Assad’s former fighters underground as demobilization stalls

LATAKIA — “I had forgotten where I had even left it,” murmurs Laith (a pseudonym) with a nervous grin, handing over a small laminated card containing his photo and some scant personal details. “It’s not as if it’s any use to me anyway.” 

This card was supposed to be a promise of safety. Instead it has become a jailer, a physical embodiment of Laith’s fear of arrest, disappearance or death. 

The hazy light of the falling sun filters into the room through silk curtains that are never opened anymore. This place exists in a sort of twilight, neither day nor night. Outside of time, it is closed at all hours to the outside world to protect those inside. 

Laith and his brother Daher (a pseudonym)—tall, muscular men in their early twenties—sit, anxiously wringing their hands at their home in a nondescript village in Syria’s coastal Latakia province. The pair are in hiding, unable to move for fear of General Security’s flying checkpoints.

The brothers, both volunteers in Assad’s military, went to their local demobilization center in Jableh in the first days after the regime fell last December. They had seen news on social media about an amnesty for former fighters. Queuing alongside hundreds of others, they were afraid but hopeful that the settlement process would bring them safety. Now, they believe the process was a lie. 

“This is dangerous,” Laith explains, holding the card. “We can’t move outside the village at all with this. It’s simply too dangerous to pass through a checkpoint.”

This settlement (taswiya) card was given to him by the since-dissolved Military Operations Department—Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s command and control center during the opposition offensive that brought down Bashar al-Assad’s regime last December. 

In the first days after the regime fell, HTS offered amnesty for those who fought under Assad, particularly conscripts. The deal was simple: Come and surrender your weapons, hand in your military ID and promise to never take up arms against the new government. In return, you will be provided with a document attesting to your demobilization, a guarantee of safety and a fair process of investigation. Once your name is cleared of involvement in war crimes, you will be given a civilian ID and your case file will be closed. 

The process appears to have been somewhat ad hoc, hastily assembled by a military operations room that surprised even itself with how quickly the regime crumbled. There is no singular standardized version of the settlement card, and Syria Direct has seen three different versions. 

“No clear administrative or legal decision has been issued regarding the collective demobilization of the military,” Samir Alabdullah, a researcher at the Arab Center for Contemporary Syria Studies, explains. As a result, large numbers of former soldiers have been left “in an unstable legal situation, [raising] fears among many of future accountability or harassment.”

Men wait outside a transitional government center for handing over small arms and security registration for former soldiers, police and civilians in Damascus, 24/12/2025 (Sameer al-Doumy/AFP)

‘They killed my son’

Out of such fear, both Laith and Daher decided to reduce their movements as much as possible. They spend monotonous days indoors, at most visiting neighbors or friends who live nearby. The fear of being spotted and stopped by a passing patrol is always present.  

Their fear is not without reason. In an Alawite neighborhood of Latakia city, an elderly man with thick white hair and a dark moustache points to the wall of a building facing his home. “This is where they lined them up,” he says, before gesturing towards the entrance of the stairwell. “They killed my son just inside there.”

His son Hussein (a pseudonym), was a quiet man who largely kept to himself. He was conscripted and forced to serve in an administrative role in the military for seven years, according to his father. Much like Laith and Daher, he demobilized and was given a settlement card in the days after the fall. Although promised safety, his subsequent days were lived in fear.

“He would go from home to university and back,” Hussein’s father says. “I wouldn’t let him go out for any other reason because I was so scared.”

Then, as sectarian violence exploded across the coast in March following an attempted insurrection by groups with links to the regime, armed men with local accents came to their home searching for Assadist remnants.

“They entered demanding to know if we were Alawite or Sunni,” Hussein’s father recalls. “When we said Alawite, they demanded to see our IDs.”

Hussein’s only form of identification was his settlement card, having handed over his ID during his demobilization. As soon as the men saw he was a former soldier, they dragged him outside, ignoring his parents’ pleas to spare him, and lined him up alongside several other men from the building.

Hussein’s father watched from the balcony as the gunmen tried to force the captives to their knees. “He knew what was coming,” he recounts, blinking away tears. “So he made a run for it, which is when they shot him in the back.”

‘We felt betrayed’

During the March massacres, Daher fled into the woods, where he hid with a group of other men from the village for three days. “We just had two bottles of water between us and no food,” he remembers grimly. They were fortunate, as their street escaped the notice of roving bands of fighters.

The brothers still flee into the woods regularly, Daher says, as government security services deploy search and sweep missions through the village. The brothers have heard rumors of young men carrying settlement cards being inexplicably arrested at home or after being stopped at a checkpoint, although Syria Direct has not been able to independently verify these cases.

The security presence in the area is heavy. As Syria Direct left the village, a group of young men dressed in the black uniforms of General Security could be seen piling out of a pickup truck to redirect cars to the side of the road: a flying checkpoint in the making.

“Whenever they set up a checkpoint, information immediately comes through different group chats and pages so that we all can avoid it,” Laith explains with a coy smile. “Obviously, I would still prefer not to take the risk.”

Not everyone has been quite so fortunate. In January, Wassim (a pseudonym) was at home with his son—a former officer—in an Alawite neighborhood of Homs city when members of General Security knocked on the door. After searching the home, the security forces questioned Wassim’s son, suspicious that he did not have a civilian ID at hand. When they discovered his service history, they rounded him up, alongside a number of  young men from the neighborhood, and took him to Homs Central Prison.

“We haven’t been able to visit him since January, and have no real information about his condition,” Wassim tells Syria Direct over the phone. “He hasn’t been charged with anything, so we don’t really know when he will be released.” Only those who served as conscripts have been released so far, he says. 

Syria Direct repeatedly reached out to the Ministry of Interior to inquire about whether its officials have been directed to apply increased scrutiny to taswiya holders, but received no response by the time of publication. Regardless of any official policy, for many within the security services, especially on the coast where armed groups linked to the regime remain active, a military history is suspicious.

“We lost a lot of men in those first hours,” explains Abu al-Bahr, a stout, rather serious man sitting flanked by two Syrian flags behind an impressively sized desk. “We were getting ambushed, surrounded and killed, often after our guys surrendered.”

Al-Bahr is the head of General Security for the coastal Tartous province city of Baniyas. He was tasked with coordinating the security services’ response to March’s armed uprising in Baniyas, which saw some of the most flagrant violence on both sides during the events.

“We felt betrayed because a lot of those taking part in the violence were carrying the taswiya” card, he explains. “They had done their reconciliation in this very room.” 

A member of Syria’s new authorities registers a man’s ID as Syrian soldiers, police and some civilians surrender their weapons and register with the authorities, in the western port city of Latakia, 16/12/2024 (Ozan Kose/AFP)

Incomplete demobilization

Samer (a pseudonym), from Damascus, agreed to fight for Assad’s regime in 2017 in order to get out of prison and escape regular torture, he tells Syria Direct. Last December, like so many other reluctant collaborators, he immediately dropped his weapons and fled after being told to surrender by his commanding officer.

Like Laith and Daher, he went to surrender at his local security office close to his home. However, unlike Laith and Daher, Samer was a conscript. Amidst a chaotic sea of desperate former fighters, he was informed by an HTS member that as a conscript, his civilian ID should have been returned to his local mukhtar (neighborhood administrator). 

Samer rushed to his mukhtar’s office in Jobar, where he stood anxiously while the old man slowly sifted through hundreds of civilian IDs transferred from the neighborhood’s military service center, where conscripts were required to report for duty.

Eventually his ID was found and returned, and just like that, only a handful of days after the collapse of the regime, Samer’s seven-year military service was over. 

Yet in many instances, it seems the demobilization is only partially complete. Neither Laith nor Daher have received any communications from the government regarding their cases. They do not know whether they are under investigation, and have no idea when they might receive a civilian ID.

The body that issued the settlement cards no longer exists, having been dissolved alongside HTS in January, and the cards themselves, which were only valid for three months, are now long expired. Syria Direct’s inquiries to government officials about the status of the demobilization process went unanswered.

A number of factors complicate and delay final discharge decisions, Alabdullah says. The complexity and scale of work required to scrutinize thousands of files requires a lot of time and human resources, while outdated administrative systems and patchwork service files complicate investigations. Additionally, the suspension of Syria’s civil registries since the regime fell has effectively blocked the issuance of new IDs. 

As a result, thousands of supposedly demobilized soldiers are now stuck “between a dissolved military status and an incomplete civilian status,” he explains.

Pushed into a corner

For now, Laith and Daher’s world has been reduced to their home. They cannot work to support their family, and days are spent in endless boredom. “[This period] has been bad. I don’t see anything in my future—we are just waiting, taking it day by day,” Daher says. 

“When you push someone into a corner, eventually he will hit back,” he mutters. Such a sentiment hints at the real danger that marginalizing former soldiers could have on stability on the coast.

The US government’s decision to de-Baathify Iraq and disband the army following its invasion in 2003 is widely cited as having forced large numbers of young men into unemployment and poverty, fueling an insurgency that eventually mutated into the Islamic State.

In the months since March’s high-profile bloodletting, violence has continued simmering on Syria’s coast. The region continues to witness a spate of killings and kidnappings targeting the Alawite community, as well as a string of guerilla attacks on the government’s security services by murky groups claiming to have ties with the former regime.

This underscores the importance of effectively demobilizing Assad’s former fighters. However, “the matter goes beyond merely issuing new civilian IDs,” Albdullah explains. “It requires long-term programs that include vocational training, psychological rehabilitation and secure economic alternatives.”

“This is a massive task that needs significant financial resources, broad international support and political stability—all of which are still lacking,” he adds.

For Laith and Daher, their purgatory has no end in sight. “We lost everything, and now we are waiting,” Laith murmurs. “They didn’t leave us our dreams.”

Additional reporting by Hadi Alali.