Strategic Profiles
The actor as a whole — political system, leadership, military capacity, alliances, strengths and vulnerabilities. The Force Atlas covers the units and equipment inside each actor.
Everything in this module14 analytical layers in this conflict
Understand
Military & security
Effects & resilience
11 actors, grouped as this conflict's own record groups them. Each opens a full profile: political system, leadership, forces, economy, stated and assessed objectives, constraints and red lines — each figure with its own as-of date, sources and confidence grade.
Transitional government
Syrian transitional government
The government formed after the fall of the Assad state, led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa — the former HTS commander once listed as a terrorist under the name Abu Mohammad al-Jolani — under a March 2025 constitutional declaration providing a five-year transition. It has won recognition and sanctions relief abroad and extended formal authority over most of the country, while carrying the transition's failures — the coastal massacres, the Sweida standoff — on its own record.
SDF & Kurdish-led structures
Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)
The Kurdish-led, multi-ethnic force formed in 2015 that defeated the ISIS caliphate with the US-led coalition and secured a decade of northeast self-administration. After the January 2026 fighting cost it its Arab-majority territories, it signed a US-brokered integration agreement — one Ministry of Defence division formed from three SDF brigades, plus a Kobani brigade attached to an Aleppo-affiliated division — that commander Mazloum Abdi described as short of aspirations but preferable to war. On 25 August 2026 Abdi announced the force's dissolution as an independent military force; what survives of the claim it carried is a set of individual appointments and an education undertaking rather than an institution.
Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES)
The civil administration built on the self-rule declared in 2013–14 — councils, courts, schools, municipalities and the Asayish internal security force, run on a decentralised model with formal multi-ethnic representation. Under the January 2026 agreement its institutions merge into state bodies, with an understanding that no administration employee is excluded — and with the judiciary, education and the return of displaced residents still unresolved files.
Türkiye & backed factions
Türkiye in Syria
The external power with the deepest position in Syria: patron of the factions that helped end the Assad era, holder of a military presence across the north since 2016, host of millions of Syrian refugees now partly returning, and first partner of the transitional government — with one demand above all, pressed under President Erdoğan: no autonomous YPG-led force anywhere in Syria.
Turkish-backed Syrian factions (SNA lineage)
The factions Türkiye organised from 2016 as the Syrian National Army — garrison and administration forces of the northern zones, participants in the operations against the YPG and in the December 2024 offensive, and carriers of a heavily documented record of abuses in Afrin and elsewhere. Under the transition they are being folded into the new national military structures, at a pace and depth that varies by faction.
Local & minority authorities
Sweida Druze factions and councils
The Druze-led armed factions and council structures controlling most of Sweida province since the July 2025 violence — organised around local religious and military leaderships rather than a single command, holding the province outside state authority, its parliamentary seats vacant. Listing is description, not recognition; the factions themselves are divided over Damascus, integration and any external protection.
ISIS remnants
ISIS remnants
What survived the caliphate: desert cells in the central Badia, attack networks concentrated in Deir ez-Zor province, extortion economies, and a strategic patience aimed at the prisons and camps holding its fighters and families. Attack tempo fell sharply after the January 2026 government offensive and integration agreement closed the seams it exploited — analysts describe recalibration, not resurgence — but the organisation attacked US forces lethally as late as January 2026 and continues low-tempo operations.
External powers
Israel and Syria
Israel answered the Assad government's fall with a strike campaign that destroyed much of the former state's military assets and with ground moves into and beyond the Golan buffer zone. Since then it has run negotiation and enforcement in parallel: a US-mediated security agreement reported near-complete — phased withdrawal toward the 1974 lines, positions retained on the Syrian Hermon — alongside continued incursions and strikes, including on Damascus during the July 2025 Sweida crisis, justified by border security and Druze protection. Since 2025 its enforcement has also reached the north: airfields associated with Turkish basing plans were struck in April 2025 and at Abu al-Duhur in August 2026, which puts Israeli operations inside the same geography as Türkiye's support for Syria's military reconstruction.
United States in Syria
The power that led the anti-ISIS coalition, built and backed the SDF for a decade, lifted sanctions in stages through 2025, brokered the January 2026 integration agreement — and then left: the last major base was handed to the Syrian government on 16 April 2026, ending more than ten years of military presence. US influence now runs through diplomacy, the Caesar-repeal certification cycle and the mediation of the Israel–Syria file.
Russia in Syria
The intervention that saved the Assad government in 2015 ended with its client's flight to Moscow in December 2024 — Russia declining to fight for a collapsing army while absorbed in Ukraine. What survives is concentrated and negotiable: the Khmeimim air base and the Tartus naval facility — Moscow's only Mediterranean naval foothold — whose terms are being bargained with a transitional government Russia once bombed, and which now hosts the man Russia shelters.
Iran and Syria
The Assad government's most committed patron — Hezbollah's intervention, the IRGC-coordinated militia network, the land corridor from Iraq to Lebanon — lost its Syrian position in a single December: Hezbollah broken by its war with Israel, the corridor cut, the client gone. The transitional government has excluded Iranian presence, and Syrian commitments against Iranian-linked forces reportedly anchor both the Israel file and US certifications. What persists is residual: smuggling economies, loyalist remnants, and patience.