Murhaf Abu Qasra (Defense Minister of post-Assad Syria) — interview with Reuters, 19 Jan 2025 (via ARK News): all armed factions, including the US-backed SDF, must integrate fully into the Ministry of Defense — "remaining a distinct military bloc... is incompatible with the framework of a large institution" — the new state's drive for a single national army.

As far as the Syrian Democratic Forces becoming part of the Ministry of Defense, this position is untenable. We propose their inclusion under the Ministry of Defense’s structure, with their distribution carried out in a military framework. There's no objection to this. However, remaining a distinct military bloc within the Ministry of Defense is incompatible with the framework of a large institution.

[Source is English (ARK News, reproducing his Reuters interview of 19 January 2025 at the Ministry of Defense in Damascus); confirmed verbatim against the fetched page. The remarks were likely given in Arabic and rendered in English by Reuters.] Declared positions of Murhaf Abu Qasra — Defense Minister of the post-Assad Syrian transitional government (a former rebel commander who led the offensive that toppled Bashar al-Assad in December 2024). His central project is BUILDING A SINGLE NATIONAL ARMY by dissolving and integrating Syria's many armed factions into the Ministry of Defense — including his own former Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). On the Kurdish-led, US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), he insists they cannot remain "a distinct military bloc" but must be distributed individually within the ministry's military structure (the SDF's Mazloum Abdi counters by demanding the SDF join as a cohesive bloc with decentralized administration). Separately, in May 2025 he reported integrating some 130 factions and declared the state "will not allow any armed group to stay outside the authority of the Ministry," later setting a 10-day ultimatum for holdout groups. This is the new Syrian state's MONOPOLY-ON-ARMS / military-unification doctrine — the security counterpart to FM Asaad al-Shaibani's "weapons available to the army, and only the army," and a direct counterpoint to demands for autonomous armed blocs (the SDF) and to the "resistance" camp's arms retention. [Axes: regime-stance (state monopoly on arms; national-army unification; dissolving factions), federalism (against autonomous armed / administrative blocs — contra SDF decentralization), regional-stance.]