Why Syria sending troops to Yemen would be a risky bet for Sharaa

As Saudi Arabia and its Yemeni allies keep up a massive offensive launched over the weekend to drive Houthi rebels from their new footholds along the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, Syria continues to reject reports that the kingdom wants the Syrian army to join the fight.

The Syrian presidency’s media adviser, Ahmed Muwaffaq Zaidan, denied the claims on Thursday via X, saying, “What some media outlets are promoting about the kingdom’s request to send Syrian forces to Saudi Arabia or Yemen is a lie and has no basis in truth.” This follows an earlier rebuttal on Wednesday by Syrian Response, the official English-language account of the government’s Foreign Media Department. The department noted that while Syria stood firmly with Saudi Arabia, the priority remained “rebuilding the country, strengthening its institutions, working with our partners on reconstruction and improving the lives of Syrians.” 

“Any military cooperation with partner countries,” it added, “would take place only through official channels and existing bilateral frameworks.”

The statements have done little to quash debate around Syria’s possible involvement in the anti-Houthi campaign, first reported by Asharq Bloomberg’s Hiba Nasr on X. The post, in which she noted that no decision had been made about a deployment, came a day after Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa traveled to Riyadh for a meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Axios and Reuters, citing unnamed Syrian and US officials, followed with similar reports that Riyadh and Damascus were discussing possible Syrian military assistance to Saudi Arabia, including a potential troop deployment to Yemen.

The Trump administration’s special presidential envoy to Syria and Iraq, Tom Barrack, met on Thursday with Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani in Istanbul. In a subsequent X post, the envoy said the pair had discussed “our shared priorities in addressing regional threats.” However, his assertion that Syria was “assisting the region in finding an algorithm to lower the temperatures in its neighborhood” did little to clarify the administration’s position. “History rarely offers a region the chance to rearrange its own pieces; it is offering one now,” Barrack observed.

A Trump administration official speaking on background to Al-Monitor confirmed that “the idea” of Syrian government forces taking part in the anti-Houthi coalition was one “among a bunch of others” that came up during internal discussions about Saudi Arabia’s predicament in the face of the Houthis’ blockade of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The Red Sea waterway has emerged as a critical alternative route for Saudi oil exports since Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. The official declined to comment further.

A record of resistance

Sharaa’s record since coming to power 22 months ago in a lightning offensive against the Assad regime suggests that the official rebuttals may reflect the government’s true stance.

Sharaa has generally resisted external pressure to get his men involved in others’ fights. Turkey, a powerful neighbor with thousands of troops stationed in Syria, repeatedly pushed the former jihadi leader to take up arms against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the country’s northeast. Sharaa eventually authorized a major military offensive against the SDF in January but on his own terms. The subsequent collapse of the Kurdish-led force accelerated an integration process that culminated in the SDF’s formal dissolution in August. The SDF lost around 80% of the territory it held at the beginning of January. Thousands of its fighters were subsequently integrated into Syria’s security forces, while its commander, Mazloum Kobane, was appointed a presidential adviser.

In June, during the G7 summit in Evian, France, US President Donald Trump said he had spoken to Sharaa about the Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, which has been at war with Israel for years. “I suggested to Israel to let Syria take care of Hezbollah, because to be honest with you, I think they do a better job of doing it,” Trump said. His comments appeared to contradict an earlier statement in March by Barrack, who said that media reports that the United States was encouraging Syria to send forces into Lebanon were “false and inaccurate.”

In a June 21 interview with Lebanon’s Al-Mashhad TV, Sharaa had the final word. He said Syria “does not adopt any military options beyond its own borders.”

Sharaa did not wade into the Lebanese conflict for several reasons. “A prominent concern was the fear of spillover into Syria, at a time the country is already massively destroyed due to years of bombings by the Assad regime, Russia and Iranian-backed forces,” Elizabeth Tsurkov, a Russian-Israeli researcher with intimate knowledge of Syria, said. Additionally, Syria does not possess air defenses capable of intercepting the rockets and missiles that Hezbollah possesses in abundance, Tsurkov explained.

Sharaa would also be hard-pressed to justify why Syrian forces would risk their lives fighting Saudi Arabia’s war when they are unable to defend their own people from Israel’s constant attacks on southwest Syria or to regain control over Suweida, where Druze armed groups have maintained control outside Damascus’ authority, an official based in the region told Al-Monitor.

Follow the money

Trump has yet to pronounce himself on Syria joining the war against Yemen.

“If Sharaa can say ‘no’ to Turkey and Trump, he can very well say ‘no’ to MBS,” the regional official speaking not for attribution said, using the initials of the Saudi crown prince.

Opinion on the matter remains divided. Despite the lifting of crushing international sanctions introduced during the rule of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s economy remains desperately fragile after 13 years of conflict that left the country in ruins and highly dependent on external funding. The World Bank reckons that recovery will require about $216 billion. Syria is looking to the energy-rich Gulf states and Saudi Arabia in particular as an economic lifeline. Qatar and Saudi Arabia cleared Syria’s $15.5 million debt to the World Bank in May 2025 and later announced a joint $89 million package, administered through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), to help cover part of public-sector salaries and essential services for three months.

In July last year, Saudi Arabia announced around $6.4 billion worth of investment agreements with Syria. But the Iran conflict has dealt a crippling blow to Gulf finances, with the destruction of major energy infrastructure by Iranian attacks and the dramatic fall in oil and gas revenues.

Aiding Saudi Arabia in the war may offer Syria a path to securing additional Saudi funding as it struggles with the cascading effects of the Iran conflict, notably the sharp spike in diesel prices. The country was hit with a wave of protests last month after the government raised diesel prices by more than 40%, as part of ongoing efforts to move away from a heavily subsidized economy toward a more market-oriented one. The demonstrations spread across six provinces, forcing the government to partially reverse course.

The average monthly salary of a public servant is around $150. Year-over-year inflation hit 40% in June, according to the Syrian Center for Policy Research. “The government has no money to pay those salaries and is making electronic payments without the cash to back them,” Mohammed Olabi, a Syrian economic researcher, told Al-Monitor. Unemployment stands at 24% and reaches 60% among young people, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

This makes Syria a lucrative recruiting ground for mercenaries. Prior to Sharaa’s rise, thousands of opposition rebels went to fight wars for opposing sides in Libya. Syrians for Truth and Justice, a rights-monitoring group, documented 2,580 Syrians recruited by Turkey to fight on behalf of Azerbaijan in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict against Armenia.

Whether any have already traveled to Yemen or plan to do so remains unknown, and there is no evidence proving that they have. Fouad Naal is a Sunni imam who spent 21 years in Assad’s prisons after issuing a fatwa in 2004 saying Syrians should not join the fight against Americans in Iraq. “To this day, I have not met or heard of anyone who has actually gone to fight in Yemen,” Naal told Al-Monitor.

“It is true that the Houthis previously supported the former Assad regime in killing the Syrian people and prolonging its existence. However, the current Syrian government is not in the business of fighting other people’s wars. Furthermore, I have not heard of any active recruitment efforts taking place in Syria to send fighters to Yemen again.”

After 13 years of conflict, Syrians are weary of war.

Sharaa, as a young jihadist, was among those who went to fight the US occupation in Iraq, only to be arrested by US forces in 2005. He was released after about five years and returned to Syria, where he joined the fight against Assad.

Today his biggest challenge is to lift his country from the wreckage of that war.