The Army of Glory, formerly the Union of Glory, is a Syrian rebel group affiliated with the Free Syrian Army active in northwestern Syria, mainly in the al-Ghab Plain in northern Hama and its surroundings. Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United States have supplied the group with anti-tank missiles including 9K111 Fagots and BGM-71 TOWs. The group has also expressed its disapproval of international efforts such as the Astana and Sochi agreements for de-escalating the war in Syria, and has opposed Russia's involvement in the war. Jaysh al-Izza also made efforts to join the Turkish-backed National Front for Liberation which includes other prominent Syrian opposition groups in Idlib such as Ahrar al-Sham and the Sham Legion, but did not do so out of complications with the integration about which Jaysh al-Izza's leadership did not elaborate.
History
On 30 September 2015, the first day of the Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War, 2 Russian bombs with 8-10 submunitions struck the group's headquarters and arms depots in a cave in the village of Al-Lataminah in northern Hama. During the 2016 Hama offensive in September 2016, Jaysh al-Izza used a BGM-71 TOW missile to blow up a low-flying Aérospatiale Gazelle helicopter, which they alleged to be Russian. In September 2018, Jaysh al-Izza originally accepted the 2018 Idlib demilitarization brokered by Russia and Turkey, with the group's leadership extending their gratitude to the Turkish President Erdoğan for coordinating the agreement. The group later became hostile to the agreement, however, after it was revealed that Syrian Government and other pro-Assad forces would not be required to withdraw from the DMZ and would instead be responsible for governing the opposition-held areas. On June 8th 2019 Abdel Baset al-Sarout, a senior Jaysh al-Izza commander and key member of the Syrian opposition, died from the wounds he sustained during combat with the Syrian Army two days prior. Following the 2017 Hama offensive, 2017-2018 Northwestern Syria campaign and the subsequent 2019 National Front for Liberation–Tahrir al-Sham conflict, the group's territorial control was confined to the areas around Kafr Zita and Al-Lataminah. Those areas were subsequently captured by the Syrian Army in the 2019 Northwestern Syria offensive, after Jaysh al-Izza, among other rebel groups, withdrew from the region to avoid being encircled by government forces. Pro-government media outlets reported that over 2,000 Jaysh al-Izza members relocated to rebel-held areas around Jisr al-Shughur, after retreating from Northern Hama during the course of the offensive. They further reported that the group had started fighting alongside the Turkistan Islamic Party in Syria. Jaysh al-Izza itself did not comment on the reports. On 9 October 2019, 500 fighters from Jaysh al-Izza, including its deputy commander-in-chief Capt. Manaf Maarati and spokesman Capt. Mustafa Maarati, reportedly defected to the National Front for Liberation. In early November 2019, the Homs al-Adiyyeh Brigade of the Sultan Murad Division of the Syrian National Army defected to Jaysh al-Izza after the unilateral release of several Syrian Army prisoners of war by the Turkish government in the context of the Second Northern Syria Buffer Zone.
