Southern Front of the Free Syrian Army
| Southern Front | |
|---|---|
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الجبهة الجنوبية Participant in the Syrian Civil War |
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Logo of the Southern Front: The Syrian opposition flag flanked by an AK-47 on each side
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| Active | 13 February 2014 – present |
| Ideology |
Syrian nationalism Anti-authoritarianism Islamism (factions) Secularism (factions) |
| Leaders | Gen. Bashar al-Zoubi (Overall Leader) Brig. Gen. Ziad Fahd (Deputy Chief of Staff) Lt. Col. Majid al-Sayid Ahmed (Head of the Operations Department) Colonel Saber Safar † (Member of the Military Council) Colonel Bakur Salim al-Salim † (Member of the Military Council) Colonel Khaled al-Nabulsi (Member of the Military Council) Major Hassam Ibrahim (Member of the Military Council) Captain Said Nakresh (Member of the Military Council) Ahmad al-Awdesh (Member of the Military Council) Samer al-Haboush (Member of the Military Council) |
| Headquarters | Amman |
| Area of operations |
Daraa Governorate Quneitra Governorate As Suwayda Governorate Damascus |
| Strength | 25,000 (Nov. 2015) |
| Part of |
 Free Syrian Army (disputed) |
| Allies |
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| Opponents | |
| Battles and wars |
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The Southern Front 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.
The Southern Front is an alliance of 54 rebel groups, ranging from secularist to moderately religious. Bashar el-Zoubi, head of the Yarmouk division, 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).
The relation between Southern Front and Syrian armed rebel group Free Syrian Army (FSA) has been described differently by different news sources. Remarks of news sources about such relation are in some cases more or less compatible, in other cases incompatible. Some statements in chronological order:
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Wikipedia