The Syrian Army Command told soldiers and officers they were no longer in service as of 8 December 2024, with the fall of the Assad regime.

This force was used primarily as auxiliaries in support of French troops, and senior officer posts were held by Frenchmen, although Syrians were allowed to hold commissions below the rank of major.

After the repression of the Great Syrian Revolt by General Maurice Gamelin, commander of the Troupes du Levant, they were strengthened and became the main forces of the French apparatus.

Indeed, by the late 1950s, the situation had become so bad that Syrian officers regularly disobeyed the orders of superiors who belonged to different ethnic or political groups.

[15] The 1963 Syrian coup d'état had as one of its key objectives the seizure of the Al-Kiswah military camp, home to the 70th Armored Brigade.

In June 1963, Syria took part in the Iraqi military campaign against the Kurds by providing aircraft, armoured vehicles and a force of 6,000 soldiers.

Syrian troops crossed the Iraqi border and moved into the Kurdish town of Zakho in pursuit of Barzani's fighters.

The division entered Jordan at ar-Ramtha, destroyed a company of Jordanian Centurion tanks there, and continued directly towards Amman.

In 1984, Major General Ali Haidar's Special Forces were instrumental in blocking an abortive attempt by Rifaat al-Assad and his Defense Companies to seize the capital.

Writing forty years later, Tom Cooper says "..despite the establishment of.. corps.. most division commanders continued reporting directly to the President.

Correspondingly, not only the Chief of Staff of the Syrian Armed Forces but also the Corps HQ exercised only a limited operational control over the Army's divisions.

[30] The 9th Armoured Division served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War as the Arab Joint Forces Command North reserve and saw little action.

[31] In 1994, Haidar expressed objections to the Syrian president's decision to bring Bashar home from his studies in Britain and groom him for the succession after the death of Basil, the eldest Assad son.

[27] Soon afterwards, on 3 September 1994, Jane's Defence Weekly reported that then-President Hafez Assad had dismissed at least 16 senior military commanders.

[28] On 29 September 2004, Jane's Defence Weekly reported that Syria had begun to redeploy elements of one or more Syrian Army special forces regiments based in the coastal hills a few kilometres south of Beirut in Lebanon.

Analyst Joseph Holliday wrote in 2013 that "the Assad government has from the beginning of the conflict been unable to mobilize all of its forces without risking large-scale defections.

The single greatest liability that the Assad regime has faced in employing its forces has been the challenge of relying on units to carry out orders to brutalize the opposition.

This loss of manpower is exacerbated by Syria's long entrenched problem of having to selectively deploy forces based on their perceived trustworthiness.

"[48] The International Institute for Strategic Studies in London calculated that by August 2013 the strength of the Syrian army had, compared with 2010, roughly been cut in half, due to defections, desertions and casualties: it now counted 110,000 troops.

[49] Increasingly, Assad's Alawite base of support refuse to send their sons to the military due to massive casualty rates among military age men in their community; according to pro oppositions sources a third of 250,000 Alawite men of fighting age have been killed in the Syrian Civil War, leading to major tensions between the sect and the Syrian government.

Struggling with reliability issues and defections, officers of the SAA increasingly preferred the part-time volunteers of the NDF, who they regarded as more motivated and loyal, over regular army conscripts to conduct infantry operations and act as support for advancing tanks.

[59] An officer in Homs, who asked not to be identified, said the army was increasingly playing a logistical and directive role, while NDF fighters act as combatants on the ground.

[60] The NDF continued to play a significant role in military operations across Syria despite the formation of other elite units, many of which received direct assistance from Russia.

The fall of the Assad regime led by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham in December 2024 ended the existence of the Ba'athist Syrian state.

[67] Richard Bennett wrote in 2001 that "..corps [were] formed in 1985 to give the Army more flexibility and to improve combat efficiency by decentralizing the command structure, absorbing at least some of the lessons learned during the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon in 1982.

[74] As of August 2022, according to Gregory Waters, the structure as the order of battle (at full strength) was:[75][76] Special Forces units formed during the Syrian Civil War:[b]

[131] Among the camouflage were Red Lizard, Syrian Leaf patterns, and EMR Desert; a locally-made copy of the ERDL and M81 Woodland.

The Syrian military also provided NBC uniforms to soldiers to remain effective in an environment affected by biological or chemical agents.

[130] The Chief of the General Staff of the Army and Armed Forces (Arabic: رئيس هيئة الأركان العامة للجيش والقوات المسلحة, romanized: Rayiys hayyat al'arkan aleamat liljaysh walquaat almusalaha) was the professional head of the Syrian Armed Forces and the Syrian Army.

[147] As of 2024, the Chief of the General Staff was Lt. Gen. Abdul Karim Mahmoud Ibrahim, who was appointed to the role by former Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad.