Repurposed into a mercenary force by Erdogan’s Turkey, the remnants of Syria’s armed opposition were sent off to fight for Azerbaijan with promises of sweet paychecks. They met abuse, humiliation, and death instead.
The GrayZone published Lindsey Snell's article about the involvement of Syrian mercenaries in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) conflict by Turkey in 2020 war.
In the first week of October 2020, Ahmad Hadad* and more than 20 other fighters from the Hamza Division faction of the so-called Syrian National Army stood in the middle of a mountain range in Azerbaijan near the Iranian border. They were lost.
After the Armenian army unleashed a bout of heavy bombardment on the mountains, the Azerbaijani soldiers who had been positioned behind the Syrians quickly fled, leaving the Syrians by themselves in unfamiliar terrain. An artillery shell landed near one of Hadad’s commanders, Muhammad Shaalan, killing him instantly.
Two of the youngest, strongest fighters in the group carried Shaalan’s body and made their way out of the mountains to look for their base. When the men became overwhelmed with fatigue, they dropped the body and let it roll down the mountain slopes to save them the effort.
Hours passed, and the Syrians realized they were no closer to finding the way back. Three fighters decided to sit with Shaalan’s body to wait for the others to return with help, knowing that if they didn’t, the body would likely be lost in the mountains forever.
After the other men left, the three who remained were met with a flurry of bullets from the south. Another Syrian National Army militant, Hussein Talha, was struck and killed. The two surviving men fled to the northeast until they reached a point where other Syrian fighters from the Hamza Division had gathered.
“The situation was tense, with our commander coordinating with the Turks to find out why the Azerbaijanis had abandoned us,” Ahmad Hadad said. “They recovered the bodies and returned them to Syria. But things got worse for us. I mean, many more of us died in Azerbaijan.”
A flight to Baku
It was last July when men from the Syrian National Army (SNA), a collective of militant Syrian opposition factions supported and supervised by Turkey, learned that they might be deployed to Azerbaijan, a country few of them had even heard of. They were told they would be acting as border guards, and that the assignment would be easy and combat-free.
On September 22, 2020, a source from the Sultan Murad faction of the SNA sent me a photo of dozens of militants on a cargo plane. “They’re going to Baku,” he wrote. “Now. And more will follow.”
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here.
