page_title: Belligerents in the Syrian Civil War
section_title: Free Syrian Army and affiliate groups
hierarchical_section_title: Belligerents in the Syrian Civil War / Syrian opposition and allies / Syrian National Coalition and Interim Government / Free Syrian Army and affiliate groups
caption_attribution_description: English: مؤتمر نصرة الشعب السوري
context_page_description: A number of states and armed groups have involved themselves in the ongoing Syrian Civil War.
context_section_description: The formation of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) was announced on 29 July 2011 by a group of defecting Syrian Army officers, encouraging others to defect to defend civilian protesters from violence by the state and effect government change. By December 2011, estimates of the number of defectors to the FSA ranged from 1,000 to over 25,000. The FSA, initially "headquartered" in Turkey, moved its headquarters to northern Syria in September 2012, and functions more as an umbrella organization than a traditional military chain of command.
  In March 2012, two reporters of The New York Times witnessed an FSA attack and learned that the FSA had a stock of able, trained soldiers and ex-officers, organized to some extent, but without the weapons to put up a realistic fight.
  In April 2013, the US announced it would transfer $123 million in nonlethal aid to Syrian rebels through defected general Salim Idriss, leader of the FSA, who later acknowledged "the rebels" were badly fragmented and lacked military skill. Idriss said he was working on a countrywide command structure, but that a lack of material support was hurting that effort. "Now it is very important for them to be unified. But unifying them in a manner to work like a regular army is still difficult", Idriss said. He acknowledged common operations with Islamist group Ahrar ash-Sham but denied any cooperation with Islamist group al-Nusra Front.
  Abu Yusaf, a commander of the Islamic State (IS), said in August 2014 that many of the FSA members who had been trained by United States' and Turkish and Arab military officers were actually joining IS, but by September 2014 the Free Syrian Army was joining an alliance and common front with Kurdish militias including the YPG to fight ISIS.
  In October 2015, shortly after the start of Russia's military intervention in Syria, a senior ex-US official was paraphrased as saying "the 'moderates' had collapsed long ago" in a piece by Robert Fisk, who added that many fighters had defected to other rebel groups, while Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov called the FSA "an already phantom structure", but later proclaimed that Russia was ready to aid the FSA with airstrikes against ISIS. On the other hand, in December 2015, according to the American Institute for the Study of War, groups that identify as FSA were still present around Aleppo and Hama and in southern Syria, and the FSA was still "the biggest and most secular of the rebel groups."
  By March 2017, the FSA backed by Turkey finished clearing the Islamic State from the north of Syria. After this, they turned their attention to taking over the Afrin canton from the YPG.
caption: Syrian opposition campaign in support of Syria in 2012
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