Syrian opposition in the context of "Syrian Arab Armed Forces"

The Syrian caretaker government (Arabic: حكومة تصريف الأعمال السورية, romanized: Ḥukūmat Taṣrīf al-Aʿmāl as-Sūriyyah) was the provisional government of Syria. It was established in December 2024 by the Syrian opposition after the Syrian General Command appointed Mohammed al-Bashir as prime minister, replacing Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali on 10 December. This came after the fall of the Assad regime and the exile of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. On 8 December 2024, hours after the fall of Damascus, Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali, the outgoing prime minister and last head of government of the Ba'athist regime, agreed to lead the transitional government in a caretaking capacity. He then transferred power to Mohammed al-Bashir, prime minister of the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG), two days later.

On 29 January 2025, Ahmed al-Sharaa was appointed President of Syria by the Syrian General Command for the transitional period during the Syrian Revolution Victory Conference in Damascus, after serving as the de facto leader following the fall of the Assad regime. As president, al-Sharaa announced plans to issue a "constitutional declaration" as a legal reference following the repeal of the 2012 constitution of Ba'athist Syria.

The Second Syrian Republic, officially the Syrian Republic from 1950 to 1958 and the Syrian Arab Republic from 1961 to 1963, succeeded the First Syrian Republic that had become de facto independent in April 1946 from the French Mandate. The Second Republic was founded on the Syrian Constitution of 1950, which was suspended from 1950 to 1954 under Adib Shishakli's strongmanship, and later when Syria joined with the Republic of Egypt in forming the United Arab Republic in 1958. The Second Republic resumed when Syria withdrew from the union in 1961. In 1963, the Syrian Ba'athist Party came to power in a bloodless military coup, which laid the foundations for the political structure in Ba'athist Syria.

The green, white, black and red flag is the first flag of the Syrian Arab Republic and with the shortest usage, that being from 1961 to 1963. It was also the flag of the Syrian opposition during the Syrian civil war, and became the official flag of Syria anew in 2025.

On 8 December 2024, the Assad regime collapsed during a major offensive by opposition forces. The offensive was spearheaded by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Southern Operations Room (SOR), and supported mainly by the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army as part of the Syrian civil war that began with the Syrian revolution in 2011. The capture of Syria's capital, Damascus, marked the end of the Assad family's rule, which had governed Syria as a hereditary totalitarian dictatorship since Hafez al-Assad assumed power in 1971 after a successful coup d'état.

As the SOR advanced towards Damascus, reports emerged that Bashar al-Assad had fled the capital aboard a plane to Russia, where he joined his family, already in exile, and was granted asylum. Following his departure, opposition forces declared victory on state television. Concurrently, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed Assad's resignation and departure from Syria.

Raqqa (Arabic: ٱلرَّقَّة, romanized: ar-Raqqah, also al-Raḳḳa), is a city in Syria on the North bank of the Euphrates River, about 160 kilometres (99 miles) east of Aleppo. It is located 40 kilometres (25 miles) east of the Tabqa Dam, Syria's largest dam. The Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine city and bishopric Callinicum (formerly a Latin and now a Maronite Catholic titular see) was the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate between 796 and 809, under the reign of Harun al-Rashid. It was also the capital of the Islamic State from 2014 to 2017. With a population of 531,952 based on the 2021 official census, Raqqa is the sixth largest city in Syria.

During the Syrian Civil War, the city was captured in 2013 by the Syrian opposition and then by the Islamic State. ISIS made the city its capital in 2014. As a result, the city was hit by airstrikes from the Syrian government, Russia, the United States, and several other countries. Most non-Sunni religious structures in the city were destroyed by ISIS, most notably the Shia Uwais al-Qarni Mosque, while others were converted into Sunni mosques. On 17 October 2017, following a lengthy battle that saw massive destruction to the city, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) declared the liberation of Raqqa from the Islamic State to be complete.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) is a Kurdish-led coalition of U.S.-backed left-wing ethnic militias and rebel groups, and serves as the official military wing of the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES; also unofficially known as Rojava). Founded on 10 October 2015, the stated mission of the SDF is to create a secular, democratic, and federalized Syria. The SDF is opposed by Turkey, who view the group as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which it has designated a terrorist group. On 10 March 2025, the SDF agreed to integrate into Syrian state institutions under the Syrian caretaker government. Mazloum Abdi met with the committee formed by Ahmed al-Sharaa to implement the deal; further meetings were planned for April.

Formed as a rebel alliance in the Syrian civil war with American support, the SDF is composed primarily of Kurdish, Arab, and Assyrian/Syriac, as well as some smaller Armenian, Turkmen, and Chechen forces. It is militarily led by the People's Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish militia which is designated as a terrorist group by both Turkey and Qatar. The SDF also includes several ethnic militias and various factions of the Syrian opposition's Free Syrian Army.

On 30 September 2015, Russia launched a military intervention in Syria after a request by the regime of Bashar al-Assad for military support in its fight against the Syrian opposition and Islamic State (IS) in the Syrian civil war. The intervention began with extensive air strikes across Syria, focused on strongholds of opposition factions such as the Free Syrian Army, the Revolutionary Command Council, and Sunni militant groups comprising the Army of Conquest coalition. In line with the Assad regime's rhetoric, Syrian military chief Ali Abdullah Ayoub depicted Russian airstrikes as part of a general campaign against "terrorism." Russian special operations forces, military advisors and private military contractors like the Wagner Group were also sent to Syria to support the Assad regime, which was on the verge of collapse. Prior to the intervention, Russian involvement had included diplomatic support for Assad and billions of dollars' worth of arms and equipment for the Syrian Armed Forces. In December 2017, the Russian government announced that its troops would be deployed to Syria permanently.

At the onset of the intervention, the Syrian government controlled only 26% of Syrian territory. Although Russia initially portrayed its intervention as a "war against terrorism" solely targeting the Islamic State, Russia employed scorched-earth methods against civilian areas and Syrian opposition strongholds opposed to IS and Al-Qaeda. Weeks after the intervention began, Russian officials disclosed that President Vladimir Putin's chief objectives were maintaining the allied Ba'athist government in Damascus and capturing territories from American-backed Free Syrian militias, with a broader geo-political objective of rolling back U.S. influence. In a televised interview in October 2015, Putin said that the military operation had been thoroughly prepared in advance. He defined Russia's goal in Syria as "stabilising the legitimate power in Syria and creating the conditions for political compromise". In 2016 alone, more than 80% of Russian aerial attacks targeted opposition militias fighting the Islamic State. Despite Russia's extensive bombing of opposition strongholds, the territory under the Assad regime's actual control shrank from 26% of Syria in 2015 to 17% in early 2017.

Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) was a Sunni Islamist political organisation and paramilitary group involved in the Syrian civil war. It was formed on 28 January 2017 as a merger of several armed groups: Jaysh al-Ahrar (an Ahrar al-Sham faction), Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS), Ansar al-Din Front, Jaysh al-Sunna, Liwa al-Haqq and the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement. The unification process was held under the initiative of Abu Jaber Sheikh, an Islamist militant commander who had been the second emir of Ahrar al-Sham. HTS, along with other Syrian opposition groups, launched an offensive that led to the fall of the Assad regime on 8 December 2024.

Proclaiming the nascent organisation as "a new stage in the life of the blessed revolution", Abu Jaber Sheikh urged all factions of the Syrian opposition to unite under its Islamic leadership and wage a "popular jihad" to achieve the objectives of the Syrian revolution, which he characterised as the ouster of the Ba'athist regime and Hezbollah militants from Syrian territories, and the formation of an Islamic government. After the announcement, additional groups and individuals joined. The merged group has been primarily led by Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and former Ahrar al-Sham leaders, although the High Command also has representation from other groups. The Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement split from Tahrir al-Sham in July 2017, and the Ansar al-Din Front in 2018.

Al-Nusra Front or Jabhat Al-Nusra Li Ahl Ash-Sham, or Al-Qaeda in Syria or The Organisation of Al-Qaeda in the Country of Syria also later known as Front for the Conquest of the Levant, was a Salafi-jihadist organization that fought against Ba'athist regime forces in the Syrian Civil War. Its aim was to overthrow president Bashar al-Assad and establish an Islamic state ruled by Sharia law in Syria.

Formed in 2012, in November of that year The Washington Post described al-Nusra as "the most aggressive and successful" of the rebel forces. While secular and pro-democratic rebel groups of the Syrian Revolution such as the Free Syrian Army were focused on ending the decades-long reign of the Assad family, al-Nusra Front also sought the unification of Islamist forces in a post-Assad Syria, anticipating a new stage of the civil war. It denounced the international assistance in support of the Syrian opposition as "imperialism"; viewing it as a long-term threat to its Islamist goals in Syria.