Syria's New Authorities Plan To Kick Russia Out Of Hmeimim Airbase

The Syrian presidential administration intends to turn it into a training ground for its military.

The administration of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa plans to take the Hmeimim airbase from Russia and turn it into a training center for its military, a source told Kommersant in Damascus. He said the possibility of "joint management" was being considered, with the facility "serving only non-military purposes."

The source noted that the Syrian army, mostly made up of former rebels bombed by Russia during Bashar al-Assad's rule, lacks general military training, and the Hmeimim base in the coastal province of Latakia is best suited to train them.

At the same time, Syria hopes to attract Russian military instructors, sources in the republic's Defense Ministry told the Lebanese newspaper Al-Modon. According to them, this is necessary because the army is armed mostly with Soviet and Russian-made equipment. They added that the assistance is likely to be limited to the training of ground forces - the training of pilots is out of the question.

Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov admitted that both Russian bases in Syria - Hmeimim and the naval logistics point in Tartus - will be repurposed into "humanitarian hubs" due to the decline in their military importance amid the change of power in the country.

After the fall of the Assad regime, Russia was forced to remove all weapons systems from Syrian bases, including S-300 and S-400 air defense systems, as well as Bastion missile systems, so now it is difficult to use these facilities even for short-term basing of strategic aviation, said Anton Mardasov, an expert of the Russian Council on Foreign Affairs.

"The previous deterrence operations that the Defense Ministry has been carrying out all these years in the Eastern Mediterranean, reducing the area of the position areas of the U.S. Navy's 6th Fleet, have become impossible," he stated, noting that "both Russian military facilities are under fire control from dominant heights and are vulnerable to sabotage even with the use of firearms."

Mardasov added that so far Syria allows the Russian military to use Hmeimim as an airfield for cargo transfers to Africa, but the situation could change. "The Syrians in that case could claim that they have achieved the withdrawal of the Russians from the coast and closed a chapter of history in which from this airbase the Russian air force has been bombing the opposition in Idlib since 2015," a province considered a stronghold of Ahmed al-Sharaa's supporters, the expert concluded.

In January, Damascus demanded that Russia withdraw its troops from the Kamyshly base in the Syrian Kurdistan Region's capital, which has served as a key outpost for controlling the country's northeast and a logistical hub for the transfer of forces since 2019.

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