NAWA: As insurgents 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 insurgents 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 insurgent factions from Syria’s south had other plans. They pushed toward the capital, arriving in Damascus’ largest square before dawn. Insurgents 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 rebel 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 rebel 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.”
Syria’s southern rebels loom large as the country’s new rulers try to form a national army
https://arab.news/9kytv
Syria’s southern rebels loom large as the country’s new rulers try to form a national army
- Syria’s interim rulers are trying to form a united national army after the fall of Bashar Assad late last year
‘People are suffering in a way you can’t even imagine’: Al Arabiya journalist recounts Sudan devastation
- Al Arabiya anchor Layal Alekhtiar’s journey through Sudan exposes the brutal reality behind the headlines
- Millions are displaced, aid deliveries blocked, and camps are filled with traumatized women and children
RIYADH: Al Arabiya anchor Layal Alekhtiar arrived in Sudan expecting to interview the de facto president. What she encountered along the way, over six harrowing days on the ground, reshaped her understanding of violence, survival, and the limits of language itself.
Speaking to Arab News after her return, Alekhtiar described what she witnessed not as collateral damage or the fog of war, but as something far more deliberate and systematic: a “gender-ethnic genocide.”
What she saw was a campaign of targeted killings of men and the mass rape of women that has shattered entire communities and displaced millions. “People are suffering, suffering in a way you cannot imagine,” Alekhtiar told Arab News.
“Firstly, I am speaking about the displaced people in the refugee camps. Fifty percent of the women who had arrived there had been raped. These are the women I encountered in the camps.
“For them (the militias), this is something they have to do to the women before allowing them to exit the war zone that they are in.
“Some of the women are much older, some of them are young girls, very young girls, 13, 14, 15, 16, and they have children who they don’t even know who the father is because they were raped by three or four, multiple masked men.”
Since the conflict erupted in April 2023, the civil war in Sudan — driven by a power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces — has displaced millions and left a trail of murder and sexual violence in its wake.
Men are killed before reaching aid sites while women and girls are often raped so violently they require surgery. Mothers are found dead, still clutching their children. Pregnancies from gang rape are widespread.
This was not abstract reporting for Alekhtiar. It was what she saw.
She travelled to Port Sudan on Dec. 2 to interview Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces and Sudan’s de facto president.
However, at the request of his office, the interview was to take place in Khartoum — a city without functioning airport infrastructure and retaken from the RSF only in March.
With a small team — a videographer, producer and driver — Alekhtiar undertook the gruelling 12-hour drive from Port Sudan to the capital.
“Looking from one area to another area, you see the difference, you see the depression, you see it on the faces, you see it on the street, you see it everywhere, and you see the effect of the war,” she said.
The destruction was physical as well as psychological. “We saw so many cars and even RSF trucks that were scorched and burned on the side of the road.”
What unsettled her most was not only the scale of the devastation, but the fact that it was inflicted by Sudanese on Sudanese.
“What I have heard from them, there is no way someone can be a human being and can do that. No way. It’s impossible,” she said.
“And the way the city, the way Khartoum is destroyed, no way a person in their own country would do something like this. It’s crazy.”
Along the journey, Alekhtiar spoke to locals wherever she could, asking what they wanted from a war that had consumed their lives.
“They don’t want war. Definitely, they want peace. All of them want that. But at the same time they will not accept being under the leadership of the RSF. For them, there’s no way. And this is something I have heard from all of the people I have spoken to. I did not hear otherwise.”
From outside Sudan, the conflict is often reduced to brief news alerts. Alekhtiar says those accounts fall far short. When asked whether the coverage reflects reality on the ground, she replied without hesitation: “No, not at all, not at all.”
Nearly everyone she met had lost everything — homes destroyed, savings wiped out when banks were looted and burned. According to UNHCR, nearly 13 million people have been forced from their homes, including 8.6 million internally displaced.
On the road from Port Sudan to Khartoum, the scale of death was impossible to ignore. Alekhtiar recalls seeing clouds of flies everywhere, drawn by bodies buried hastily or not at all along the route.
During her six days in the country, her team stopped in Al-Dabbah, where UNHCR tents shelter displaced civilians. What she saw there still stays with her. “I want to emphasize one thing and it is very alarming,” she said.
“What I was witnessing in the camps was only women and children; there were no men. The only men I saw were very old in age. It’s a genocide. They are killing all men. They cannot go out.
“What we saw in the videos, it was real,” she said, referring to the graphic footage of atrocities circulating on social media. “It’s not true that it was one video and the reality is different than that. No, it was real.
“It’s a gender-ethnic issue. It is really a genocide. I’m not just using the word genocide for the sake of using the word. This is actually a genocide.”
Life in the camps was defined by scarcity. There were no spare clothes, almost no supplies, and most people slept directly on the ground. The UN was scrambling to respond, Alekhtiar said, but had never anticipated displacement on this scale.
She watched buses arrive packed with women, screaming babies in their arms. When she asked why the infants were crying, the answer was devastatingly simple.
“Because they are hungry … they are breastfeeding and we cannot feed them because we have not eaten,” they told her. The women’s bodies, starved and exhausted, could no longer produce milk.
UN staff told Alekhtiar they lacked resources as funding was insufficient. RSF fighters were also blocking the main roads, preventing aid from reaching those who needed it most.
Alekhtiar wished she had more time in the camps because this — bearing witness and amplifying suffering — is the core purpose of journalism, she said.
What the women told her there continues to haunt her. Rape survivors said they were treated as slaves, stripped of humanity by their attackers. “They need help, on a psychological level, human level, all levels,” Alekhtiar said.
“These women, I don’t know how they will live later. Some of them cannot talk. They are sitting and looking at me; they cannot talk. Some of them keep crying all day long. Some of them don’t go out of the tent.
“Some of them have kids with them. They don’t know who these kids are, because they found them on their way, and they took them, because they were children alone.
“One woman told me she took a child from his mother’s arms who was murdered, and the child doesn’t speak, even at his age of 3 years, he stopped being able to speak. So many stories, so many stories.
“The problem is the war is still ongoing, and they will come from other cities in their millions. We are not talking about tens or hundreds of thousands. We are talking about millions.”
Alekhtiar does not believe placing further sanctions on Sudan is necessarily the solution.
“The international community, countries, right now are announcing sanctions on Sudan, but that’s not enough,” she said.
“What people need there is support, humanitarian support, and they need real support from the whole world to stop this war because it’s not a normal war.
“A whole race is being killed. Being killed because they want to change the identity of one region. It’s a genocide.”
International sanctions have targeted individuals accused of mass killings and systematic sexual violence. The UK has sanctioned senior RSF commanders over abuses in El-Fasher.
The US, meanwhile, has sanctioned the Sudanese Armed Forces over the use of chlorine gas, a chemical weapon that can cause fatal respiratory damage.
Asked about her own experience in the field, Alekhtiar said the availability of clean water was among the biggest challenges she faced.
“Showering was not an option,” she said, as most water came out black, contaminated, its contents unknown.
She barely ate, overwhelmed by what she was witnessing.
“I was crying all the time there, to be honest. I was sick for two days when I arrived back,” she said.
“After you leave, you become grateful for what you have when you see the suffering of others. They changed my whole perspective on life. It changed me a lot.”
