How Syria’s rebels became makers of drones and guided missiles

Just five years ago Syria’s Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was a beleaguered jihadist force fighting to survive after years of attacks by the Russian-backed Assad regime.

Now, in its stronghold of Idlib province, HTS boasts a military academy; a centralised command; rapidly deployable specialist units including infantry, artillery, special operations, tanks, drones and snipers; and even a local weapons manufacturing industry.

The capabilities of the revamped insurgent group have been apparent over the past week in its audacious raid across northern Syria that left watchers of the country stunned. “It has transformed over the past four, five years into essentially a polished proto-military,” said Aaron Zelin, an expert on the group at the Washington Institute think-tank. 

Sourcing basic weaponry has been relatively easy for HTS: Syria has been awash with arms since 2011, when Turkey and Arab nations, with US support, flooded the country with weapons to help bolster the rebels in the civil war against the Iran-supported regime.

But HTS’s homegrown manufacturing, particularly of drones and missiles, has enabled it to pose new threats to a regime that lacks significant anti-drone capabilities. In recent days, the militant group has posted slick footage from suicide drone attacks on a commanders’ meeting in a Syrian army building and another drone attack on the air base in the central city of Hama. 

Within its fledgling breakaway mini-state, home to between 3mn-4mn people, the rebels produce drones in small workshops based in houses, garages or converted warehouses, relying on 3D printers when they cannot access parts, according to experts.

“This is a common story across modern conflict today: we’ve seen similar tactics in Azerbaijan, Ukraine and elsewhere,” said Broderick McDonald, a conflict researcher at King’s College London. Much of the expertise required could be drawn from online resources, analysts said. 

A 2023 drone attack on a Syrian military academy in Homs, which killed at least 100 people, was a “proof of concept”, said Zelin. No one claimed the attack, but it is widely assumed to have been carried out by HTS.

McDonald, who has tracked rebels’ drone use this week, said the group had previously deployed small drones that can fly into armoured vehicles and drop grenades. In their ongoing offensive they have also used domestically made rocket drones, and larger models that can travel further and carry a bigger payload.

They had used drones for surveillance and to target the regime before sending fighters into battle, said Zelin. In “a first for non-state actors”, he said rebels had dropped leaflets from drones over civilian areas to encourage defections.

HTS also invested in producing long-range missiles, rockets and mortar shells. During their offensive the militants have revealed a new guided missile system, about which little is known but Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute described it as a “massive missile with a huge munition at the front”. The missile is thought to be named “Qaysar”.

“That replaced the need for suicide truck bombs, which [HTS] would have done five years ago,” Lister said, adding that the guided missiles had been fired dozens of kilometres across open territory ahead of a new offensive.

Its own weaponry has supplemented arms that HTS claimed when disarming other rebel groups or captured from the regime in battle. The group’s latest advance has yielded more equipment: videos on the insurgents’ social media channels have showcased seized regime army weapons and armoured vehicles, including some that are Russian-made. 

“They’ve captured huge amounts of equipment: not just tanks and [armoured personnel carriers], but also anti-air systems. They’ve got a [Russian-made] Pantsir, and several other anti-air missiles they’ve captured as well as multiple light attack aircraft, which they are trying to figure out how to use,” said McDonald. 

“If they can get [the anti-air defence systems] operational, it would mitigate one of the big challenges that HTS back and other rebel groups have always faced, the lack of defence against Russian air strikes,” he said. 

In recent years, researchers have noted a thriving black market trade between regime forces and HTS for weaponry and ammunition.

Experts insist that Turkey, the main backer of other rebel factions under the umbrella of the Syrian National Army, is not directly supplying HTS. Ankara, along with the US and other states, has designated the Islamist movement a terrorist organisation. But some of HTS’s current stock had been supplied by rebel groups that Ankara backs in northwestern Syria, analysts said.

HTS and some Turkish-backed rebel groups maintain close co-ordination, including in the current offensive, and weapons are transferred between groups. Turkey has given rebels Toyota 4x4s, armoured vehicles and personnel carriers, “usually second hand Turkish stuff that’s out of commission in the Turkish army,” said Malik Malik al-Abdeh, a Syrian analyst. 

That equipment is being used by a group with a very different structure from four years ago. When HTS accepted a ceasefire mediated by Turkey and Russia in 2020, it used the ensuing period of relative stability to rethink its strategy and military doctrine.

Until then, HTS had to some extent mimicked the Syrian army’s structure, much as it also reproduced civil institutions such as courts in Idlib, said Dareen Khalifa, an HTS expert at the Crisis Group think-tank. Then, she said, the group realised that approach relied on resources and large groups of recruits which HTS did not have.

Instead, according to Jerome Drevon, a Jihad expert at the Crisis Group think-tank, “they drew inspiration from western military doctrines” .

They particularly looked to the British armed forces, which are smaller and more nimble, Drevon said the group’s leader and military chief had told him.

HTS could call on about 30,000 fighters, experts said: 15,000 full-time fighters and thousands more reservists, as well as men from other armed opposition groups in its allied network. The group’s rapid advance across Syria’s north would encourage more to join, they said.

Its diversity of fighters was key to the group’s successful turnaround. After President Bashar al-Assad brutally cracked down on the mass uprising in 2011 that morphed into a civil war, rebel groups became balkanised, turning the country into a patchwork of rival fiefdoms. HTS at this time was a group of a few dozen hardened jihadis, an offshoot of al-Nusra, a jihadist force that emerged in the chaos of the war. 

HTS eventually absorbed some surviving rivals. Its ranks swelled to include foreigners and veteran jihadis from other conflicts around the region, as well as less ideological rebels.

The fighters now needed to be ideologically coherent, said Drevon, and better co-ordinated on the battlefield. To achieve that, HTS set up its military academy about two and a half years ago. Regime defectors and foreign jihadis appear to have played key roles.

HTS persuaded about 30 former officers with the regime’s army, who had defected to other rebel groups, to establish the academy, Drevon said. They replicated the regime’s military service, establishing nine months of training divided into three-month increments of basic, intermediate and advanced.

The graduates also learned behavioural discipline, said Khalifa, who highlighted drastic differences between HTS’s takeover of Idlib province in 2015 and today. 

In 2015 the group was brutal in its approach to residents in Idlib, forcing them to choose between death or repenting for their perceived sins. But after renouncing ties to al-Qaeda the following year, while maintaining authoritarian tendencies, HTS now seeks to publicly demonstrate tolerance for religious minorities. It has allowed Christians to conduct mass in Aleppo’s churches since it took control, according to images on social media, a local bishop and the group itself. 

The group has also shown discipline on social media, displaying almost total silence to ensure the element of surprise on Assad’s forces, said Lister.

McDonald said some of the group’s special forces “went into Aleppo the night before HTS assaulted the city last Wednesday, and reportedly targeted regime officers”.

The rebels’ advance towards the major city of Hama, which stayed in regime hands during 13 years of brutal civil war, has underscored the weakness of the Syrian army and pro-regime militias, who — despite being propped up by forces from Russia, Iran and Tehran’s network of proxies — abandoned their posts in fear of the rebels’ advance.

“HTS has come a long way in five years,” said Drevon. “Now we have to wait and see where they go from here.”

Additional reporting by Richard Salame in Beirut

Weapons illustration by Bob Haslett and cartography by Steven Bernard