Syria's U.S.-trained opposition fighters wait to learn of their role in a new Syria

By Jane Arraf

Published December 31, 2024 at 4:17 PM EST

Salim Turki al-Anteri, the commander of the Syrian Free Army, in his office in al-Tanf, Syria, Dec. 14.

AL-TANF GARRISON, Syria — When Salim Turki al-Anteri took his opposition forces into battle against regime troops in southern Syria this month, it was against his own former tank unit.

Drawing on his past U.S. military training and his hopes for a united Syria, the commander ordered his forces to fire artillery warning shots, intended to persuade regime soldiers to abandon their tanks and leave the battlefield.

"We didn't want to kill any soldiers," he says of the battle on Dec. 7, a day before Damascus fell.

"We aimed to the left and to the right, and then closer to them," he says. "We didn't follow them because we knew that if we followed them, we would have to kill them."

Unlike many military commanders who were regime loyalists, most ordinary soldiers were conscripts who'd been given no choice but to fight for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, he says.

"I consider all the soldiers my sons," he says. And he considered the tanks they fought in equipment to be safeguarded for the country's army — whatever shape it may take in a post-Assad Syria.

Syrian regime tanks sit abandoned on the Damascus-Baghdad highway in Syria, Dec. 13. Most regime soldiers retreated rather than fight opposition forces this month.

Anteri, a colonel and the commander of the Syrian Free Army, a small, U.S.-trained opposition force before the fall of the Syrian regime, spoke with NPR at his base next to a remote U.S. military outpost in southern Syria. He defected from the Syrian army to join the opposition eight years ago.

Now his unit is among dozens of former opposition groups that will have to be knitted together into new Syrian security forces. Anteri, who commands about 600 fighters, says he is waiting to see what role in the new security forces his group will be given by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which led the coalition that drove Assad from power.

The U.S. has had an uneasy role in this key region

Al-Tanf, originally a U.S. special forces base, has played a key role in training Syrian opposition fighters, including Anteri's. It lies about 200 miles from Syria's capital Damascus, on the main Damascus-Baghdad highway. Abandoned regime tanks lie by the side of the road. Nearby are cast-off Syrian army uniforms, tossed aside by fleeing soldiers as Assad fell.

The Syrian ruler was quickly toppled in a surprise offensive this month by opposition forces, who took back the country with little resistance after more than a decade of civil war. Anteri believes the reason the regime soldiers his forces encountered didn't fight back was because they knew the U.S. military was backing the SFA. Along with a patch bearing the Syrian insignia on his fighters' uniforms, he also instructed soldiers to wear a patch with an American flag.

The American base at al-Tanf is testament to the uneasy U.S. role in a key strategic region. The U.S. has not had diplomatic relations with Syria since 2012, after the start of the Syrian civil war. The bases it established over the past decade in the south and east operate under no Syrian legal authority. They fall under the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition operating in Iraq and Syria, but that coalition is soon being dismantled.

A Syrian Free Army soldier stands at the entrance of a base near the U.S. al-Tanf garrison in southern Syria, Dec. 14.

It is a military presence so opaque that Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters earlier this month that he himself only recently learned there were more than double the number of U.S. forces in Syria as the 900 figure he had been quoting. Iraqi military sources had reported increased numbers of troops moving from a U.S. base in Irbil, in its Kurdistan region, over the past several months into Kurdish-controlled northeastern Syria.

The U.S. role in Syria will be clarified as new governments in both countries take shape

A senior U.S. military official said expanding the U.S. military role in Syria would require talks with any new Syrian government.

"We don't want to start just tromping around Syria," said the official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. "It would be better if we understood how they felt about that and open that discussion with them before we do anything."

He said pending those discussions, the U.S. would continue to launch airstrikes against the Islamic State — which it largely defeated five years ago — and to support Syrian forces it trains and advises. Also in question, of course, is what decision the incoming Trump administration will make on maintaining U.S. forces in Syria.

That U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition is being disbanded at the insistence of the Iraqi government, to be replaced by country-to-country agreements. Under the agreement between Iraq and the United States, there will be a U.S. troop presence in federally controlled Iraq by the end of this year, and in Kurdish-controlled Iraq by the end of 2026.

U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria have been a lightning rod for Iran-backed militias. In January, one such militia in Iraq claimed responsibility for a drone attack on Tower 22 — a U.S. support base to al-Tanf in northeastern Jordan. Three U.S. soldiers were killed in the attack.

A Syrian Free Army fighter walks with a resident of the Rukban camp for displaced Syrians near the Jordanian border. Until the Syrian regime fell, 7,000 camp residents, including opposition fighters, were trapped in the remote desert for years.

Since 2003, when the U.S. and its allies toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and left a security vacuum after disbanding the Iraqi army, proliferating Iranian proxy militias have used Syria as a conduit to funnel Iranian arms to Iraq and Lebanon. Assad, a member of the Alawite religious minority, was backed by Iran and, in recent years, by Russia.

Syrian Kurdish forces, who created an autonomous region after breaking their territory away from the Assad regime in 2012, remain a key U.S. security ally, and helped militarily defeat ISIS in its last holdout in Baghuz, Syria, in 2019. The continuing U.S. troop presence in this autonomous region of northeastern Syria also serves to protect oil fields there.

Although ISIS has been hugely diminished since it overtook large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014, it still retains a presence in Syria, including near historic Palmyra, where SFA commander Anteri is from.

Meanwhile, former opposition groups wait for guidance on their new role

Now, three weeks after decades of regime control abruptly ended, the victory by disparate groups of Syrian fighters is still sinking in.

In a guest house next to the U.S. base, an SFA officer, Saeed Saif, shows a wide range of equipment found at a Russian military base in Syria after it was abandoned in the fighting in early December.

U.S. officials, including the senior military official, say Russia is expected to offer concessions to the new Syrian government to retain its strategic deep water port in the Syrian coastal city Tartus.

A Syrian Free Army fighter stands a few hundred yards from a sand berm marking the border between Jordan and Syria on the outskirts of Rukban camp in southern Syria, Dec. 14.

From the abandoned Russian military base, there are old gas masks and brand new Kalashnikov rifles — some still stacked in the wooden box they were shipped in. There is a communications device to send encoded messages and documents and files taken from a vault in an underground operations room.

"We don't know what they say," Saif says. "We are waiting for someone to translate them."

More puzzling are what appear to be paperweights — scorpions encased in plastic and mounted on bases.

"They used them for decoration," Saif says.