ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Around 150 high-ranking Syrian military officers remain in Iraq and all other soldiers who previously fled to Iraq after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime have been repatriated, the mayor of a border district said Sunday.
“Besides 150, mostly high-ranking officials, who have not returned and been sent to Baghdad, all others [Syrian soldiers] have returned to Syria,” Imad al-Dulaimi, the district mayor of Rutba in Anbar province, told Rudaw.
“No Syrian soldiers are left in the camp where they were settled about a month and a half ago,” he added.
Iraq said in mid-December that it had sent back approximately 2,000 Syrian soldiers, who had sought refuge in the country a day before the collapse of the Assad regime to Syrian authorities.
The soldiers fled to Iraq through the al-Qaim border crossing on December 7. Iraqi officials said at the time that they had entered the country with Baghdad’s permission.
Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) led a blistering offensive against Assad’s Syrian army in late November, ending over five decades of Baathist rule in less than two weeks.
Thousands of former Syrian soldiers have surrendered to HTS under a national reconciliation process aimed at reintegrating Assad's former forces into the new administration.