During the Eid al-Fitr holiday, at the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, a number of rebel commanders in Syria congregated in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli. The meeting, held Sunday July 19, culminated in the announcement of a new Supreme Military Council for the Free Syrian Army.
The Free Syrian Army, or FSA, is a term has been used for many things during the Syrian war. Some Syrians have used the term very loosely, to signify all types of armed resistance against President Bashar al-Assad, but there is also an institutional framework referred to as the FSA. It has its origins in a December 2012 meeting in Antalya in Turkey, where a broad gathering of armed groups elected a new leadership to represent them all.
The new network of command and support institutions, which gradually came to be seen as synonymous with “the FSA,” was fronted by a Turkey-based “General Staff” made up of defected military officers, whose top figure was Brigadier General Salim Idris. He would be supervised by a “Supreme Military Council,” also known as “The Council of Thirty” for having thirty members. These positions were elected at the conference and represented many of Syria’s most prominent armed groups at the time.