Syria’s New Leaders Try to Unite Rebel Factions Under Defense Ministry

As the fighters who ousted Bashar al-Assad set out to assert control over the country, they pursued former government forces loyal to the Assad regime, resulting in deadly clashes in parts of the country.

Syria’s new leadership has taken steps to try to unite disparate rebel factions under a single government, the latest move to try to assert authority over the country in the wake of Bashar al-Assad’s ouster.

A number of rebel factions have agreed to dissolve themselves and be integrated under the defense ministry, according to Sana, the Syrian state-run news service.

“They are trying to build a state,” said Dareen Khalifa, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, which researches global crises. “You can’t build a state while you have a million and one militias running around doing their own things.”

Amid the efforts to disband rebel factions, there were deadly clashes in parts of the country on Wednesday as the new Syrian military administration pursued former forces loyal to the Assad regime, according to the interim interior minister and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor based in Britain.

In Tartus‎, a major port city on the Mediterranean coast, clashes between military forces and gunmen killed 14 security force members and injured 10 others, the interim interior minister, Mohammed Abdul Rahman, said in a statement on Wednesday. He blamed an ambush by loyalists in the former Assad regime for the killings.

The war monitor reported that a military patrol in Tartus had been looking for a former high-level government official — the director of military justice, Muhammad Kanjo Hassan — in connection with the deaths of thousands of prisoners in Syria’s notorious Sednaya prison, when it confronted members of his family and other armed men. The patrol was ambushed, and the former justice director apparently was not apprehended.

The Syrian military administration said it was also conducting security operations in the village of al-Jobeh and the cities of Damascus and Homs to capture forces from the former Assad regime that had fired on civilians. A curfew was imposed on Homs, Tartus‎ and Latakia from 8 p.m. Wednesday to 8 a.m. Thursday.

The clashes and curfews occurred as the new administration pushed to disband the country’s armed rebel factions, a step toward establishing a single national military.

Ahmed al-Shara, the leader of the offensive that overthrew the Assad dictatorship, has also taken other actions recently aimed at building a new state. His administration appointed a caretaker prime minister to lead a transitional government until March 2025 and promised that a legal committee would draft a new constitution.

Ms. Khalifa, the adviser with at the International Crisis Group, said she met Mr. al-Shara earlier this week and was under the impression that dissolving the rebel factions was a top priority for Syria’s new leaders because “wayward factions” were acting outside their command in parts of rural Syria.

The agreement to unite the rebels was reported on Tuesday. Pictures posted on social media the same day showed Mr. al-Shara meeting with dozens of rebel faction leaders, many of them clad in military uniforms.

Mr. al-Shara, formerly known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has participated in official meetings recently wearing a business suit rather than a military uniform. Since his faction, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, routed Mr. al-Assad, he has presented himself as more of a statesman and less of a rebel leader, and has espoused relatively moderate political positions despite past links to Islamist extremists.

On Sunday, he said at a news conference that the “logic of a state is different from the logic of a revolution.” He spoke standing alongside Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan.

“We absolutely will not allow for weapons outside the framework of the state,” Mr. al-Shara said, adding that he was referring both to rebel groups and to a Kurdish-led militia, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, who are separate from the rebels.

The Syrian Democratic Forces control an autonomous region dominated by Kurds in northeastern Syria, while the rebel groups hold sway in other parts of the country. A rebel alliance with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the lead helped topple the Assad dictatorship.

The Sana report said all rebel factions signed on to Tuesday’s unity agreement. But The New York Times was not able to independently verify that. The Syrian Democratic Forces did not appear to have signed on.

Farhad Shami, a new media official with the Syrian Democratic Forces, said his group wasn’t opposed in principle to being integrated into a new Syrian military, but the matter required discussions with the new leaders in Damascus without the intervention of regional powers.

He said the Syrian Democratic Forces would like to speak with their counterparts in Damascus about fighting the Islamic State, writing a new constitution that guarantees the rights of all Syrians, holding elections and forming an inclusive government.

The Kurdish-led force has been battling the Islamic State in Syria for years with U.S. military backing. Neighboring Turkey is hostile to the Kurdish force, viewing it as an extension of a Kurdish group in Turkey that has been fighting the Turkish state for decades.

On Wednesday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said Kurdish forces in Syria must either put down their weapons or “be buried.”

Muhammad Haj Kadour and Safak Timur contributed reporting.