Southern Front (Syria)

Southern Front
الجبهة الجنوبية Participant in the Syrian Civil War
Logo of the Southern Front: The Syrian opposition flag flanked by an AK-47 on each side
Active	13 February 2014 – present
Ideology	Syrian nationalism Anti-authoritarianism Islamism (factions) Secularism (factions)
Leaders	See Leadership
Headquarters	Amman
Area of operations	Daraa Governorate Quneitra Governorate As Suwayda Governorate Damascus
Size	25,000 (Nov. 2015)
Part of	Free Syrian Army (disputed) See Nature of the Front
Allies	United States  France  Saudi Arabia  Qatar  Jordan  United Arab Emirates  Norway Criterion Brigades Army of Free Tribes Al-Qaratayn Martyrs Brigade Revolutionary Commando Army National Front for the Liberation of Syria Jabhat Ansar al-Islam Tahrir al-Sham/al-Nusra Front (sometimes) Ahrar al-Sham Jaysh al-Islam
Opponents	Syrian Armed Forces National Defense Force Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant Khalid ibn al-Walid Army Tahrir al-Sham/al-Nusra Front (sometimes)
Battles and wars	Syrian Civil War See List of battles

Syrian Civil War

The Southern Front (Arabic: الجبهة الجنوبية‎‎) is a Syrian rebel alliance consisting of 58 or 54Syrian opposition factions, established on 13 February 2014 in southern Syria.

By June 2015, Southern Front controlled about 70 percent of Daraa Governorate, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Claims have been made by the Southern Front itself and by media in Britain,Germany and the United Arab Emirates that the Southern Front is being funded by the US and its allies, possibly through a US led Military Operations Center (MOC) based in Amman, Jordan. Since its formation, rebels said, field operation rooms have been added inside Syria to improve coordination between units. The coalition is "described by Western officials as the best organized of the mainstream opposition". The constituent groups range from secularist groups to moderate religious groups, and the Southern front has been described as a "non-hardline Islamist rebel group" that rejects extremism.

Since 8 July 2017, the Southern Front became the first Syrian rebel group to agree to a de-escalation zone with Russia and the Syrian Army.

The Southern Front is an alliance of 54 rebel groups, ranging from secularist to moderately religious. Bashar al-Zoubi, head of the Yarmouk Army, said to the BBC in 2014 that the groups or factions of the Southern Front are militarily coordinated by a moving command centre with a unified leadership but with no overall commander and no centralised command—which is contradictory.

The Carter Center, a private organization in the U.S. promoting human rights globally, in February 2015 also described ‘The Southern Front’ as a loose coalition of self-described moderate armed groups without leadership or organizational structure, that has agreed on the name ‘Southern Front’ to receive support from the ‘Friends of Syria’ (“an international diplomatic collective, which focuses on supporting the Syrian opposition”) through the southern MOC (“Military Operations Center” which is not further defined by Carter Center).