Four months ago, Syria TV reported on the beginning of a new round of major restructuring efforts within Syria’s Ministry of Defense. According to the report, five new corps were being created, each assigned to a region of the country and command over several divisions. Creating corps is an expected step of the army’s development; a necessary layer for coordinating administrative, logistical, and command and control efforts of divisions and brigades. However, the corps-creation process has also given the Ministry of Defense new opportunities to further integrate, centralize, and sideline personnel and units from former opposition factions.
The current restructuring process should therefore be viewed as a natural continuation of the broader armed faction integration process of the past two years. Furthermore, it must be understood that even within this current step, nothing is set in stone and the initial structures reported four months ago have already undergone significant evolution. This article will look at where the current efforts fall within the integration process, and then provide an up-to-date command structure based open-source and closed-source research conducted over the past several months.
Armies Within Armies
Unlike Syria’s new Ministry of Interior, the army was built from the outside in. The Defense Ministry represents a wide spectrum of non-state armed actors with a complex history of cooperation, competition, and open war over the past 14 years. Analyst Jerome Drevon recently published a detailed report on the formation of this new army, examining the integration of these factions from its theoretical foundations to its practical implementation. In it, he argues that:
“The new government has secured the formal integration of nearly all the former armed opposition into a new army without a broader power-sharing arrangement or international agreement…. HTS made no concessions to other armed groups as collective entities: some of their leaders obtained positions in the administration, army, and government, but the government refused any factional representation.”
The initial integration process described by Drevon - as well as by senior Ministry officials I spoke with in late 2025 - relied heavily on structured negotiations between armed factions and HTS, represented now as the new Ministry of Defense. The initial focus was on structural integration, ensuring all factions fell under an officially centralized chain of command under the purview of the new government. As Drevon explains:
“By February [2025], [the Ministry] acknowledged that integration would proceed more gradually: the factions officially had to dissolve, but their organizational structures would be incorporated as new army divisions instead of vanishing immediately, according to the minister of defence…”
The initial process of merging the opposition factions into one army followed three basic steps. Firstly, the new Ministry of Defense, led by Major General Marhaf Abu Qasra, met with all of the faction leaders and secured their unconditional acceptance of new government’s and Ministry’s authority. These efforts culminated in the January 29, 2025 Victory Conference.
Secondly, the Ministry established a restructuring committee that was tasked with outlining a new military structure. This involved determining the number of intended army divisions, their component units, and the shape of the air force and navy. While this design process was happening, the factions began to submit lists of their personnel and equipment to the committee, which it used to determine whether each faction would enter as a battalion, brigade, or division. This process took an additional two to three months to complete, during which time, according to one official, “we were still factions.”
The Ministry then met with each faction and pushed them to join these newly drawn up units. Here the true merger began, with some factions being split up, others merged, and some retaining significant cohesion. According to one division commander, it took between five and six months to finalize the structures, with the full merger and integration of the factions taking longer. Drevon argues that this first stage should be viewed as generally successful, with the understanding that, “The measure of success is not the disappearance of local violence or the restoration of security everywhere but the prevention of any organized armed alternative to the state.”
The first stage of the army’s formation can therefore be described as a “bureaucratic incorporation,” as Drevon writes, where the new Syrian government, “allowed former factions to enter with much of their internal structure intact, while reserving the institutions responsible for internal political control for its own cadres.” Naturally, this resulted in an incomplete integration.
Most factions were small enough to be incorporated into a division alongside others. While one faction may have had a clear size and authority advantage, it was still balanced internally by other units. HTS itself, whose former cadres hold all major positions within the ministry, initially split its units across seven divisions, of which only two could arguably be said to contain only HTS members (50th and 90th).
However, four non-HTS factions were large enough and strong enough to obtain their own divisions as well: Faylaq al-Sham, Hamza Division, Sultan Suleiman Shah, and the Construction and Liberation Movement (colloquially referred to as Ahrar Sharqiyah). Faylaq al-Sham had been a close ally of both HTS and Turkey throughout the final years of the war and was assigned to Idlib as the new 64th Division after December 2024. The three former Syrian National Army factions, meanwhile, were all heavily sanctioned internationally and enjoyed significant political and financial backing from various foreign actors during the war.
Sultan Suleiman Shah in particular, led by Muhamad al-Jassem ‘Abu Amsha’, had used this support to accrue a massive amount of money. After December 2024, Jassem reportedly used his personal wealth to bypass Ministry efforts at fully integrating his units. Most notably, after his division was assigned to eastern Hama in the spring of 2025, he was accused of hiring local tribesmen outside of the military’s official structure. According to multiple local sources and one Damascus-based researcher I spoke with, Abu Amsha personally paid the salaries of these new tribal fighters in 2025, none of whom had been vetted by or officially hired by the Ministry of Defense.
Such personal armies represented the biggest dangers of the unfinished integration process. Ideological commitment to old factions undermine unity and chain of command, but the formation of potential ‘armies within armies’ could pose a serious risk to internal stability. The first step of the new corps-creation process was therefore to strip these potentially problematic commanders of their old units through administrative promotions. Between late July and early August 2026, Ahmed Al-Hais, Sayf Bulad, and Muhamed al-Jassem were all separated from their former divisions through promotions to administrative roles within their divisions’ respective corps commands (Bulad reportedly refused the promotion and has resigned from the army).
The current stage of restructuring thus falls within this broader process of integration and unification. Ideological integration followed the initial structural integration of the factions. The Moral Guidance Authority, as well as respected senior commanders close to HTS, emerged as the core apparatus by which the Ministry began addressing discipline and unity within its ranks. According to several members of the Moral Guidance Authority I spoke with this year, much of the their work focuses on ending the “factional mentality” among soldiers, as well as enforcing strict adherence to the laws of the state.
The persistance of factional structures within the new army - whether as brigades or divisions - has posed a serious challenge in truly unifying the army’s ranks. For many soldiers, factional allegiances continue to supersede a sense of national army service. The creation of the corps and the leadership and unit changes that have followed, and will continue to unfold, are all intended to address these deeper factional and command failures following the earlier efforts detailed by Drevon. The current stage of corps building, as outlined below, therefore represents only another temporary structure intended to facilitate further unification prior to arriving at a long-term army structure.
However, many non-HTS members of the army do not share this belief, viewing these ongoing efforts not as unification but as HTS consolidation. By mid-August the leadership changes had widened and began impacting a large number of former factions, including smaller ones. Former SNA commanders serving as brigade leaders have been the most widely impacted by these changes. But the restructuring has also impacted long-time close allies of HTS, such as Brigadier Muhamad al-Gharib of Faylaq al-Sham and, more recently, Brigadier Jamil al-Saleh of Jaish al-Izza. The separation of these men from their divisions has helped fuel discontent among non-HTS members of the army.