Samer Abboud, Villanova University
When Syrian Druze leader Hikmat al-Hijri declared the formation of a new military unit called the “National Guard” (al-Haras al-Watani) in August 2025 to protect the Druze community from further massacres by the national army, a familiar face was revealed as one of the formation’s commanders. Jihad al-Ghoutani is a son of Suweyda who served for years in the Assad regime’s army, had risen to the rank of Brigadier General in the 4th Division, and was responsible for leading artillery divisions in battles around Damascus and Idlib over several years. A close ally of the Iranian military apparatus in Syria, al-Ghoutani was not the only former regime official to be integrated into al-Hijri’s National Guard. He was joined by Shakib Nasr, Anwar Radwan, and several others from the Assad regime who were now part of one of the National Guard’s more than 20 fighting units.
The remobilization of figures like al-Ghoutani into existing (and revitalized) security formations after the fall of the Assad regime is not only occurring in Suweyda but in the coastal areas (largely under the Coastal Shield Brigades and Azra’il of the Mountain Regiment but also with smaller militias) and the northeast under the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The remobilization of these former regime officials into these formations reflects the emergence of a security actor that I am referring to as Syria’s new security entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs are not ‘new’ in the sense of just arriving on the battlefield. Indeed, they are veterans of the Syrian conflict and have played key roles in the former regime’s security apparatus. What is new about them is that their remobilization into different security formations has paralleled a new communitarian security discourse in Syria focused on minority protection, external alliances, and confrontation with the central government. In this way, Syria’s new security entrepreneurs are contributing to a more explicitly sectarian security discourse in post-regime Syria that constructs threat from the perspective of the “minority community” in relation to the central government in ways that draw on majority-minority framings of Syrian politics. While such sectarian lenses are not necessarily new in Syria, they have been given renewed meaning in the aftermath of the regime’s collapse as communities rearticulate threat and insecurity in sectarian terms. The new security entrepreneurs have thus emerged within several overlapping contexts, including the government’s failure to initiate a serious transitional justice or reconciliation process, an expanding Israeli occupation, government-led massacres in Suweyda and the coastal areas, and attempts from within these communities to extract political concessions from the government in the context of political transition.
Syria’s new security entrepreneurs are also emerging from within a transforming regional security structure in which a United States and Israeli-led war against Iran has engulfed the region in shared conflict. As the Syrian government navigates this destabilizing regional environment, authorities are forced to confront the political projects led by Syria’s new security entrepreneurs. On the one hand, these confrontations are occurring as legacies of the conflict trajectory and are independent of the regional environment. On the other hand, the Israeli expansion into Syria and potential occupation of Southern Lebanon has enmeshed Syria – and the potential for Syrian groups to seek Israeli patronage – into the regional security structure. Moreover, while the United States has clearly supported Syria’s transition in some ways by alleviating sanctions and legitimizing President al-Sharaa, their convergence, and deference, to Israeli leaders on regional security means that the United States is not preventing regular Israeli aerial assaults, continued expansion into Syria, or support for Druze separatism in Suweyda.
In addressing how the new security entrepreneurs also create the terrain for a new security discourse in Syria, I address the following questions: What kind of security politics emerges after the fall of the regime? How do the encounters between different security actors occasion a new security politics? Why do formations adopt a communitarian security discourse? In addressing these questions, I am hoping that this essay can shed insight into questions of security in post-conflict transitions and what these periods of destabilization mean for Syrian actors’ ability to either invite or prevent international intervention.[1] As a country in transition, the Syrian state lacks many of the qualities of statehood to exercise sovereignty over their territory. These sovereign weaknesses have exacerbated the country’s security politics after the regime’s fall.
Syria’s Security Landscape
Syria’s security landscape has taken clearer shape more than a year after the fall of the Assad regime and creation of the transitional government. The new government’s ministers and its bureaucratic structure were initially transplanted from the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG) that ruled Idlib during the conflict and thus continued to resemble a conflict-era security formation rather than a popular national movement that had broad societal support. The new government’s reorientation of Syria’s external alliances away from Iran and Hizballah towards the Gulf States and Türkiye occurred in parallel with the normalization of relations with Western countries and the lifting of sanctions.[2] But Israel did not join this normalization process. After the regime’s collapse Israel declared the 1974 Syrian-Israeli Disengagement Agreement null and void and proceeded to expand its occupation zone including to the strategic Jabal al-Shaykh (Mt. Hermon). Syria’s military weakness meant that it could do little about Israel’s encroachments. As Syria’s external environment reconfigures around these new realities the internal security landscape remains unstable.
Syria’s domestic instability is driven in part by actors for whom the fall of the regime was not a fulfillment of a revolution or even necessarily a desirable political end. Instead, the transition served as the occasion for the emergence of new encounters between authorities and existing security formations, such as the Druze National Guard under the leadership of Hikmat al-Hijri and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) led by Mazloum Abdi, which had co-existed with the regime. Sharaa himself has repeatedly stated publicly that the Kurdish and Druze groups were not part of the revolution because they never fought alongside them or against the regime. The internal security situation in Syria today is thus partly a legacy of the conflict and its many unresolved disputes. But in important ways the situation is radically different than the conflict-period. The new landscape is marked by an explicit communitarian security logic that emerged out of the conflict and subsequent transition, and which has been further driven by domestic and regional calls for the international protection of minorities and the decentralization of state power. The agents behind this communitarian security logic are what I am referring to as Syria’s new security entrepreneurs.[3]
The Syrian conflict produced several such security entrepreneurs who organized militias, controlled (and sometimes governed) territory, and directed predatory economic activities and intermediation to finance their activities. Syria’s new security entrepreneurs include both existing security actors responding to the fall of the regime and remnants[4] of the former regime reconstituted themselves within new or existing security formations to confront the transitional government. In other words, the fall of the regime produced a new kind of security entrepreneur whose subjectivity predates the transition but is shaped by their encounters with the new authorities. The internal security landscape is increasingly defined by these encounters between the transitional government with geographically concentrated security formations in the coastal areas, northwest, and southwest which were largely oriented around the protection of minority communities in the aftermath of the regime’s collapse.
In August 2025 the security logic of the new entrepreneurs was consolidated at an SDF-sponsored conference called “Unifying the Position of the Components of Northern and Eastern Syria” in which al-Hijri and Ghazal Ghazal, the head of the religious committee of the Alawi Islamic Council and considered the de facto leader for the Alawi community, both participated virtually. The conference was an attempt to rebalance some of the power the SDF lost after the March 10 agreement with the central government.[5] This agreement was interpreted differently by both parties; the SDF believed that its provisions for gradual central government takeover of key responsibilities (such as border control) were concessions to retain some administrative and military autonomy, while the central government interpreted the agreement to mean the gradual extension of its sovereign authority over northeast Syria without formally conceding autonomy to the SDF-led Autonomous Administration of North East Syria (AANES). Because the United States sponsored this deal and interpreted it in accordance with the central government, the SDF had little negotiating power and few options to realize some of its key strategic goals for autonomy, revealing the extent of its dependence on its one-time external patron.
The conference sought to regain some of the power lost by the redirection of American sponsorship. To do so, SDF leaders invited a host of other Syrian communities in the name of the “unity” of Syrian minorities, including Kurds, Alawites, Circassians, Christians, Assyrians, and Turkmen. The conference’s final statement reflected the ‘unity’ of the communities in their condemnation of the massacres in the Sahel and Suweyda and demands for a transparent investigation. Moreover, the final statement claimed, Syria’s rich diversity and pluralism could only be protected by a new constitution that enshrines diversity and decentralization as a mechanism to prevent the repetition of the massacres and the reemergence of authoritarian. The conference may have been an SDF-led performance, but it consolidated a political vision and security discourse for Syria in which minority protection from the central government would form the basis for the articulation of a communitarian security politics. The vision presented of a future Syria at the conference was one of confrontation between minorities and a central state that could only be resolved by strengthening the political power and autonomy of minority communities. In this sense, the conference reflected the collective strategy of different groups that felt excluded by the political transition and which sought to preserve their territorial authority acquired throughout the war. The conference was ultimately inconsequential because the groups remained delinked militarily and politically but it nevertheless provided a new security language that could be deployed by the armed formations behind the communal interests represented at the conference.
Security Entrepreneurs
In this landscape, Syria’s new security entrepreneurs emerged as agents in the confrontation between communities and the central state as mediated through the changing international environment. As security entrepreneurs, they serve several functions. First, they are discursive agents who construct threat in relation to the central state, and this threat is largely framed in communal-geographic terms. The central state – whey they often described as takfiri or in other terms emphasizing al-Sharaa’s jihadist past – emerges as the source of communal insecurity. Evan as they highlight the threat posed by the new regime, they are reliant on a discourse of state weakness and fragility that threatens the well-being of their community. For the new security entrepreneurs, the state is both an active threat to their communities and also too weak to protect communities from violence – a dual logic to which the state-sanctioned massacres in the coastal areas and Sweyda attest. Critically for the purposes of this essay, their response to this dilemma has been to become not only advocates of decentralization or some sort of federalist arrangement in Syria as a solution to the problem of minority protection, but also as intermediaries between a minority group and the international community. Through public interviews, declarations, and open collaboration with non-Syrian actors, the new security entrepreneurs seek to internationalize what they see as their struggle against the state. As intermediaries, they became advocates for international intervention,[6] especially Israeli intervention, in the name of community protection and safety. Al-Hijri, Ghazal, Abdi, and many of their subordinates have publicly welcomed Israeli support in the protection of their communities, while many Druze in Sweyda openly fly the Israeli flag. In this way, these community leaders are creating political opportunities for regional actors to intervene into Syria.
The largest concentration of the new security entrepreneurs is likely in the coastal areas under the Coastal Shield Brigade[7] and the Fawj Azrail al-Jabal (Azra’il of the Mountain Regiment).[8] Both formations serve as umbrellas for militias and armed factions that were involved in fighting alongside the regime during the conflict and against the transition government in the coastal battles in March 2025. They are commanded by and consist of loyalists, such as Miqdad Fatiha (formerly in the Republican Guards), Brigadier General Giath Dalla (formerly 4th Division),[9] Mohammed Jaber (former commander in the Desert Hawks militia), Yasser al-Hajal (former commander in the Tiger Forces), Sumer Hussein (former commander in the Tiger Forces), Haider Shaddad (formerly in Tiger Forces) and dozens more.[10] As self-declared representatives of the Alawi community, both the Brigade and Regiment have adopted explicitly communitarian security discourse to describe the threat posed by the central state, their desire for an alliance with Israel, and their political vision for a federalist Syria in which they exercise self-determination. The Regiment’s logo, for example, visualizes these security politics in its merging of the Alawite state and former Syrian flags in the background of two crossed Dhulfaqar (a double-pointed sword associated with Imam Ali) over which the number “313” (popular among Alawi militias) sits.
In Suweyda, the Druze National Guard has adopted a pro-Israeli, pro-intervention stance in the wake of the government massacres in the governorate. The National Guard is made up of several smaller militias and movements that pledged allegiance to al-Hijri after the Suweyda massacres. There are believed to be more than 90 independent armed groups that did so, from factions as small as 10 men to the absorption of the 164th Brigade of the former national army.[11] Most of these fighters were once part of either al-Hijri’s militias or the former national army. The former Brigadier General al-Ghoutani has openly called for Israeli support and deemed Israel the Druze’s “closest ally.”[12] As a public figure in the National Guard, al-Ghoutani has regularly courted Israeli support, expressed his commitment to federalism, and willingness to military confront the central government. He is joined by other former regime actors such as Shadi Murshid (judge turned commander), Mirhaj al-Jaramani (formerly of the National Defense Forces), and Tariq al-Shoufi (a former Colonel with public ties to Israel). These figures have all publicly advanced a narrative of Druze insecurity and demands for federalism as the solution to community exclusion.
The adoption of a communitarian logic by is consistent with an emergent security politics in Syria that sees the central state as both a threat to minorities and too weak to protect them. In this new landscape, security entrepreneurs willingly seek out internal and external alliances to advance a political vision for a decentralized Syria that can serve as a form of protection for these communities. The security politics that follow from this vision pit the armed formations as protectors of these communities and the intermediaries between them and the state army. Such security politics are not hegemonic in these areas, however, as there is considerable repression to silence dissent and challenges to their authority. Nevertheless, the presence of these groups and the vital role that former regime security actors play in them reflects a host of post-Assad security anxieties that the central government must find ways to address that do not lead to the repetition of massacres, including how to integrate these regions into the state, how to politically and juridically confront the question of how former regime remnants should be treated, and how to prevent the consolidation of a sectarian security discourse.
Conclusion
The new security landscape in Syria is reflected in the everyday speech of government officials. Whereas the new security entrepreneurs advance a communitarian vision Ahmad al-Sharaa and the new government repeatedly use the language of “components” to refer to Syrian communities. The government’s insistence on consolidating power and extending sovereignty to all of Syria is reflected both internally and internationally in how they frame security problems in the country. The largest challenge today might be that of how to integrate these areas into a centralized Syria politically but also through something akin to a security sector reform program.[13] The competing visions between a centralized or decentralized Syria are not just political questions but have now formed a core pillar in the new security politics after the fall of the Assad regime, the massacres in the Sahel and Suweyda, and the capitulation of the SDF to the central state. The SDF’s absorption into the state after military confrontations and months-long negotiations demonstrates both that these groups understand their confrontation with the state as occurring independently of the other groups. This absorption also suggests that the government’s strategy is not to concede territorial authority – the key demand of these groups.
Syria’s new security entrepreneurs are mostly individuals formerly integrated into the regime’s security apparatus who have remobilized into armed formations and adopted a communitarian security logic that positions them as advocates for decentralization and allies of Israel by drawing on explicitly sectarian framings. As security actors, they are invested in sustained confrontations with the central state whom they see as the purveyor of community insecurity. While emerging from the unique trajectory of Syria’s conflict the new security entrepreneurs resemble similar security formations in other post-conflict contexts such as Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere. These security remnants generate new political challenges in the context of transition and raise questions about how to disarm them, demobilize fighters, integrate leaders into the new political system, and address the security needs of populations they were nominally “securing.” In Syria, these challenges are compounded by a destabilizing regional environment and the fragmentation of Syria’s new security entrepreneurs into territorially based security formations. Moreover, today, the Syrian government has actively sought to fortify the border and prevent Lebanese nationals (and Hizballah supplies) from entering the country. As the regional security situation further deteriorates and Syria becomes more impacted by regional war through increased refugee flows, potential attacks, and shifting US and Israeli strategy, the dynamics of confrontation between the government and new security entrepreneurs may change.
[1] See the following: Thaler, Kai M. When Rebels Win: Ideology, Statebuilding, and Power After Civil Wars (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2025); Mampilly, Zachariah Cherian. Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life During War (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2015).
[2] But see Hana Atia, “The End of Sanctions? Rethinking Termination Processes through the Syrian Case.” POMEPS Studies 58 (March 2026): 36-43.
[3] My use of the term ‘security entrepreneurs’ does not solely refer to people who benefit from the commodification of security but rather who are agents who engage in security discourse and threat construction to rationalize security practices.
[4] I recognize that this may not be the best term to describe former security officials within the regime as it may denote a continued commitment to the regime. This is not the case. Part of my claim here is that they are adopting a communitarian logic in their security encounters.
[5] By March 2026 the SDF had effectively conceded its political and military positions to the central government after they lost military battles earlier in the year trying to impose their understanding of the March 10 agreement on the government. The government has now declared sovereignty in the Kurdish areas while extending a host of localized political rights, citizenship to stateless Kurds, and a range of cultural rights (such as education in Kurdish).
[6] On the history of minority communities seeking protection through international intervention, please see Rogan, Eugene, The Damascus Events: the 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2024).
[7] The brigade was formed in 2015 and eventually became dormant before being revived after the fall of the regime.
[8] The Regiment is mostly composed of former affiliates of the Tiger Forces led by General Suhail Hassan, one of the more powerful armed formations during the conflict.
[9] Young, Michael. “What was Syria’s Violence About?” Diwan. https://carnegieendowment.org/middle-east/diwan/2025/03/what-was-syrias-violence-about. (March 11, 2025)
[10] Zaman al-Wasl. “Assad militia attacks in Syria’s coast backed by Hizballah and Kurdish SDF”. Zaman al-Wasl (in Arabic) https://en.zamanalwsl.net/news/article/69208/. (July 2025)
[11] al-Shoufi, Ayman. “What is the National Guard and how much of Sweida does it control?” al-Jazeera (in Arabic) https://www.aljazeera.net/politics/2025/10/18/ما-حقيقة-الحرس-الوطني-ومدى-تحكمه (November 18, 2025)
[12] Atallah, Nada. “‘Israel will not abandon us’: Separatist Sweida poses new threat for fragle Syria” The National. https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/2026/02/08/syrias-fragile-unity-faces-a-new-test-in-sweidas-druze-heartland/ (February 7, 2026)
[13] Tlass, Yassmine, “Security Sector Reform in Post-Assad Syria: Decentralization as a Foundation,” POMEPS Studies 57: Syria After Assad (December 2025).