Turkey will assist the Syrian opposition groups that toppled Bashar al-Assad in forming a unified military force of 300,000 troops within 18 months, with Turkish military advisors playing a central role, a pro-government Turkish news website reported on Monday.
Under a plan announced by Murhaf Abu Qasra, Syria’s newly appointed interim defense minister, various opposition groups are expected to merge into a single military structure.
Turkish Armed Forces personnel will be stationed at five strategic locations to oversee the process, according to the Türkiye news website. The initiative will begin in Idlib province and expand to include the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army and other militant groups operating in the southern Daraa-Quneitra corridor.
Gen. Ahmad Osman, a military representative of Syria’s transitional leadership, told Türkiye that the initial phase would focus on creating a core force of 70,000 to 80,000 troops. He said this would be achieved by incorporating 50,000 soldiers from the Syrian National Army, 40,000 former fighters from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and officers not implicated in abuses under the Assad regime.
Osman stressed that Turkey’s military and logistical support is crucial to reaching the final goal of a 300,000-strong army, a target set to be met within one to one-and-a-half years.
The report also addressed challenges concerning other armed groups in Syria, particularly the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which Turkey alleges is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an organization designated as a terrorist group by Ankara and its Western allies.
This comes as Syria’s new authorities announced on Tuesday that they had reached an agreement with the country’s rebel groups on their dissolution and integration into the regular defense forces, Agence France-Presse reported.
Photos published by the state-run SANA news agency showed the country’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, surrounded by the heads of several armed factions — but not representatives of the Kurdish-led forces in Syria’s northeast.
The meeting “ended in an agreement on the dissolution of all the groups and their integration under the supervision of the ministry of defense,” said a statement carried by SANA and the authorities’ Telegram account.
On Sunday Sharaa had said the new authorities would “absolutely not allow there to be weapons in the country outside state control.”
That also applied to the Kurdish-led SDF, he said.
Last week the military chief of Sharaa’s HTS — the Islamist group that spearheaded the offensive that toppled president Bashar al-Assad — told AFP that Kurdish-held areas would be integrated under the new leadership and that “Syria will not be divided.”
Thirteen years of civil war in Syria has left more than half a million people dead and fragmented the country into zones of influence controlled by different armed groups backed by regional and international powers.