When opposition factions in Syria came to power a year ago, one of their first acts was to dismiss all of the country’s military forces, which had been used as tools of repression and brutality for five decades under the rule of Bashar al-Assad and his family.
Now, one of the biggest challenges facing the nascent government is rebuilding those forces, an effort that will be critical in uniting this still-fractured country.
But to do so, Syria’s new leaders are following a playbook that is similar to the one they used to set up their government, in which President Ahmed al-Sharaa has relied on a tightknit circle of loyalists.
The military’s new command structure favors former fighters from Sharaa’s former Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group.
The Syrian Defense Ministry is instituting some of the same training methods, including religious instruction, that Sharaa’s former opposition group used to become the most powerful of all the factions that fought the Assad regime during Syria’s civil war.
The New York Times interviewed nearly two dozen soldiers, commanders and new recruits in Syria who discussed the military training and shared their concerns. Nearly all spoke on the condition of anonymity because the Defense Ministry bars soldiers from speaking to the media.
Several soldiers and commanders, as well as analysts, said that some of the government’s rules had nothing to do with military preparedness.
The new leadership was fastidious about certain points, like banning smoking for on-duty soldiers. But on other aspects, soldiers said, the training felt disconnected from the needs of a modern military force.
Last spring, when a 30-year-old former opposition fighter arrived for military training in Syria’s northern province of Aleppo, instructors informed roughly 1,400 new recruits that smoking was not permitted. The former fighter said one of the instructors searched him and confiscated several cigarette packs hidden in his jacket.
The ban pushed dozens of recruits to quit immediately, and many more were kicked out for ignoring it, according to the former fighter, a slender man who chain-smoked as he spoke in Marea, a town in Aleppo Province. After three weeks, only 600 recruits had made it through the training, he said.
He stuck with it.
He said he was taken aback by other aspects of the training. The first week was devoted entirely to Islamic instruction, he said.
Soldiers and commanders said the religious training reflected the ideology that the HTS espoused when it was in power in Idlib, a province in northwestern Syria.
A Syrian defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the government had not decided whether minorities would be allowed to enlist.
Syria’s leaders are relying on a small circle of trusted comrades from HTS to lead and shape the new military, several soldiers, commanders and recruits said.
The Syrian Defense Ministry did not respond to a detailed list of questions or repeated requests for comment.
After abolishing conscription, much hated under the Assad regime, the new military recruited volunteers and set qualifications like a ninth-grade education, physical fitness and the ability to read.
But soldiers who had fought with the opposition in the civil war were grandfathered into the ranks, even if they did not fulfill all the criteria, according to several soldiers and commanders.
“They are bringing in a commander of HTS who doesn’t even have a ninth-grade education and are putting him in charge of a battalion,” said Issam al-Reis, a senior military adviser with Etana, a Syrian research group, who has spoken to many former opposition fighters currently serving in the military. “And his only qualification is that he was loyal to Ahmed al-Sharaa.”
Former HTS fighters, like fighters from many other factions, have years of guerrilla-fighting experience from the war to oust the Assad dictatorship. But most have not served as officers in a formal military with different branches such as the navy, air force and infantry and with rigid command structures, knowledge that is considered beneficial when rebuilding an army.
“The strength of an army is in its discipline,” Reis added.
Most soldiers and commanders now start with three weeks of basic training — except those who previously fought alongside Sharaa’s group.
The government has signed an initial agreement with Türkiye to train and develop the military, said Qutaiba Idlbi, director of American affairs at the Syrian Foreign Ministry. But the agreement does not include deliveries of weapons or military equipment, he said, because of American sanctions remaining on Syria.
Col. Ali Abdul Baqi, staff commander of the 70th Battalion in Damascus, is among the few high-level commanders who was not a member of the HTS. Speaking from his office in Damascus, Abdul Baqi said that had he been in Sharaa’s place, he would have built the new military in the same way.
“They aren’t going to take a risk on people they don’t know,” said the colonel, who commanded another opposition group during the civil war.
Some senior commanders said the religious instruction was an attempt to build cohesion through shared faith, not a way of forcing a specific ideology on new recruits.
“In our army, there should be a division focused on political awareness and preventing crimes against humanity and war crimes,” said Omar al-Khateeb, a law graduate, former opposition fighter and current military commander in Aleppo province. “This is more important than training us in religious doctrine we already know.”
*Raja Abdulrahim for The New York Times
