Syria's elite Tiger Forces fail to stem rebel advance in Hama

President Bashar Al Assad is rapidly running out of military options

Syrian army equipment and vehicles abandoned on the motorway to Damascus, near Suran, north of Hama. AFP

Syrian government forces said they had withdrawn from Hama on Thursday, a strategic city with supply lines to loyalist coastal strongholds. In any attempt to retake the city, one army unit could be critical for the decisive battle: the Tiger Forces, whose members mostly hail from the governorate of the same name.

The unit, often called an elite military formation, is in fact mainly composed of local militias with a core of at least 4,000 fighters linked to the feared Syrian air force intelligence, formerly headed by Jamil Al Hasan, according to researcher Gregory Waters.

Al Hasan is wanted by France and Germany over the alleged murder of civilians, including dual-citizens, in Syria’s civil war, and has been sanctioned by the US and EU.

"The tiger forces are supposed to be elite forces. But really, to Syrians, they're just known as brutal and quite cruel forces," says Natasha Hall, an expert on Syria and Senior Fellow at Center for Strategic and International Studies.

During the worst periods of fighting, the unit – designated the 25th Special Missions Division in 2019 – was used as a “fire brigade” outfit, moving rapidly from crisis to crisis as the government was assailed by a number of localised uprisings.

Those occurred first under the banner of the Free Syrian Army in the summer of 2011 and then a mix of competing and increasingly extreme groups, edging out secular opposition, later including ISIS and Jabhat Al Nusra. The latter group, formerly linked to Al Qaeda, is designated a terror organisation by the EU and US, but has attempted to agressively rebrand as a moderate force.

The uprising was sparked by government crackdowns that included the Tiger Forces, which according to the Global Public Policy Institute, a think tank, were “credited with pioneering the use of barrel bombs in the early years of the war”, improvised explosive devices rolled out of helicopters to devastate districts in towns such as Deraa.

According to Mr Waters, who has closely tracked the evolution of the force, its members are recruited mostly from Hama, and while most are from Syria’s Alawite minority, the kin of President Bashar Al Assad, it has small numbers of Christian, Ismaili Shiites and Sunni recruits.

But it is far from representative of the population, Ms Hall says. She explains that the unit has joined the ranks of much of the Syrian army, which has collapsed into countless militias, with groups such as the Shabiha, now the National Defence Forces, often paid by looting or other criminal activities.

"The Syrian Arab Army has been hollowed out since I would say 2012, there is mandatory conscription. So most men, aside from those who are only children, have been in the military in some capacity in their life, but there were mass defections early on."

"So it took some time for the Syrian military, the regime, to recuperate. What they did, as other regimes have done in the past, like Sudan with Janjaweed, is essentially rounded up militias and thugs to create new forces."

Oded Berkowitz, an expert on militia tactics in Middle East conflict, says the rapid withdrawal by government forces in Hama is an attempt to concentrate defences.

"Being able to consolidate a defensive line with depth and reserves that are now closer will negate one of the rebels’ primary advantages in manoeuvre, which was surprise. The initial surprise of the rapid advance is now gone," he said.

He does not rule out a complete collapse of the Syrian army in Hama, however, and says the next critical battle could be around Homs, which he envisages as a possible Aleppo-style siege.

The local base of support for the Tiger Forces, combined with what analysts say is a close working relationship with Russian advisers, means its performance in the battle of Hama is a litmus test of how Damascus will weather the latest uprising. According to security researcher Nicole Grajewski, the unit has also been given T-90 tanks, Russia’s premier export armoured vehicle.

An anti-government fighter remotely fires rockets on regime forces, in the northern outskirts of Hama. AFP

So far, things are not looking positive for the formation, having lost its headquarters in Aleppo in the Hayat Tahir Al Sham-led offensive last week, and now losing the city of Hama. The unit does not appear to have fought significant battles in Aleppo, where the 30th Division crumbled quickly.

Along with the Tiger Forces, another unit that has worked closely with Russia is the Fifth Corps, a formation put together at the height of the civil war in 2016, with many “reconciled” former rebels from Deraa governorate. It has taken part in offensives before in Idlib, but in the latest round of fighting appears to have abandoned a large number of tanks, according to open-source analysis by Oryx, a team of researchers tracking losses in conflict, which responded to a question from The National.

The Third Corps, which fought in Lebanon against Israel in the 1980s and had its 47th Armoured Brigade bombed by Israeli jets last month, is also partially garrisoned in Hama. All of these units possess various Soviet-era tanks, scores of which have been seen abandoned in videos on social media on roads between Aleppo and Hama, according to Oryx.

Finally, the Fourth Division, a unit accused by the US of links to drug-smuggling and militias has also been thrown into the fray. But these units cannot be thought of in the conventional military sense, where a division has a standardised number of platoons, companies, battalions and regiments, a pyramid structure that goes up to the roughly 10,000-20,000 soldier division.

"This is not like an army in the traditional military sense, at one point they probably were," says Ms Hall, before the gradual collapse of Syria's military and economic power, which led to widespread disorganisation in the army.