritime shipping in the Red Sea.”
The designation will also trigger a broad review of UN partners, non-governmental organizations and contractors operating in Yemen, the White House said.
“The President will direct USAID to end its relationship with entities that have made payments to the Houthis, or which have opposed international efforts to counter the Houthis while turning a blind eye toward the Houthis’ terrorism and abuses,” the White House said.
The Houthis in recent days have signaled they were scaling back attacks in the Red Sea following a multi-phase cease fire deal between Israel and Hamas. Earlier on Wednesday, the group released the crew of the Galaxy Leader commercial ship more than a year after they seized their Bahamas-flagged vessel off the Yemeni coast.