Syria authorities say armed groups have agreed to disband

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (also known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani) arrives for a meeing with visiting Druze officials from Lebanon's Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) in Damascus on December 22, 2024. (File/AFP)

• On Sunday, Sharaa had said the new authorities would “absolutely not allow there to be weapons in the country outside state control”

DAMASCUS: Syria’s new authorities announced Tuesday that they had reached an agreement with the country’s militant groups on their dissolution and integration into the regular defense forces.
Photos published by the state-run SANA news agency showed the country’s new leader, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, surrounded by the heads of several armed factions — but not representatives of the Kurdish-led forces in Syria’s northeast.
The meeting “ended in an agreement on the dissolution of all the groups and their integration under the supervision of the ministry of defense,” said a statement carried by SANA and the authorities’ Telegram account.
On Sunday, Sharaa had said the new authorities would “absolutely not allow there to be weapons in the country outside state control.”
That also applied to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, he said.
Last week, the military chief of Sharaa’s Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham — the group that spearheaded the offensive that toppled president Bashar Assad — told AFP that Kurdish-held areas would be integrated under the new leadership, and that “Syria will not be divided.”
Thirteen years of civil war in Syria has left more than half a million people dead and fragmented the country into zones of influence controlled by different armed groups backed by regional and international powers.