How Syria’s Rebels Aren’t Winning the War: The Anatomy of a Battle

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:30:20 +0300

By Rania Abouzeid/ Southern Idlib Province

The short message screeched over a walkie-talkie, prompting the half a dozen rebels in the room who had been lounging on flat mattresses and drinking tea to jump to their feet, grab their guns and run out of the door. It was almost 7:30 p.m. Ten men in civilian garb had just sneaked out of the Syrian army’s Zahlanee checkpoint some 500 m away from the rebel position, just across an olive grove, and were now moving toward a cave on the outskirts of the grove. The cave had been a rebel position at one point. “They told them not to be late,” the voice over the walkie-talkie said, relaying what he had heard from a transmitter set to intercept Syrian Army communications, “so they’re not defectors. They’re not trying to defect. They’re planning something, but what I don’t know.”

A rebel named Ahmad picked up a BKC machine gun, while others grabbed Kalashnikov rifles. Another rebel, Abu Sammy, manned the 14.5-mm antiaircraft gun mounted on the back of a navy blue pickup truck as his colleagues in the Farouq Brigade bundled into the back. It sped a short distance down a narrow deserted path closer to the Zahlanee checkpoint, one of two key loyalist positions that protect the larger, fortified Wadi Deif military base. (The other is called the Hamidiyeh.) The base is one of the last remaining Syrian military outposts in the vast northern province of Idlib. The rebels have been trying to overrun it since at least October as they try to wrest full control of Idlib. So far, Syria’s rebel forces have not managed to gain full control of any of the country’s 14 provinces.

Dusk was falling and it was raining as the men dismounted and spread out near an abandoned, partially destroyed house near the olive grove. Some of them crouched near herbs planted in rusting 18-liter tins of vegetable oil lined along the patio as the pickup truck maneuvered into position. Abu Sammy fired a volley of shots toward the government soldiers before retreating out of sight, behind the damaged house.

The army’s response was swift: the orange glow of three rounds from what the rebels said was a ZSU-23-4, or Shilka antiaircraft gun, flew over the house, landing in a nearby field. “You pigs!” Ahmad said. Four more bursts from the Shilka whizzed overhead. A few sniper shots crackled. The rebels responded with the 14.5-mm, firing it each time from a different position along the short graveled path. The back and forth continued for half an hour.

“How many suffocated?” Ahmad said into a walkie-talkie, asking his colleague who was listening to the radio chatter of the troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad. (Enemy dead are never “martyred,” they are often “killed” but sometimes described by the less-dignified “suffocated.”)

“They’re calling for the doctor, there are eight wounded,” came the reply.

“Praise be to God. That’s great.”

The night’s tally among the government soldiers was relatively high: five dead, three wounded, according to their radio chatter. It was a small victory for these rebels, who have been holding the line in the devastated, deserted village of Marshamsheh, around the Zahlanee checkpoint, since October. But in the wider war for control of the Wadi Deif base and Idlib province, they are on the back foot.

“Battles are about ebb and flow,” says Hajj Zaki, the Farouq’s commander there. “We don’t want to look at the glass as half-empty.”

On Feb. 6, a coordinated rebel offensive codenamed Marakit il Bina il Marsoos, or the Battle of Reinforced Structures, was unleashed to open all the remaining fronts in Idlib province at around the same time — Wadi Deif, the Karmid checkpoint, the Mastoomeh checkpoint, the Abu Duhoor military airport and the smaller checkpoints associated with these outposts. The plan was then to pivot to take on the regime forces in the provincial capital of Idlib city, and the city of Jisr al-Shughour, the two key urban areas in the province still under the control of forces loyal to Assad.

The attack was the rebels’ second major attempt to snatch the positions and take control of Idlib. But like the first offensive in mid-October, it also soon fizzled.

The rebels’ struggle for Idlib is a microcosm of the battles being played out elsewhere in this more than two-year conflict that has left at least 80,000 people dead and millions more displaced. Although vast swaths of the country, especially across the north, have fallen out of Assad’s control, they are still within the reach of his artillery and warplanes. Government forces appear to be focusing on regaining or maintaining control of key roads and towns near strategic highways, rather than trying to win back all of the lost territory, and on consolidating their hold in the towns and cities they still control. Rebel commanders, meanwhile, are trying to learn the lessons of why their ambitious, province-wide offensive essentially failed.

The reasons are simple and have been replicated on many a battlefield across Syria in this vastly asymmetrical war, yet they also highlight the complexity of the conflict — the difficulty of uniting rebel ranks, the inconsistency of rebel supplies of weapons and ammunition, and the creativity of Syrian army tactics.

“We did what we could with what we had,” says Colonel Afif Suleiman, head of the rebel Free Syrian Army’s Idlib Revolutionary Military Council, from his office in a school in southern Idlib. “Weak means gave us weak results.”

The first step in the multipronged offensive, which took 50 days to prepare according to Suleiman, was to effectively cut the M5 highway at Heesh, a town about 17 km from Wadi Deif. The M5 is a key land supply route used by the Syrian army and is the main artery linking the capital Damascus to the central cities of Homs, Hama and through Idlib further north to Aleppo.

Although stretches of the road were already partially destroyed (usually blown up) by the rebels and rendered impassable, TIME saw rebel preparations in late January to completely cut the M5, and visited sites a few hundred meters from the highway where trenches were being dug to provide cover for rebels to get as close as possible to several stretches of the highway to destroy them. The aim was to maintain and strengthen a months-long siege (which was not airtight at that point) on Wadi Deif and its associated checkpoints.

At first the plan went well, and Assad’s opponents notched up several key wins. The road around Heesh was mined while other stretches were blown up in early February, choking supplies to government troops in Wadi Deif and its associated outposts who had to rely more heavily on air drops from helicopters. Army reinforcements from the south in the form of several columns of tanks as well as convoys of armored vehicles ferrying ammunition were intercepted on the road by rebels and destroyed. The fight around Wadi Deif’s two main defenses, the Zahlanee checkpoint near the village of Marshamsheh and the large Hamidiyeh outpost near the city of Maaret al-Numan, ignited. There were defections, including those of a major and other officers from Wadi Deif. A siege on a nearby military airport of Abu Duhoor was also tightened. 
And then, on the night of April 13 things changed — largely because of an act of subterfuge from government soldiers. The rebels’ fortunes turned at Sahyan, a small town south of the town of Babuleen, not far from Heesh, according to several rebel commanders in the area as well as the military council’s Suleiman. The eastern half of Sahyan was in rebel hands, the western in the regime’s. Government soldiers, under cover of darkness, surrounded eastern Sahyan. They had changed out of their uniforms and had dressed into the mismatched civilian and military garb of many rebel fighters, rebel commanders tell TIME. Some even wore the black headbands proclaiming “There is no God but God” that some rebels wear. “The revolutionaries saw them, and thought they were of them, another group,” Suleiman says. “They were all gunned down, everybody in eastern Sahyan was killed, some 40 or 50 men.” In the Syrian war, the loss of that many fighters in one place represents a significant blow to any rebel unit.

The disguised loyalists continued up the road toward Babuleen, a small rebel-held town just a few kilometers from Heesh, where they waited until dawn, before setting up a similar ambush. “All told we lost between 100 to 107 martyrs,” Suleiman says. “I don’t know how many died from the army, but the fight continued for three or four hours.”

By April 15, the army had taken control of Babuleen, and more crucially, had retaken the road around Heesh, breaking the siege on Wadi Deif and allowing reinforcements to reach Zahlanee, Hamidiyeh and other smaller checkpoints. (The eastern part of Heesh is now inaccessible to the rebels. Their trenches are exposed to newly established nearby army positions that are on higher ground.)

The rebels were reeling, and rather than close ranks and recalibrate, they started blaming each other, including the units that were tasked with securing the eastern part of Sahyan for their perceived laxness. The lack of unity among the ranks of Syrian rebels as a whole has long been a problem that stretches beyond this battle, beyond Idlib and is, in fact, a fundamental challenge to opposition forces.

Their unity, always tenuous, was forged ahead of the battle by a council of religious scholars headed by a cleric from the extremist Jabhat al-Nusra group, which has affirmed its allegiance to al-Qaeda. The council gathered the dozens of various commanders in the area and extracted a pledge of allegiance from each that he would work under its direction, and with his fellow commanders. The accord doesn’t seem to have lasted long.

“The word of religious scholars carries weight with respect to the book and the Sunnah [teachings of the Prophet Muhammad], but they are not able to control the battalions and the large groups,” says the Farouq’s Hajj Zaki. The accord started to fracture within weeks. “It reached a point where their word was no longer heeded on the battlefield.”

The Jabhat al-Nusra sheik heading the council denied that any of the commanders had broken their pledge to coordinate their efforts. “Everybody worked according to his means,” he said, seated on a green mat in the vestibule of his mosque in southern Idlib. Several black Jabhat al-Nusra flags, printed both on cloth and paper, were taped to its walls, alongside large maps of the provinces of Idlib, Hama and Damascus. The sheik would not be drawn on the reasons why the supposedly coordinated battle failed to achieve its aims. “Victory comes from God,” he kept repeating, adding that the rebels must be patient.

Abu Akram, a rebel commander in the city of Maaret al-Numan from the Islamist Suqoor al-Sham brigades who was part of an operations team planning the battle, was a little clearer about the disputes: “The main reason was the lack of supplies, and we started blaming each other and saying ‘so-and-so has more than me, you pledged to work, why aren’t you?’ until it reached the point that Ahrar al-Sham wouldn’t work with the Martyrs of Syria [brigade], and the Martyrs of Syria wouldn’t work except with so-and-so. So we had to end the battle, and plan for a new one.”

The battle — Marakit il Bina il Marsoos — was ended shortly after the success of the government soldiers’ subterfuge in Sahyan, which broke the siege on Wadi Deif and its defenses. Since then, there have been several other smaller offensives against government positions with names like One Body and Repelling the Enemy, but they all failed to dislodge government forces. A new offensive, Retaliation of Banias, is currently under way and focusing on the Karmid checkpoint, a large government outpost from which troops regularly shell surrounding villages in southern Idlib, and the Abu Duhoor military airport, one of the last military airports still in government hands in the area.

Defections around Wadi Deif have decreased since the failed offensive, commanders say, and some lessons learned — about the reliability of certain groups, the fickleness of weapons suppliers, the lack of strategic planning of some commanders — have been noted. “If a commander suggests a plan and it is a failure and illogical, we won’t rely on him again,” says Abu Akram. Other lessons, especially about forging rebel unity, have not been applied. “We talk about Farouq, Suqoor, Martyrs of Syria, all of them are respected, but we are getting caught up in these names and this is affecting things on the ground,” says Hajj Zaki, the Farouq Brigade’s commander along the Zahlanee front. “If we don’t eliminate the names, we cannot learn to be organized, and that’s the truth, even if it hurts.”

Abu Akram, meanwhile, is taking a long-term view of the fight. After Marakit il Bina il Marsoos, the supposedly coordinated battle to wrest control of the province, “the army is as it was, and we are as we were,” he says from his small outpost in the city of Maaret al-Numan. He points to two teenagers in military camouflage seated in the room. “Look, see them, we are preparing them, training them for this fight, so that no matter how long our revolution continues, we are ready.” He points to another of his men: “This young man is now 18,” he says. “When the revolution started two years ago, he was a boy. Now, he mans a Shilka. This is a long fight.”

Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/05/20/how-syrias-rebels-arent-winning-the-war-the-anatomy-of-a-battle/#ixzz2TotbOujJ

In Syria, the Jihadist Campaign for Hearts and Minds

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:17:18 +0300

By Rania Abouzeid / Raqqa

The dusty, battered navy blue Subaru sedan with a blown-out rear window rolled up to the street corner in Raqqa City. The bespectacled Jabhat al-Nusra fighter behind the wheel was five minutes early for our 9 a.m. appointment. Kalashnikov rifle slung across his shoulder, he stepped out of the car to open the front passenger door for me. “Good morning,” the young Syrian said after we were both seated. He placed the Kalashnikov near the gear stick. “Are you scared of me?”

I smiled at his choice of greeting, told him I was not. “Good,” he said, as he unfastened the black headscarf he kept wrapped around his face to conceal his identity. The piece of fabric fell away, revealing a bushy black Salafi-style beard (no mustache) and a broad smile with a gap between his two front teeth. “See, I’m not scary,” he said smiling before securing the scarf back across his face, covering everything but his brown eyes.

Jabhat al-Nusra was one of three Islamist groups that spearheaded the brief battle to capture Raqqa city in early March, making it the first of Syria’s 14 provincial capitals to fall from President Bashar al-Assad’s grip. The Jabhat is an ultraconservative fighting force the U.S. considers a terrorist outfit because of its ties to Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) – links that AQI apparently confirmed in an audio statement on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Jabhat al-Nusra’s emir Abu Mohammad al-Golani said that his group was not consulted ahead of the AQI statement, but he nonetheless pledged his allegiance to Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

We set off on a 45-minute drive out of the city, to see a former senior regime official who had been a mole for Jabhat al-Nusra. He was a judge who passed light sentences on captured rebels, as well as intelligence to Assad’s foes.

Several weeks earlier, the Jabhat fighter and two colleagues had led eight vehicles of fighters, including a truck mounted with a 12.7mm anti-aircraft gun, in a raid deep in Raqqa province on the home the judge had fled to after the rebel victory, the same home we were now heading toward. The judge was detained – like many senior members of the regime in Raqqa city, including the governor and the head of the Ba’ath party who both remain in rebel custody – but the judge was freed shortly after the raid, as soon as his role in aiding the Islamists had been determined.

We stopped at a local patisserie, where the Jabhat fighter – Kalashnikov in hand, scarf across his face – bought several kilos of sticky, syrup-drenched Arabic sweets for the family we were going to see. He hadn’t been back to the home since he’d raided it. “There was a young girl there,” he said of that night as we got back in the car. “She grabbed my legs and said ‘please uncle, don’t take baba [Dad].’ I was really affected by that.”

The sound of the wind rushed in through the blown-out rear window, while Koranic chanting played through the car’s speakers as we drove past small villages dotted among dusty plains and green fields of shin-high wheat crops. The fighter, a 21-year-old former literature student, used to engage in relief work for an Islamist charity before he picked up a gun eight months ago. “A normal person reaches death through life, while the Mujahid [holy warrior] reaches life through death,” he said. “I don’t know who first said that, but I like it. It’s what I believe.”

We reached our destination, a modest single-story gray concrete home whose exterior wasn’t painted. A young girl of about five or six opened the door. She recognized the fighter, despite – or perhaps because of – his face covering. We were led into the sitting room, where her father, an older manwith gray hair in a navy blue tracksuit, was reclining on a thin mattress along a wall. He stood up and greeted his guests, as did his wife, a plump woman in a tight long-sleeved floor-length burgundy dress and a burgundy and lilac headscarf.

They said that the judge and his family — one of four families staying in the five-room home as guests — had left for Hama shortly after the judge was released from the Jabhat’s custody. “That’s a real shame,” the Jabhat fighter said. “I would have liked to talk to him.”

The talk soon turned to the raid, which had begun at 4.30 p.m. in the evening. The parents, including several of their eight young children, sat around the fighter. They asked him his name, where he was from. He declined to tell them, saying only that he was “from God’s country.” He did, however, take off his face covering.

He was the only one of the three men commanding the raid who entered the home that evening. The 40 or so men who had come with him fanned out in the field around it as townsfolk, many armed, made their way toward the men standing around the house. “We could see them coming,” the Jabhat fighter told the family, “we didn’t want a fight.”

“He told me ‘don’t be scared,’” the mother said, referring to the Jabhat fighter, as she served coffee in gold-rimmed cups.

“I told you we were going to take him (the judge), one way or the other, so let me help you,” the fighter said.

“Yes, and then I told you I want to search you, and I did!” she said. “I thought I don’t care, kill me if you want, but I must try and protect my children.”

The fighter said that at that point, he went outside and gave his gun to a colleague, before submitting to the woman’s search. “She even searched my shoes!” he said, as everyone – except the father – laughed.

The judge, who was hiding in a bedroom, didn’t hand himself over, and the family insisted that he wasn’t there. “I gave a promise to the women – there were three, the judge’s wife, she was wearing blue wasn’t she? A policeman’s wife, and you aunty,” the fighter said, gesturing to the mother. “I told you we weren’t going to harm you.”

The mother was feisty, and was doing most of the talking. Her husband seemed nervous as she chided the Jabhat member about a fighter who had shot open a bedroom door, after her teenage daughter couldn’t find the key. “He shouldn’t have done that,” the mother said, “the children were scared for three days after that.”

The Jabhat fighter apologized, and said that the man who shot open the door had been reprimanded because he had broken his commander’s word that there would be no shooting if the judge came peacefully.

A pretty young girl in black track pants and a purple top entered the room. “You’re the one who asked me not to take baba, aren’t you?” the fighter said. She smiled. “Yes, you are Jabhat aren’t you?”

Her name was Noor and she was 11 years old. “He looked friendly from his eyes,” she said, explaining why she had pleaded with an armed man. “I wasn’t scared of him.”

“I was very moved by what you did,” the fighter said, “by your courage to protect your father.”

The fighter told the father that he remembered he did not have a gun in the house, a point the father confirmed. “You should have a gun,” the fighter said.

“If I took out a gun that night, what would have happened?”

“You didn’t, and you shouldn’t have, but you have daughters. It’s not safe.”

The visit was brief, no more than half an hour. The fighter requested a photo with all of the children, and a separate one with Noor, who had clung to his legs that night, pleading for her father’s safety.

“Forgive us sheikh,” the father said, as he walked the fighter to the door.

“We had refugees in the house, the judge was a guest, we feared for him,” the mother said. “I swear, from now on, even if he is my own brother, I won’t let anyone stay with us.”

“I wanted to see the children,” the fighter told the parents, before heading back to the car.

It wasn’t the first time the Jabhat member said he’d returned to see a family in a home he’d raided. He said he hadn’t come back for the man and his wife who had lied to him and said the judge was not in the house. He’d come back for the children. “I tell the guys that we are all ambassadors. I am an ambassador for Jabhat al-Nusra and I am a person who pays more attention to children than adults. A child is the only person who is still innocent,” he said as we headed back to Raqqa City.

“Do you remember when you were a child, if somebody did something bad to you, you remember it,” he said. “What we did that night might change their life, they may never forget it, or it might alter their personality. Now, they will remember that I came back to see them.”

Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/04/10/in-syria-the-jihadist-campaign-for-hearts-and-minds-has-begun/#ixzz2Q4Bl731C

A Black Flag In Raqqa

Tue, 2 Apr 2013 09:55:35 +0300

POSTED BY RANIA ABOUZEID

The young man stood several metres away from the front door he had just knocked on, his back turned to avoid seeing the lady of the house, should she open it.

The man, who was in his twenties, was a part of Jabhat al-Nusra, an ultraconservative armed Syrian Islamist group the United States considers a terrorist organization with links to Al Qaeda. Like many of its members in this city, he wore a black scarf wrapped around his head to conceal his identity; only his brown eyes were visible. He also wore a gray shalwar kameez—common in the subcontinent but not in Syria, though many young militia members have adopted it. The house was where I’d been staying in the city of Raqqa, in north-central Syria; he didn’t know the family—he was there to see me.

In early March, Raqqa city, although relatively late to join the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad, became the first of Syria’s fourteen provincial capitals to fall from his grip. Islamist rebels, spearheaded by Jabhat al-Nusra, the Salafi Ahrar al-Sham brigades, and the Jabhat al-Wahda al-Tahrir al-Islamiya (a grouping of some two dozen battalions), had won the battle for the city. These groups all operate outside the broad umbrella of the more secular, often more disorganized, and sometimes undisciplined rebel Free Syrian Army.

Two men in their twenties, called Abu Noor and Abu Abdullah, answered, then called me to the door to greet the man from Jabhat. We stood in the stairwell of the apartment building chatting for a few minutes, and then Abu Abdullah went inside and came back with a flyer bearing Jabhat’s name. It called for replacing the tri-starred flag used by Assad’s opponents since the uprising’s earliest days with a black one bearing the words of the Muslim shahada (“There is no god but God and Muhammad is His messenger”).

“What is this?” Abu Abdullah asked the young Jabhat member. “We were just talking about it, we don’t like it.”
The Jabhat member, who was unarmed, smiled through his face covering. “And what don’t you like about it?” he said. “We are all Muslims, so what is the problem with a flag that bears the shahada?”

“We are not all Muslims,” Abu Noor said. “You and I are but there are Christians here, too. You have insulted them. And besides, what gives you the right to change the symbol of the revolution?”

“We protected the churches,” the Jabhat member said, referring to the city’s two churches, which were left unscathed in the Islamist rebel takeover of the capital. “Let’s not talk out here,” he added. “The neighbors will hear us. Do you have coffee?”

The men walked into the formal living room of the modest five-room apartment. Two older gray-haired men, Abu Moayad and Abu Mohammad, rose from sky-blue couches to greet their guest.

For the next few hours, the men engaged in a combative and highly charged discussion. It was about the black banner, but more than that about the direction the Syrian uprising has taken. The men of the house feared that it had been hijacked by Islamists, led by Jabhat al-Nusra, who saw the fall of the regime as the first step in transforming Syria’s once-cosmopolitan society into a conservative Islamic state. All four men said they wanted an Islamic state, but a moderate one.

A few days earlier, a massive black flag bearing the shahada had been hoisted atop a flagpole in Raqqa city’s main square, in front of the elegant, multi-arched governorate building. “We will become a target for American drone attacks because of the flag—it’s huge,” said Abu Noor, a wiry young man who worked in a pharmacy by day and at night volunteered to guard the post office near his home against looters. “They’ll think we’re extremist Muslims!” (There haven’t been such strikes in Syria yet, though the possibility is much discussed here.)

“There is no moderate Islam or extremist Islam,” the Jabhat member said calmly. “There is only Islam, and Islam is under attack in the West regardless of whether or not we hoist the banner. Do you think they’re waiting for that banner to hit us?” he said.

Abu Mohammad, an older man in a tan leather jacket and a white galabia (a loose, floor-length robe), interjected: “What we’re saying is, put the flag above your outposts, not in the main square of the city. We all pray, we all say, ‘There is no god but God,’ but I will not raise this flag.”

“This is an insult to people who died for the revolutionary flag,” said Abu Abdullah, a former English major at the university.
“We are not forcing anything on anyone,” the Jabhat member said. “We offered it as a choice. We did not take down the revolutionary flags in the city—even though we could have.”

Outside, the night air was cool. Warplanes that had been continuously rumbling over the city during the day had retreated, prompting bakeries, shuttered because of the threat of air strikes, to open. Long queues, segregated by gender, quickly formed as night fell, just as they did every night, guarded by armed men with black scarves covering their heads and faces.
“With this banner you have cleaved us from our country Syria,” Abu Moayad said. “Why is it here? We are not an Islamic emirate; we are part of Syria. This is a religious banner, not a country’s flag.”

The Jabhat member leaned forward and looked the older man in the eyes. “This is a lack of self-esteem, something we were conditioned to feel toward our religion by a regime that didn’t let us practice it,” he said. “Do you know how many people a day come to offer loyalty to us, to try and join us?”

At that, Abu Moayad lost his temper. He stood up, moved a few steps across the room toward the young masked man, and wagged a finger in his face: “The Syrian revolution rose up to step on Bashar’s neck, but I swear I am with Bashar against this flag!” he yelled. “That is how strongly I feel about it! You are causing fitna [internal divisions]!”
The young man remained seated. “What did you do for the revolution?” he asked.

“I used to transport ammunition smuggled from Iraq to towns in Raqqa province.”

“That’s great, thank you,” said the Jabhat member. He seemed slightly taken aback by an answer he didn’t appear to have expected. “But why do you say that this flag will cause fitna and all of the problems of the Free Army—the thieving and the looting—aren’t fitna?”

The comment only enraged Abu Moayad. “Whoever wrote this is a Zionist!” he said, grabbing the black-banner leaflet out of Abu Noor’s hands.

Things quickly escalated. “You have blasphemed because you accused somebody of being an infidel!” the Jabhat member said, raising his voice for the first time. “I know the man who made this flyer; he is not an infidel!”

“God will judge me, not you!” Abu Moayad said. “How old are you anyway? I can’t tell with that scarf covering your face.” He continued: “Where are you from? I don’t want to know your name or see your face, but where are you from?”

“I am a son of Syria,” the young man said.

A charge of blasphemy is no small matter, and this one was levelled by a member of Jabhat al-Nusra. Abu Moayad sunk back into his armchair. One of the men cracked open a window. Another went to check if the coffee was ready. Still, it was the Jabhat member who calmed things down.

“Do you want the Koran to be the constitution in a future state?” he asked the room. All the men said they did.

“We just don’t want fitna,” Abu Mohammad said quietly.

“If Jabhat causes fitna, I will leave it, but it is not,” the young man said.

“I apologize for all of this. We are angry,” a chastened Abu Moayad said.

“It’s okay, but I tell you that you haven’t convinced me of your arguments.”

“I’m telling you that you will lose all the support you have because of this flag,” Abu Mohammad said.

Coffee was served, along with pitted dates on small round plates. Abu Mohammad reached into his tan leather jacket for a pack of cigarettes. He asked the Jabhat member if he could smoke in his presence (many ultraconservatives like the Jabhat consider smoking a sin). The masked young man made a small hand gesture that meant “Go ahead.”

The talk shifted to the men they all knew from various brigades, Islamist and otherwise: where they were fighting, who had been killed, and who had switched battalions.

“Look, mistakes happen,” said the young masked man. “We weren’t all trained. I was a student before all of this.”

He still hadn’t touched the dates or even the coffee he had requested. “You’re going to starve to death if you keep wearing that thing,” Abu Mohammad said, referring to the black scarf. All the men laughed, including the Jabhat member—but he did not, at any time during the evening, take it off.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/04/the-black-flag-of-raqqa.html#ixzz2PNj1Bbp6

In Syria, the Rebels Have Begun to Fight Among Themselves

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 23:10:24 +0200

By Rania Abouzeid / Tal Abyad

The day started like a regular Sunday for Mohammad al-Daher, better known as Abu Azzam, the commander of the rebel Farouq Brigades in the vast swathe of eastern Syria called the Jazira, a region that stretches from the Turkish border to the Iraqi frontier and encompasses the three provinces of Raqqa, Hasaka, and Deir Ezzor. He had a series of meetings in the morning in a number of locations in the bustling town of Tal Abyad on Syria’s border with Turkey as well as in the partially destroyed former police station that is the Farouq’s headquarters. And he was going to visit his mother.

By late-afternoon, however, the burly 34-year-old Raqqa native would be lying in a hospital bed – wounded by members of the ultraconservative Islamist group Jabhat al-Nusra (which the U.S considers a terrorist organization with links to Al-Qaeda). Abu Azzam’s targeting has blown open a sharp rift and long-brewing conflict between the more-secular nationwide Farouq brigades and the Jabhat. The two groups are among the most effective, best organized and most well-known of the many military outfits aligned against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — and the fight between them is just beginning.

Farouq has the upper hand in Tal Abyad, which lies opposite the Turkish city of Akçakale. It snatched the border crossing from Assad’s forces on Sept. 19, 2012, much to the chagrin of a number of other rebel groups – both secular units under the loose banner of the Free Syrian Army, as well as Islamist groups operating independently. It’s not the only border post controlled by the Farouq. The gateway to Idlib province, Bab al-Hawa, near the Turkish city of Reyhanli, is also in their hands. The Jahbhat, on the other hand, were at the forefront of taking Raqqa City, further to the south, the first provincial capital tofall to any rebel force.

By mid-afternoon, Abu Azzam stopped in to see his mother, Em Mohammad, in her modest first-floor apartment a short walk from the Farouq base. The young man stooped to kiss her right hand, he put his forehead to it before kissing her cheeks and embracing her warmly. “Finally, I see you!” she told him, gently scolding her son as he sat beside her. “You know the last time I saw him he was like this,” Em Mohammad said, picking up Abu Azzam’s two cell phones, holding one to each ear and pretending to issue orders into them, interspersing the talk of weapons and requests for battle updates with “Hi mother, how are you, how is your health?” The half a dozen men in the room all laughed. “I’m sorry,” Abu Azzam told his mother, “but what can I do?”

Turkish coffee was served in delicate thin-handled china cups. On this day Abu Azzam wasn’t in his unit’s military uniform. He was dressed in indigo jeans, a dark green crew-neck sweater, a black leather jacket and navy boat shoes. He has a Salafi-style black beard (without a mustache) that he frequently tugs at, and a smile so broad and disarming that it seems like it takes up his whole face.

He reached for his pack of Winston Silver cigarettes, before turning to his mother, a feisty, friendly woman in a long black dress and powder blue headscarf whom he bore a striking resemblance to. “Just so you don’t hear it elsewhere, they planted an (improvised explosive) device in my car yesterday,” he told her. Em Mohammad put her hand up to her mouth. She had lost Abu Hussein, the second of her three sons, on Feb. 20 in the battles for Raqqa province. He was also a member of the Farouq, a father of two little girls, and now her eldest son was telling her he was targeted. “May God protect you,” she told him.

“Nobody dies before his time,” Abu Azzam said, repeating a common Arabic phrase. In a chilling premonition of what would happen just a few hours later, he said: “I know that I am going to be killed either by the regime or by the Jabhat. There is no difference, they are both dirty.”

The IED consisted of several sticks of TNT wired to the ignition of a BMW vehicle Abu Azzam often travels in. A neighbor alerted the Farouq leader to the presence of the device.

Seated on the floor, Abu Azzam rattled off a laundry list of towns and cities he said the Farouq helped clear of Assad’s forces. “What did they liberate?” he said of the Jabhat. “They are just here to try and impose their rules on us.” He held up his cigarette: “They threatened to label me a kafir (unbeliever or apostate) because of this,” he said. (Some ultraconservatives consider smoking a sin.)

Some of the men in the room who had just returned from Raqqa city, relayed details of the Jabhat’s smear campaign there against Abu Azzam and the Farouq. “They’re calling us Farouq sarouk,” one said (Sarouk roughly translated in this context means thief). “Some of them say that we are non-believers.”

It’s not the first time Abu Azzam has clashed with conservative Islamists. Before taking Tal Abyad, he was in charge of the Bab al-Hawa crossing hundreds of kilometers away. A Syrian Islamist extremist called Abu Mohamad al-Absi, who led a group of foreign jihadis who at one point controlled one of Bab al-Hawa’s two gates, wanted to raise the black banner over the border crossing, something Abu Azzam opposed. Absi was kidnapped and killed in September 2012, most likely by the Farouq although they haven’t admitted it. The Jihadis retaliated in early January, killing Abu Azzam’s successor at Bab al-Hawa, Abu Ali. In several meetings with TIME over the past year, Abu Azzam has repeatedly said that the Farouq will not allow Islamic extremists to “hijack” the revolution.

There was a knock at the door. A religious cleric with a long gray beard, in a flowing white galabiya (a loose, floor-length robe) and a vest over it, entered the house. Em Mohammad and most of the men in the room were asked to sit inanother room while Abu Azzam met the man. “Please wait with the chief of staff,” Abu Azzam said laughing, referring to his mother. Other men in the Farouq jokingly call Em Mohammad “Anissa,” after Bashar Assad’s mother Anissa, a woman who some say acts as her son’s key advisor, and is even the real power behind the regime. That Em Mohammad is respected among the Farouq for her warmth, savviness and strength is without question, and those qualities would soon come to the fore in the hours ahead.

The meeting was brief and the sheikh didn’t stay for lunch, which was placed on a black plastic sheet on the floor as is customary. Store-bought kebabs, grilled tomatoes and green peppers, as well as minted yoghurt were laid out. Flat Arabic bread was passed around. “This is the first thing I’ve eaten all day,” Abu Azzam said. It was almost 4.30pm.

The three men seated around him, Bandar, Ramadan and Badr, were all old friends from the central city of Homs who studied at the university there. The four men all lived together before the Syrian revolution. When the uprising became armed, Abu Azzam, a fourth-year Arabic literature student living in the city, joined the Farouq as did most of his friends.

The Farouq Brigades emerged from Homs and nearby Rastan just months into the Syrian uprising, now two years old. In the period since, operating under the FSA umbrella, they have formed units across the country, from Daraa in the south near the Jordanian border to the northern region bordering Turkey. The brigades take the name Farouq from Omar bin al-Khatab, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad, political architect of the caliphate and, historically, the second Caliph.

The men recalled their university days with laughter. The mood was light. “I’ve lost so much weight in this revolution,” Bandar said laughing. “Do you remember how we used to cook in Homs?” Abu Azzam’s specialty was molokhia, green leaves that are carefully picked and turned into a viscous green soup served with chicken and plain rice.

Ramadan recounted an incident that had happened earlier in the day in Raqqa city that TIME also witnessed. He had stopped at a street-side coffee stall in his white pick-up truck which has a black flag bearing the Muslim Shahada (There is no god but God and Mohammad is his prophet) mounted on it. Three teenage girls walked past, two in hijabs, tight jeans and figure-hugging sweaters that extended to their thighs, the third in a black abaya. The third girl looked at the armed men in the truck and brazenly took off her abaya. Under it, she was dressed like her friends. “She must have thought we were Jabhat because of the flag and wanted to make a point!” Ramadan said, “so I turned up the music so she would know that we weren’t.” He continued proudly: “See, this is Raqqa, and the Jabhat thinks it’s going to control it?”

Lunch was cleared and the men said their goodbyes. Abu Mansour, Abu Azzam’s deputy who is also his cousin, walked into the room, bid his cousin farewell and told him he was going to check on his family just across the border in the Turkish town of Akçakale.

Abu Mansour walked the short distance home. His niece had just served steaming hot Turkish coffee but before Abu Mansour could take a sip, one of his two cellphones rang. “What! Where are you? I’m coming now!” he said into the phone before jumping up, shoving his local Alhamraa cigarettes and his phones into his leather jacket and rushing out the door. It was a little before 5pm and Abu Azzam had just been shot.

Minutes earlier, on the other side of the border, Abu Azzam had also received a phone call, from one of his men. The Jabhat had set up a random checkpoint at a spot dubbed “Liberation Roundabout” on the main road in Tal Abyad and were detaining Farouq fighters and trying to disarm them. A few days earlier, 11 Farouq men were picked up by the Jabhat in town.

Abu Azzam grabbed a BKC machine gun and ran out of the door to intercede on behalf of his men. According to Em Mohammad, he didn’t ask any of his men to come with him but two followed him anyway. He had just reached the roundabout and stepped out of his car when a member of the Jabhat reportedly tossed a hand grenade in his direction before others opened fire. The melee was over within minutes, and Abu Azzam, as well as several other wounded men, were being ferried by passers-by to the border crossing into Turkey, where Abu Mansour was waiting to rush his bloodied commander in a taxi to the local hospital in Akçakale.

The hospital foyer was crowded with unarmed Farouq fighters in plainclothes, as well as others. Em Mohammad paced up and down. She was carrying a blue garbage bag containing her son’s clothes. She held up his indigo jeans. They were bloodied and there was a tear above the right knee.

Abu Azzam was shot in the left side of his abdomen, both his hands were bandaged and he sufferd shrapnel wounds to both legs, as well as above his right eye. One of the Farouq men’s phone rang. “Don’t do anything until we get men and ammunition,” he told the caller. “Calm down! Calm the men down! Here, speak to Em Mohammad and do whatever she says.”

Em Mohammad took the phone. “Please, you are all my sons. This is not the time for rash decisions. We must be smart. Calm down. We are all angry. This has become personal but we don’t want unnecessary loss of life. Please calm the men down, I’m counting on you.”

Abu Azzam was wheeled into the nearby X-ray room. His mother leaned forward gently through the crowd to cover his naked shoulder with the pale mauve sheet. One of the two Farouq fighters was lying on a gurney in the emergency room. He looked to be about 20 years old and was dressed in military camouflage pants and an aqua t-shirt. He had a shrapnel wound to his left ankle, which was bandaged. Tears welled in his eyes. “They shot Abu Azzam!” he said, before asking one of his colleagues for water, a request denied on doctor’s orders. “Then let me go back out there and fight!” he said. “Let me fight them!” he said, crying.

A gurney with a pale mauve sheet covering a dead man was wheeled out of the emergency room into the foyer, and toward the elevator to be taken to the morgue. The crowd in the foyer gathered around it as the sheet was lifted to reveal the man’s face. he had shoulder-length hair, and also looked to be in his early 20s. Em Mohammad and members of the Farouq didn’t recognize him, but a short man with a closely-cropped graying beard did. The dead man was a member of Jabhat al-Nusra, the short man claimed, before offering the dead man’s name. Em Mohammad started crying. “He’s so young, may God rest his soul,” she said, a generous sentiment given that the man had apparently just tried to kill her son.

Soon after, another dead man was also wheeled out, also identified by the short man as a member of Jabhat al-Nusra. “They have eyes and ears everywhere,” Em Mohammad said, referring to the short man. There were other characters in the foyer, men who were identified to TIME as Turkish intelligence agents. By 6 p.m., four policemen were guarding the entrance of the hospital and using a hand-held metal detector to check everyone coming through the doors.

Abu Azzam was to be transferred to a bigger hospital in Sanliurfa some 53 kilometers away. He let out a cry of pain as he was wheeled into a waiting ambulance. A thin stream of fresh blood escaped from under the large bandage over his right eye. (As of Tuesday, the Farouq commander was still in hospital, under Turkish guard, in a stable condition.)

Later on Sunday night, Abu Azzam’s sister and other female relatives crossed into Turkey in the dark, along with their children. They were taken to Abu Mansour’s home. Two Farouq men sat outside the front door, guarding it although they were both unarmed. One, a man in a black and gray tracksuit, sat on the stairs. With deep sadness, he said that the day’s events had made him want to forget about the revolution. “If this is what it has come to – to us fighting each other – then I want to sit at home and support Bashar,” he said. His view was not shared by most of the Farouq who were itching for a fight.

By Monday, no fewer than five Farouq liwas (or brigades although the term doesn’t strictly correlate to a brigade in the modern military sense) were on their way to Tal Abyad from the provinces of Aleppo and Idlib. There have been clashes in Tal Abyad between the two groups although by Monday afternoon the border crossing was reopened.

Abu Mansour, Abu Azzam’s deputy, said the Jabhat approached him and requested that the matter between the two groups be resolved in a Sharia court. As a goodwill gesture, they released 11 Farouq fighters as well as 22 others they had picked up earlier. They were also forced to retreat out of the various positions they occupied in Tal Abyad to their main base in the town. “The problem is that they have forgotten that we are all fighting Bashar,” Abu Mansour said of the Jabhat. “They want an Islamic emirate. They say that they are Islamists and we are apostates, but we will not accept that they have any sway or authority over us or others. May God heal Abu Azzam, that is the main thing, but in every province now, we will fight them.”

Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/03/26/in-syria-the-rebels-have-begun-to-fight-among-themselves/#ixzz2OgOPdTOg

How Islamist Rebels in Syria Are Ruling a Fallen Provincial Capital

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 00:50:29 +0200

By Rania Abouzeid / Raqqa City

Raqqa City was once dubbed the “hotel of the revolution” because it became home to hundreds of thousands of people displaced from fighting elsewhere who sought refuge in a place considered firmly in the grip of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Earlier this month, however, the city in north central Syria, which was late to the anti-government revolt, became known for something else: It is the first and only provincial capital that Assad’s regime has completely lost—with the rebels taking control of it within the span of a week.

The regime will likely lose the entire province within days. There are only three remaining regime outposts in this vast eastern tribal area that extends all the way to the Turkish border: there’s Division 17 a few kilometers outside the city; the military airport at Tabqa about 40-to-50 kilometers away, and Brigade 93 in Ain Issa, some 70 kilometers away. All three positions are under heavy rebel attack and government counter-attack.

But here in Raqqa city, some 100 kilometers from the Turkish border crossing of Tal Abyad, the scars of war are faint. Warplanes still rumble in the air, mainly to aid the men besieged in Division 17, but, despite reports from earlier in the month, airstrikes and artillery shelling in the city are now rare.

The dusty streets are swept clean, unlike so many other areas in Syria where the state’s power has collapsed along with its services, and festering piles of fly-ridden garbage crowd the streets. The power outages are brief in most parts of the city although there have been days-long blackouts in areas around some damaged government buildings. The mobile phone service ceased a few days ago but the landlines still work. There is fresh fruit and meat in the markets (albeit at inflated prices), and most of the stores along the main thoroughfare of Tal Abyad street are open, selling everything from carpets and women’s clothing to hardware and leather shoes. There are, however, long lines of people outside the bakeries, which only operate at night because Assad’s warplanes generally don’t fly in the dark. (In other parts of Syria, people waiting outside bakeries during the day have been the victims of air strikes.)

Perhaps what is most striking is that only a handful of the sand-colored flat-roofed three and four story buildings in this city have been damaged by fighting–or its aftermath. Even some of Bashar Assad’s portraits remain in place. There’s one on the outer facade of the office of the Agricultural Worker’s Union, another on the civil engineering faculty as well as a two-starred Syrian regime flag flitting above the three-story women’s hospital. (The secularist rebels have a three-starred flag; the Islamist have variations of a black banner with Koranic script.)

According to the locals, the battle here was brief. It started in earnest at dawn on March 2. Regime forces positioned in the five checkpoints ringing Raqqa City either retreated into the city or were overrun within a day or so. Several security outposts inside the city were also abandoned, the men inside fleeing to either the military or the political security branches, the two sites that saw fierce clashes which nonetheless only lasted three days. The governor and the local head of the ruling Ba’ath party were both detained. By March 7, Raqqa city had fallen to the rebels.

So far, the city has avoided the disorder of a post-regime security vacuum. Very few homes were looted. The banks and the money in them have been secured, while government and security offices were not ransacked, and the paperwork within them not burned. Instead the files have been collected and are being studied. The city’s two churches in this majority Sunni Muslim area are untouched and protected, although the townsfolk speak of Alawites being killed just for being Assad’s co-religionists.

So why and how did this happen in Raqqa? Put simply, it’s because the regime had diluted its forces here, deploying them to other parts of the country, and because the forces aligned against Assad were mainly Islamists, largely outside the broad umbrella of the more secular, loosely organized, and in some cases poorly disciplined Free Syrian Army (FSA).

The offensive was spearheaded by Jabhat al-Nusra (which the U.S considers a terrorist group with ties to al-Qaeda), the Salafist Ahrar al-Sham brigade and Jabhat al-Wahda al-Tahrir al-Islamiya (a grouping of some two dozen battalions)–all non-FSA groups who prefer the term Mujahedin (holy warriors) to revolutionaries, the label many FSA use to describe themselves.

A special unit of Ahrar al-Sham called Liwa Omana al Raqqa (or the Brigade of Security for Raqqa) was tasked with securing government installations after they fell, protecting public and private property and maintaining services to the city. The unit was specifically formed with this aim, according to its commander, Abu Tayf, a history graduate who used to work in real estate. “We had sleeper cells inside the city for a long time. When we entered the city, they rose and implemented the plan,” he says. “The project was devised a long time ago.”

There are also spray-painted messages around the city warning against theft. “A thief’s hand will be cut. Signed Jabhat al-Nusra” is plastered in many places, including outside the Real Estate Bank, which like the other banks in the city, is guarded by Nusra.

Several commanders of various Islamist units said they prevented some FSA units from entering the city, either during or after the battle, because they feared they might be more interested in looting than fighting. In at least one instance, an FSA unit was turned away by force, after an exchange of gunfire. “We did not forbid the free army, we forbade people who we suspected wanted to cause trouble in the city,” says Dr. Samer, “emir” of Jabhat al-Wahda al-Tahrir al-Islamiya who formerly went by the nom de guerre Abu Hakam. “I’m talking about certain individuals or battalions, but we don’t forbid people from Jihad.”

Dr. Samer, a 32 year-old physician who was studying to be a surgeon before the rebellion began, cuts an imposing figure in his full military uniform, black boots and black beret. He wears his bushy black beard in the manner of a Salafi (without a mustache) and although he used the Islamist term “emir” rather than commander to describe himself, he smokes Gauloises blondes–unlike ultraconservative Muslims like Jabhat al-Nusra who forbid the practice. The doctor appeared in an amateur video posted shortly after the city’s fall. In it, he’s seated on a couch between Raqqa’s governor and the local Ba’ath party leader, two men who remain in rebel detention. “That was filmed upstairs,” Dr. Samer says, referring to the video.

His unit is now based in the governor’s home, a palatial mansion that could rival any of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s. No less than seven green-hued chandeliers hang from the dining room ceiling. There’s a sauna and a steam room. The gilded bust of former Syrian President Hafez Assad that once adorned the spacious marble-tiled entrance now sits outside the house’s high black-and-gold metal gate. “Tyrant” is spray painted in blue across its head. Yet little else seems to have been removed. The china and crystal glassware remain in their cabinets, tapestries still hang from the walls, and furniture remains in its place.

“The governor will be treated as he deserves,” Dr. Samer says. “He is being interrogated. His positives will be weighed against his negatives and he will be treated according to Shari’a [law].” The doctor would not say if he still has the two regime men, or if they’ve been handed over to Jabhat al-Nusra, which is more likely. However, he said he is prepared to consider a prisoner swap: “We are ready if the regime wants to do something, we will consider it, for the sake of not spilling blood.”

There are other prisoners too. There were at least 140 with the doctor’s unit according to his military spokesman, Abu Abdullah, although 40 were released. The others, who are mainly soldiers and security men, await trial in Shari’a courts.
That Islamists now run this city is unmistakable. On Thursday, a massive black flag bearing the Islamic Shahada (“There is No God but God and Mohammad is his Messenger”) was hoisted atop a flagpole in the square in front of the elegant multi-arched Governorate building, near a fallen bronze statue of Hafez Assad in tribal garb. “Tomorrow will be better” is spray-painted along the statue’s back, but not all of Raqqa’s residents think so. Even those who want an Islamic state–which appears to be a clear majority–are wary of what seems to be Jabhat’s version of it.

The Islamists have maintained order, protected property and set up a Hayaa Shariyaa (Shari’a Association) to hear court cases and establish religious classes among other duties. They are working to get civil institutions up and running. In one letter dated March 17, Jabhat al-Nusra said it “invites” former civil servants to return to work. It was signed by the group’s emir in Raqqa, “Your brother in Jabhat al-Nusra, Abu Saad al-Hadrame.” The groups are also looking at how to secure salaries.

But the Jabhat has distributed other pamphlets too, including one a few days ago that called for replacing the tri-starred revolutionary flag with the Islamist black one. “Yes to choosing that the [black] banner ….. be the flag of the Syrian revolution and Syria.” It upset a fair number of people, some of whom simply want a civil state. Others feared that it would serve as an excuse for the regime to brand the city’s residents as extremists, or place Raqqa on a list the U.S. is allegedly putting together of Islamist targets in Syria for potential drone strikes.

At least a few hundred publicly protested against the raising of the black flag in the square outside the governorate, while others complained inside the privacy of their homes. “We all pray, we all say ‘There is no God but God,’ but I will not raise this flag,” an older man said. “Are they trying to breakaway from Syria? From the country of Syria? That [black] flag doesn’t represent me,” said another. “This is an insult to people who died for the revolutionary flag,” one young man said.

Another pamphlet pictorially depicts what is considered appropriate dress for Muslim women. Some of the Muslim women in the city wear jeans, tight shirts, and hijabs although most wear abayas out in public. According to the pamphlet, trousers are out, as are wrist-to-ankle abayas (or black cloaks) that come in at the hip, or buttoned up wrist-to-ankle overcoats that suggest a hip or shoulders. The only form of dress with a green tick beside it is an amorphous cloak of black material and a waist-length headscarf that also completely covers a women’s face. On a recent afternoon, five women passed around the pamphlet, before derisively dismissing it. “I won’t cover my face regardless of what happens!” said one. “This is our clothing,” said another, pointing to her long-sleeved, ankle length, emerald green dress and lilac headscarf. “What’s wrong with this?”

For their part, the Jabhat and other Islamists say that nothing will be forced, and that they are merely presenting their ideas and offering a choice. “We, in Shari’a, do not have something called an infidel dress code and a believer’s dress code,” says Sheikh Abu Ali, who is at once part of Omana al-Raqqa (Ahrar al-Sham) as well as a Shari’a official in Jabhat al-Nusra in Raqqa. “Our guide is that a woman should not dress in a way to entice a man.” Regarding whether a woman should cover her face, he said the issue was undecided among religious scholars. “Islam in the Levant was not and will not be anything except a moderate Islam,” the sheikh says, adding that Christian women could wear what they wanted, as long as they did not “entice men.”

“We proselytize, and try to raise people’s awareness about Islam but we will not force anything on anyone. There are a lot of women around here who are in trousers, tight trousers, but all we can do is teach and invite.” Directing his remarks to me, he continued, “You are a woman and you are sitting here with us. As long as you are respectful, there is no problem.”
All of the key Mujahedin commanders in the city seem cognizant of the need to avoid antagonizing the local population, and know that Raqqa will be a test case in the new Syria. “Raqqa today is under the microscope,” says Abu Tayf. “If civil peace prevails, we will be an example for others to follow but if we fail people might even turn away from the idea of liberation.”

Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/03/23/how-islamist-rebels-in-syria-are-ruling-a-fallen-provincial-capital/#ixzz2OV67FjZE

Two Years Later: What the Syrian War Looks Like

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:06:00 +0200

Posted by Rania Abouzeid

Two years ago, Syria was a very different place. In early March, 2011, a group of boys in the southern city of Daraa brazenly scribbled graffiti criticizing Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria. The words included the mantra of revolution that had ricocheted from Tunisia to Egypt, from Yemen to Bahrain: “The people want the fall of the regime.” The authorities’ response was as swift as it was predictable: the boys were detained and tortured.

On March 15, 2011, some people in Daraa took to the streets to demand the boys’ release. There were also small demonstrations in other parts of Syria, including in the capital city, Damascus, where rumblings of discontent had slowly become more pronounced over the preceding weeks. Those demonstrations were the beginning.

Two years later, Syria is at war. What does the Syrian war look like? It looks like shells that crash and thud and thump into residential streets, sometimes with little warning. It looks like messy footprints in a pool of blood on a hospital floor as armed local men, many in mismatched military attire and civilian clothing, rush in their wounded colleagues, or their neighbors.

It’s a hospital foyer bursting with armed men trying to find out who is hurt, who is dead, and what is happening. A young boy and a girl, siblings, covered in a fine dust. They’re hurriedly patched up and walked out of the hospital to make way for a stream of others. The Syrian war sounds like women asking about their sons.

And it sounds like a hospital generator that hums and sputters and cuts out because there’s no diesel to run it, or because the diesel is too expensive. A doctor pauses, waiting for the power to come back on, before he resumes stitching the scalp at the base of a little girl’s skull. There’s no anesthetic. Her short, curly black hair is still in pigtails, tied with pink bands. Her name is Tala, and she is screaming for her mother. Her father hurriedly pulls aside the blood-spattered green curtain that delineates the tiny consulting room from a slightly larger one, where an elderly man and a woman are lying on the blood-streaked floor. They are bleeding into the floor, creating new pools of blood. Médecins Sans Frontières says that medical structures are targeted and destroyed and that health-care workers are killed for doing their job, creating the need for secret field clinics that are usually poorly stocked.

The Syrian war looks, too, like dusty shoes spilling out of a cardboard box by the open door of a deserted, partially destroyed home in a town that, like many, is devoid of civilians. The box is near a child’s black-ink drawing on the wall, of a helicopter. There are a little girl’s white sneakers with blue butterflies near a woman’s black wedge-heeled slipper, a man’s lace-up dress shoes, and a toddler’s orange patent-leather sandals. Things are in their place; their owners are gone. It also looks like things that are out of place, like a kitchen sink in somebody’s grassy, rubble-carpeted garden. The Syrian war looks like the millions of people who have become refugees or are internally displaced. It looks like others who say they’d rather die in their homes than live off of handouts in a tent.

What does the Syrian war look like? It looks like significant number of people who, for reasons of ideology or patronage or fear, believe that Assad’s regime the best option. It looks like a growing number of people, even those within the rebel ranks, who eye the increasing clout of Jihadists and other Islamists and fear what they may turn Syria into.
What does the Syrian war sound like? It sounds like the women of an extended family, aunts and sisters, mothers and grandmothers, sitting in a room where thin mattresses line the walls, discussing what kind of a Syria they want to live in. They’re in darkness because there’s no electricity.

Mayada, a young, strong-willed, English-literature major, says that, in her heart, she wants an Islamic state, but she recognizes that in Syria, a multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian society, that is unlikely. She says an Islamic state would be “more just.” Her aunt Sarea, who is just a few years older than her, snickers at her remarks. She won’t live in an Islamic state, she says. Unless that state is modelled on Turkey, it’ll be an excuse to lock women up in their homes.

The two women debate the issue for hours, and others chime in. In the end, they agree that an Islamic state is not the best option—not because Islam doesn’t grant rights to women but because the male clerics who interpret the religion cannot be trusted.

What does the Syrian war look like? It looks like armed men with little accountability. It looks like the amateur video of a local character known as the Yellow Man of Aleppo, an eccentric older man decked out in yellow, from his ivy cap to his shoes, being humiliated by young thugs who belong to a unit of the Free Syrian Army in the northern city. They accuse him of being a government spy, a fassfoos, in the local slang.

They spit on him, tell him to bark like a dog, make him repeat vulgarities about Assad’s female relatives. “Take a picture of me pulling his mustache,” a young, smiling, fresh-faced rebel tells the camera. They take turns plucking out hairs from his graying blond mustache. “Are you Sunni?” the cameraman asks the Yellow Man. “Do you like Alawites or do you hate them?” he asks, referring to the sect that Assad belongs to. “I hate them,” the Yellow Man replies. “Liar!” one of the young men says as he slaps the old man’s face. Some men may become what they are fighting.

What does the Syrian war look like? It looks like another amateur video, taken from the other side of this increasingly intractable divide. A man, bloodied and beaten, hands tied behind his back, is dragged along the gritty asphalt by uniformed, armed government soldiers. He’s wearing nothing but his white underwear. He cannot even lift his head, which scrapes along the street. He turns onto his back. “Where are your wife and children?” one of his tormentors asks, stepping on the man’s face with his black boot. Somebody asks for a piece of glass to cut the man’s tongue out. They curse him, mock him, and laugh as they torment him.

“For God’s sake, please, just let me say goodbye to my children,” the man says, knowing that his end is near. His face is swollen, bloodied. “Will you let me fuck your wife?” one of his tormentors asks, mockingly. “If you let me, you can see your children.” “No,” the man says, “my wife is my soul, my children are my soul. My wife is the crown on my head.”
“The crown on your head?” He kicks the man’s head. Others laugh as they continue dragging him along the street, trying to decide where to dump him.

This is what the Syrian war looks like. Every man with a gun is an authority, and for some the enemy—who was once their neighbor—is no longer a person. How can a man who has inflicted such harm, and become used to that sort of power, let it go and step back—especially if others do not?

What does the Syrian war look like? It looks like ad-hoc rebel checkpoints set up along roads. As state authority disintegrates, other forms of power naturally emerge—a person’s surname, his tribal affiliation if he has one (and the size of his tribe)—can mean the difference between being harassed or being allowed to freely pass. Religious authorities come to the fore. It is natural, for example, that Sharia courts are trying to impose order on lawlessness. A person’s name or local accent can reveal a sectarian identity and, by extension, a presumed political view. People are being reduced to their base identity even as they also retreat into it.

What does the Syrian war sound like? It sounds like laughter, like people who can still find humor in their predicament and joke about it. Even as death becomes so commonplace that traditional mourning periods are shortened and rituals are overlooked, people learn to make do, to live with their new reality. Have you heard the joke about the man who finds a magic lamp, rubs it, and a genie appears? “Your wish is my command,” the genie says. “Great,” the man says. “I need a bottle of cooking gas.” The following day, the man rubs the lamp again, summoning an irate genie. “What do you want?” the genie says. “I’ve run out of diesel,” the man says. “Couldn’t you wait a few days? Now I’ve lost my spot in the queue for cooking gas!”

Abu Mohanad was a first lieutenant in Assad’s army. He is a member of the minority Druze sect, and is now part of a unit of the Free Syrian Army. The other men jokingly call him “the Salafi Druze,” a religious oxymoron that plays on Assad’s branding of all his opponents as extreme Islamist Salafis and terrorists. He’d been married for only thirty-five days when he defected, and hasn’t seen his wife in over a year. Abu Mohanad’s unit cobbles together rockets from scavenged water pipes, fertilizer, and metal street signs, which are used for the fins. “In every place where we removed a street sign, we left somebody to offer directions!” Abu Mohanad’s colleague Abu Hussein says, laughing.

What is the Syrian war like? It is frightening, bloody, depressing, and sometimes uplifting. It is numbing. It is every human emotion on a heightened level. What does the Syrian war look like? Above all, it looks like the names and faces of the seventy thousand people the United Nations says have been killed in the two years since the uprising began. The real figure is likely much higher. The U.N. number is of those whose names or faces are known, and doesn’t include the countless others who are still missing, who may be in mass graves. At least seventy thousand people dead. That means seventy thousand individuals, each part of a family, each family part of a community, each community part of a country. That is what the Syrian war looks like.

Rania Abouzeid covers Syria for Time magazine. You can follow her on Twitter at @raniaab.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/03/two-years-later-what-the-syrian-war-looks-like.html?printable=true&currentPage=all#ixzz2Nbc9qJ3f

Syria’s Many Militias: Inside the Chaos of the Anti-Assad Rebellion

Tue, 5 Mar 2013 18:35:59 +0200

By Rania Abouzeid / Antakya, Turkey

Syria‘s rebels have been locked in a bloody uprising against the regime of President Bashar Assad for nearly two years. But for 27 days after it was formed last December, the Free Syrian Army’s Military Command—elected by some 550 rebel delegates and tasked with commanding and controlling the myriad groups on the ground—did not receive so much as a bullet from its Arab and Western supporters. That lack of aid threatened to crush the nascent Military Command’s credibility with the fighting men inside Syria.

The body, headed by chief of staff Brigadier General Salim Idris, replaced the Joint Command of the Revolutionary Military Councils (which was formed less than three months prior), and shunted aside the dueling, Turkey-based so-called leaders of the Free Syrian Army, Colonel Riad al-As’aad and General Mustafa al-Sheikh, who were never more than figureheads.

After 27 days of pleading, the “valve was opened,” Idris told TIME in an interview at a hotel in Antakya, southern Turkey. (The command is based inside Syria, albeit close to the Turkish border.) He remains at the mercy of suppliers he declined to name but who are widely known — mainly Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with the blessing of Turkey and Western states. “Our brothers in the field make demands as if I have any influence over our suppliers,” Idris said. “I can’t force them to give us ammunition. If they say ‘I don’t want to give you anything,’ what can I do?”

The men on the ground aren’t necessarily waiting for Idris’s supplies — they have become adept at scrounging for weapons and ammunition, buying them from the regional black market or from corrupt regime soldiers, capturing war booty and making their own armaments, rockets and improvised explosives devices. Almost two years of a grinding civil war have necessitated such skills.

But if the Military Command is to successfully stitch together the patchwork of factions and militias that make up the rebellion, it needs some form of leverage — and the funneling of weapons and ammunition into Syria is supposed to be its modus operandi. Although there are reports of new batches of armaments being shuttled mainly via Syria’s southern border with Jordan, as well as its northern one with Turkey, Idris says it’s all not enough: “We need between 500-600 tons of ammunition a week. We get between 30-40 tons. So you do the calculations.”

The Syrian political opposition didn’t even want to attend an international conference on Syria in Rome last week, a reflection of the anger many of Assad’s opponents feel at the lack of robust foreign support. In the end, the head of the opposition coalition, Moaz al-Khatib, went but was unimpressed by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s pledge of $60m non-lethal aid offered directly to select armed rebel groups. So how will the Military Command succeed in imposing its authority when all of its various predecessors largely failed, and Islamist groups outside the Free Syrian Army (which itself is just a loose umbrella term) are growing in stature and influence?

It’s not just about providing material support—the promise of prestige plays a part too. Although there are Islamist Jihadi units of various shades within the Free Syrian Army, other large independent groups like the Salafi Ahrar al-Sham brigades and Jabhat al-Nusra offer the strongest Islamist units within rebel ranks. The U.S considers Jabhat a terrorist organization with links to al-Qaeda although the group denies this and is widely respected by other rebels for its fighting prowess. Some FSA units are joining the Ahrar and Jabhat, not just because their networks of support seem to be more consistent, but because it has come to be perceived as a kind of graduation or a promotion, an acknowledgement that a particular FSA unit or an individual fighter is good enough to become a part of the most respected, most disciplined rank of fighters. It doesn’t hurt that the Ahrar and Jabhat turn fighters away, often because they aren’t considered pious enough, making acceptance into the groups a form of achievement.

In several recent battles in Idlib province, for example, the two Salafi groups took the organizational lead, and the participation of other groups was by invitation only. Jabhat, in particular, has an authority the FSA lacks because it fights fiercely—often at the very front of the frontlines—is considered “clean” and not corrupt and because its religious clerics can invoke the power of a Sharia court. Which group, once it has pledged obedience or allegiance to a religious court, would dare fall outside of its authority?

At the same time, a number of Islamist groups — including Ahrar al-Sham but not Jabhat al-Nusra — have also coalesced into a bloc called the Syrian Islamic Front, a coalition that says it’s fighting a “two-front war” — to topple Assad and to build “a civilized Islamic society in Syria.”

Some members of the Islamic Front, like Ali Alloush, leader of the Martyr Hamze battalion in the city of Maaret al-Numan in southern Idlib province, say the lack of support drove him to join the Islamist coalition. “We were not Islamists or extremists,” Alloush says. “Our Islamic philosophies and understanding were not like the ones that the Syrian people now have, but with the progression of time, our faith in God, and our belief that He was the only one who could end this for us, that we have nobody but Him, grew. So, naturally our thoughts developed, just as they have in other Islamic states facing this, toward extremism, and the West drove us to this.”

In the midst of all this, the latest American initiative is to provide direct non-lethal assistance to rebels, including body armor. But some U.S.-donated body armor is already in Syria, and it’s not what the men on the ground want. “You know how many of Assad’s men we killed who were wearing those?” one fighter in Idlib province said, dismissing the vests and helmets. “The U.S can keep them. We are seeking martyrdom anyway. We need heavy weapons.”

While some rebels have embraced a fervent religiosity, others have opted for criminal activity. Some groups have resorted to kidnapping, sometimes for revenge, but most often to secure money for weapons like anti-aircraft guns. (The 14.5mm is common; the larger caliber 23mm is widely considered more of a status symbol because of its size, while the humble 12.7mm is now almost a little passé.) Kidnap victims are also sold from one group to another. On a recent day, TIME overheard a commander say that another group offered to sell him three civilians for 1 million Syrian pounds (about $14,150) and that they’d toss in a fourth civilian for free.

The Free Syrian Army’s various hierarchical structures, including the 14 provincial military councils, were supposed to be the main taps for weapons and ammunition, and thereby a form of leverage with fighting groups. But the military councils were never the main tap, and certainly aren’t now. Colonel Afif Suleiman, head of the Idlib Military Council, says he makes it clear that he has very little to offer the battalions that are part of the council. “They know that the councils are just a way to organize their activities, they don’t expect anything else from them,” he says. “If somebody says they fought in this battle, if there is no proof, if he was not registered, who will believe him? The council is a means to organize and to prove the participation of people and groups.” In other words, a record keeper that occasionally distributes arms and ammunition.

Alloush’s friend and colleague in Maaret al-Numan, Radad Khalouf, leader of Dara’ Maaret which is part of the Islamist Suqoor al-Sham brigade, says that the military councils do more than they take responsibility for—he contends that they fomented the splits within rebel ranks by trying to micro-manage units on the ground, down to handpicking a group’s leader, for example, at the threat of withholding ammunition. “In the beginning, we just had sticks and pump action shotguns,” Khalouf said. “We will go back to the stick and pump action rather than have somebody enforce their views on us.” He has the same opinion about the rebels’ international backers, and their perceived agendas.

Still, both Alloush and Khalouf like many of their ilk say they welcome the formation of the Military Command, but as Khalouf says, “we are reserving judgment until we see what it has to offer.” It’s a widely held view that makes Idris, the chief of staff, bristle. “Do they ask themselves where am I supposed to get the money from? Am I a government?” Idris says. “Everybody is an analyst, from a fighter to a commander to somebody who has nothing to do with anything, to the refugee.”

Nonetheless, Idris says that the Military Command is withholding support from groups it considers ineffective, and reserving supplies for those it deems worthy, based on their battlefield results. He denies that it is akin to the patronage networks senior defectors instituted in the past, where favoritism was shown to certain units often based on little more than a pledge of personal loyalty to the senior defector. Idris also doesn’t think it will foment the rivalry that already exists within rebel ranks for funding and armaments; rather, he thinks he’ll be better able to weed out ineffective groups.

There is an operations center, which sends monitors to the battlefield to watch and report on who fought where and how, who abandoned their posts, who responded to advice, who worked well with others, and who sat back, watched and waited to move in and grab the war booty. Take Commander X, Idris says, who in the past to impress his overseas or local patrons “goes and fires a few rockets, creates a bit of dust, films it and puts it on YouTube so that he can say ‘see, I worked.’ Now, it’s no longer like that.” Commander X won’t be supplied by the Military Command or included in future battles, Idris says. If his patrons are overseas, or private donors, Idris says he will inform them too, something he says he has already done although he refused to divulge which groups had been reprimanded. “Syrians don’t have time to stage these plays,” he says.

Idris says if he can organize and coordinate a little over half of the groups on the ground he’ll consider it a success “because 70-80% of the fighting men are civilians (i.e. not defectors), with civilian leaders. They are not used to being told ‘no, you can’t participate in this fight.’ He’s fighting in his town, he bought his own gun, his brother may have been killed, his son wounded. How can I impose anything on him? I can’t.” Soldiers are used to taking orders, Idris says. Armed civilians are not.
“Bashar is not better than us at organizing his men, but he has the power of a state,” Idris says. “He can bring that to bear and punish a man who won’t follow orders. It’s not easy [for us]. It’s very difficult to command this.”

Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/03/05/syrias-many-militias-inside-the-chaos-of-the-anti-assad-rebellion/#ixzz2MgTwxbDy

Portrait of a Lady: A Female Syrian Rebel Speaks to TIME

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 16:02:30 +0200

By Rania Abouzeid / Abu Duhoor

Em Joseph doesn’t really look like many of the women in this socially conservative stretch of Syria‘s Idlib province, and she certainly doesn’t act like them. Instead of the traditional hijab, or headscarf, worn by women in the area, her head and the lower part of her face are wrapped in a red-and-white keffiyeh in the manner that a man (or a woman working in the fields) might wear the garment.

She carries two grenades, one in the left breast pocket of her blue-and-gray military camouflage vest, the other in the same pocket of the men’s leather jacket she wears over the vest. Perhaps her only concession to femininity is the pattern of maroon and creme swirls on her loose, floor-length beige robe, but if it weren’t for the swirls, the garment could easily be a man’s galabiya. And then, there’s her Kalashnikov rifle.

Em Joseph is a 40-year-old Syrian female fighter with the Islamist Suqoor al-Sham Brigades. She is a rarity.

There have been media reports of female fighting battalions, but most — upon further investigation — turn out to be false, just photo-ops of a few women carrying guns. One report claimed that women in Deir Ezzor, a tribal, socially conservative area bordering Iraq, were fighting in high heels. Women in the area don’t even wear high heels, unless there’s a wedding or some other special occasion.

On Patrol in Syria with Assad’s Most Diligent Enemies

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 19:18:08 +0200

By Rania Abouzeid / Marshamsheh

Hajji Zaki crept along the partially destroyed unpainted walls in the hallway of the single-storey house, ducking to stay out of sight of regime snipers stationed at a large outpost some 500 m away. Two of the rebels he commands in his unit of the Farouq Brigades moved ahead of him.

The father of five had his left arm outstretched in a gesture that indicated he wanted his men to stay low. His right hand clutched a Kalashnikov. Dusty chunks of smashed cinder blocks, the detritus of what was once walls, littered the floors of the unfurnished house, crunching underfoot. “We use this place to snipe from,” Hajji Zaki, 38, said as he crouched in a doorway. “You see these doors,” he said, gesturing to a pale gray metal door still in good condition. “That’s my work.” Before he was a local Farouq commander, Hajji Zaki was a local metalsmith.

There are 23 men in his Farouq unit stationed along the eastern flank of the Wadi Deif military base, one of the few remaining loyalist outposts in the northern Syrian province of Idlib in late January. His men are all from this front-line town of Marshamsheh, a desolate, devastated area that was once home to some 4,000 people but is now populated almost solely by a handful of diverse rebel groups. There’s nothing between it and Wadi Deif except an olive grove.

The forces ranged against the regime of President Bashar Assad are a varied crew: there are foreign fighters; Islamic extremists, both Syrian and from other countries; as well as criminal elements who kidnap for ransom or loot homes, exploiting the general lawlessness of war. There is a kinetic nature to the rebellion — of multiple pieces moving at once. In Aleppo further north, many of the rebels fighting there don’t know their way around the metropolis. They’re from the towns and villages around it.

But in many smaller places like Marshamsheh, it is still mainly local men like Hajji Zaki who are fighting in their hometowns. It is their homes that are being destroyed, their families displaced or killed. On the other side of this conflict’s increasingly intractable divide, there are also men loyal to Assad who are just as grounded in their local communities, fighting for what they believe is right and just, and also losing their lives and livelihoods. This is the nature of civil war.

It’s easy to get caught up in talk of weapons, of geostrategic interests and diplomatic maneuvers, but war, at its most basic level, is more intimate than that. It’s about people, mainly the terrible things they see and do or have done to them, but also the bonds they forge, the attempts to cling to the normalcy of their old lives and what they think about their new ones.

The loss these men feel hits close to home, because they are at home. Hajji Zaki checks on his men daily, traveling either on foot or in a white Mitsubishi pick-up truck smeared in red mud presumably to make it less visible, its driver and passenger windows blown out and replaced with plastic sheets that rustle as he drives. In addition to the sniper’s position in the partially destroyed home, the Farouq mans six other positions along this front line. They are on rotating 12-hour shifts.

As Hajji Zaki moves through the empty streets between his outposts he points out the landmarks of his life: the primary school he attended (whose outer wall now has a meters-long tri-starred revolutionary flag painted across it), his workshop along the town’s main road (its metal shutter blown off by the force of a blast and tossed askew like a crumpled piece of paper), his home — or what’s left of it.

“That’s my house, this is my brother’s house, this is my parent’s house,” he says as we walk across a flat grassy area carpeted with lumps of rubble. He is so soft-spoken it’s often hard to hear him. Half of the flat roof of the home he lived in for 12 years has tipped down to the ground in a solid sheet, like a folded napkin. The stonework on the outside was his handiwork; so too was the intricate metalwork covering the windows.

It is surprising how porcelain can sometimes survive what concrete does not. Several coffee cups lie under an olive tree near the stainless steel tray on which they were carried when the first MiG warplane struck Hajji Zaki’s neighborhood in October. The meters-deep crater left by the first rocket is just outside the remains of his parents’ home. The home of his younger brother Abu Sami (who is also part of his battalion) has been completely flattened. “We used to need a 4-m ladder to climb up here,” he says as we step onto the roof. It’s a step off the ground. “The most important thing that I removed from the house were my family photos,” Hajji Zaki said, “everything else can be replaced. My memories, my thoughts,” he says sighing, “are often of the past.”

His family, like that of all of his men, has joined the several million internally displaced Syrians who have sought refuge elsewhere. He says he tries to see them every few weeks. As we head back to the Farouq headquarters, one of Hajji Zaki’s men in the backseat, Ali Abu Jumaa, 25, suddenly asks him to stop. “My grandmother!” Abu Jumaa says. He quickly gets out of the car with his Kalashnikov, rushes to an elderly woman in a long black dress, red cardigan and a pale pink hijab who is carrying a walking stick. He hugs her and kisses her right hand.

“I’ve been gone for four months,” his grandmother says before rattling off the names of several nearby towns she’s been staying in. “We’ve been moving from place to place.”

“How did you get here, who is with you?” Abu Jumaa asks his grandmother, before adding, “Don’t stay here long.”

“No, I just came here to see …,” she says, her voice trailing off as she gestures to the rubble around her. “Not one of our houses is O.K.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll stay with her,” his cousin (also part of the Farouq) says as Abu Jumaa plants several kisses on his grandmother’s cheek and gets back into the car.

It’s getting dark as we head back to the Farouq headquarters in a house close to the front. Hajji Zaki turns off his headlights to avoid detection by loyalist forces. Inside the vast main room, several of his men are milling about, including his brother Abu Sami, 31.

It’s time for evening prayers, led by Hajji Zaki, who stands on a blue prayer mat laid out over the room’s red carpet, a step in front of his men who are lined up behind him. A walkie-talkie screeches in the background, relaying information about the ongoing fight around Wadi Deif and in other places.

Thin mattresses line the walls of the room. In one corner, neatly folded blankets are stacked atop each other. There’s an assortment of weapons lined up near the entrance, mainly Kalashnikovs, a few sniper rifles, a BKC machine gun, a few rocket-propelled grenades. Two Farouq flags, emblazoned with the brigade’s black insignia, hang from a wall.

The Farouq is among the largest, best organized and most well-known of Syria’s many military units. They take the name Farouq from Omar bin al-Khatab al-Farouq, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad, political architect of the caliphate and, historically, the second Caliph.

Hajji Zaki sticks to civilian clothes and doesn’t wear a uniform. But most of his men are dressed in matching military fatigues emblazoned with the brigade’s black insignia. Each man’s uniform also displays his assigned number. The Farouq look more like a professional fighting force than the many hodgepodge groups outfitted in mismatched items of military and civilian clothing.

In the kitchen, Abu Hamzi, a former rocket-propelled-grenade specialist in Assad’s army, is preparing a meal in honor of his guests. As required by the Arab custom of hospitality, it’s a feast, laid out in the main room on a pale beige plastic mat. Lentil and rice soup, dry biscuits dipped in molasses and tahini, yogurt, saffron rice, fresh lettuce, sliced tomatoes, sardines and canned mortadella. “Don’t put out the mortadella,” Hajji Zaki jokes, “they’ll think we eat like this all the time.”

Later that night, the men gathered around a sobya, a heater in a corner of the room, drinking sweet tea from hourglass-shaped cups and smoking local al-Hamraa cigarettes. There’s no electricity and hasn’t been for months, no cell-phone coverage, no Internet. Six large plastic bags of warm flat Arabic bread containing 48 loaves in total were placed near the sobya. Abu Ibrahim, a former construction worker turned sniper, reached for a bag and started splitting the loaves (it is easier to do when the bread is still warm). Others, including Abu Sami, joined him in the task. An old army-green wooden box once containing 60-mm mortar shells served as the bread box for the split loaves. “I have three wives at home,” Abu Ibrahim complained in a joking manner as he split the bread. He had made the same joke earlier as he served the tea. Both are domestic duties usually done by women.

The place was powered by a car, its battery hooked up to an electrical converter that is wired to a few lightbulbs and the television, converting the battery power into electricity. Some of the men gather around a Toshiba laptop, to watch snippets of battle scenes or to see pictures of friends killed in battle. They’ve lost some 20 men from this area. Abu Sami pulls up photos of his 7-month-old son Sami on the computer. Most of the men carry photos of themselves in their wallets from the days of their compulsory military conscription, images of themselves in uniform posing near tanks, carrying RPGs or a rifle.

The talk turns to several key commanders in the area, how the men believe they are more interested in making quick trips to a battlefield to upload a few photo-ops to YouTube rather than staying and fighting. “The revolution was better before. Some commanders have forgotten the early days when we had nothing,” Abu Sami says. “Now they have money, cars, they have forgotten when they only had a motorbike. They are more interested in their five- or six-car entourage. After the regime falls, will they keep their tanks? What will they do with their 14.5-mm [antiaircraft guns]?”

“Why do men join him?” one of the men says of one of these commanders.

“Ammunition is low. People want a leader who can supply them. What matters to a fighter is that his ammunition vest is full,” Abu Sami says. “But after the fall of the regime, I tell you, even his cousins will leave him, they won’t stay with him.”

Abu Ibrahim, who served his military conscription in 1987 and ’88 with Division 11, the same unit he says is now stationed in Wadi Deif, says the fight among rebels after the fall of the regime will likely be harder than this one. That struggle would be to unseat the warlords who are now setting up minifiefdoms as well as against religious extremists. Those fledgling tyrants — whether local or national — will not be tolerated. “They won’t have as many men or weapons as Bashar, and we are going to remove him, so we will also be able to remove a small group that thinks of these things,” he said.

“We know that this is a long fight, a difficult fight,” Abu Sami says, “but I am fighting for my son. We are all fighting for our sons. God willing, our children will live good lives.” Mortar strikes and other explosions continued outside, some so close that the doors and windows shook.

Abu Sami unwrapped the small pickled hot pepper he kept in his wallet. Some of the men laughed as they recounted how Abu Sami ran the pepper around the rim of another man’s coffee cup, and the man’s reaction to the unexpected spiciness. He’s thinking about doing it again, but soon changes his mind and puts the pepper away.

Over in the kitchen, Abu Hamzi was preparing a dessert called sayanee. It’s a long process, involving making thin pancakes, smothering them with melted cinnamon butter and then piling them atop each other until they reach a 3-cm or so stack. It’s taking so long the men have dubbed it the “operation of the sayanee.”

Finally, after several hours it is ready. “Do we have forks?” somebody asks Hajji Zaki. He laughs. “Yes,” he says. “Praise be to God, we have received support and assistance in the form of forks.” The men all laugh. Tomorrow, Hajji Zaki would do the rounds on the front line, try and secure ammunition and meet with other commanders to discuss unseating the loyalists from Wadi Deif. But tonight, on this front line in this Syrian town, there was dessert, and he was with his men.

Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/02/19/on-patrol-in-syria-with-assads-most-disciplined-enemies/#ixzz2LSdsAxzL

Ground War: Syria’s Rebels Prepare to Take a Province from Assad

Thu, 7 Feb 2013 08:20:09 +0200

By Rania Abouzeid / southern Idlib province

It was pomegranate season when the battle for Wadi Deif began in mid-October. Like so many rebel offensives, the fight for the Syrian military base, just east of the devastated city of Maaret al-Numan and one of the last major loyalist outposts in the vast northern province of Idlib, soon sputtered for the usual reasons — the rebels’ lack of coordination, lack of ammunition and heavy weapons and the strength of regime reinforcements backed by airpower and artillery.

The pomegranate trees in many of the abandoned, rubble-strewn, hollowed-out homes in the adjacent frontline village of Marshamsheh are now denuded, their branches bare, but the rebels hope that before the first buds of new foliage sprout, the base will be theirs.

It is difficult terrain to storm. The base is protected by two large outposts, the Zahlanee, which is just 600 to 700 m from the various rebel groups that are now this village’s only inhabitants, and the Hamidiyeh, which has come under greater attack from rebels in and around Maaret al-Numan. The two rebel launch points — Maaret al-Numan and Marshamsheh — are separated only by a few kilometers, but Wadi Deif and its defenses stand between them, necessitating a detour of more than 20 km.

In addition to its imposing position near a strategic spot along the south-north Damascus-Aleppo highway, Wadi Deif is also an important barracks with an armored regiment and a fuel depot believed to hold millions of liters in underground silos. There are at least four other smaller checkpoints protecting it, as well as the Zahlanee and Hamidiyeh.

On Wednesday, the push to take it was forcefully renewed, but unlike previous offensives here and elsewhere that tend to be disorganized, poorly coordinated actions by a few brigades, this phase of the battle has been carefully planned over many weeks. It is not an isolated fight but part of a wider strategy, codenamed Marakit il Bina il Marsoos, or the Battle of Reinforced Structures, to open all the remaining fronts in Idlib province at around the same time — Wadi Deif, the Karmid Checkpoint, the Mastoomeh Checkpoint, the Abu Duhoor military airport and the smaller checkpoints associated with these outposts — before rebels turn their full attention to the regime forces concentrated in Idlib city, the provincial capital, and the city of Jisr al-Shughour, the two key urban areas still in the regime’s firm grip. If the rebels succeed, they will have taken the first province from Syria’s regime, creating an area completely free of the forces of President Bashar Assad and a de facto safe zone — without direct international help.

The Islamist Vanguard It is a highly ambitious plan, but that’s not the only thing that sets it apart. The offensive is overseen by a council of religious clerics, a Shari‘a court led by Jabhat al-Nusra, the militant group designated a terrorist organization by the U.S but widely respected by rebels for its disciplined fighting prowess. The court has knitted together dozens of groups from across Idlib province, extracting a sworn pledge from each brigade leader that he will work with the other groups under the direction of the court and will not compete with his counterparts for any ghanaim, or spoils of war, from the outposts if they fall.

It’s not the first time Jabhat al-Nusra has taken the organizational lead in a fight in Idlib. In coordination with the Salafist Ahrar al-Sham brigades, it shepherded the final two-week phase in the months-long battle for the strategically important Taftanaz military airport that fell to the rebels in mid-January. The participation of other groups in those final stages of the fight was only at Jabhat’s invitation. Jabhat al-Nusra also established a committee that first itemized and then distributed the war spoils. Still, the sheer scale of Marakit il Bina il Marsoos, its multiple fronts and the pledges to the Shari‘a court mark it as a new battlefield experiment the rebels hope will be emulated by others if it is successful.

“We invited all of the leaders of the brigades here,” the Jabhat al-Nusra sheik heading the operation told TIME, on the condition that neither his name nor his location be identified. He sat in a vast reception room with green and beige cushions lining its walls and a black Jabhat al-Nusra flag taped to a wall. “This is a difficult, sensitive moment for us now,” he said. “They have all sworn to the court to work together. God willing, this will serve as an example to others.”

The Free Syrian Army’s Idlib Revolutionary Military Council, headed by Colonel Afif Suleiman, is also involved, but not in a leading role. “The Shari‘a court is empowered to try and hold accountable any side that breaks its pledge,” Suleiman said. “In other battles, there were disputes and tension, people would take the booty that they wanted, so we decided that it is better that the ghanaim would be in the hands of the Shari‘a court and it can distribute it based on the participants.”

Four operations rooms have been established for this fight, with seven people in each, according to Radad Khalouf, leader of Dara Maaret, part of the Islamist Suqoor al-Sham forces, and a member of an operations room representing Maaret al-Numan. Each operations room oversees between 30 and 40 katibas, or battalions. “We are organized and have plans, but what’s holding us back is our thin resources,” Khalouf said on a recent morning, as he walked past buildings crushed by regime artillery and air strikes, through an olive grove and then a little further to see his men on the front line at a location they call the salad mix. Regime warplanes rumbled overhead.

Khalouf’s men, along with several other groups, are spread out along a 5-km southern front in Maaret al-Numan, working to take out the Hamidiyeh checkpoint. Each position is 100 m from the other. There are seven men per post (on six-hour shifts) and each post contains a machine gun, a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher, a sniper rifle and four Kalashnikovs. The nearest regime location is only 400 m away in some places, 700 in others.

In the weeks leading up to the renewed multipronged assault, operational secrecy wasn’t exactly airtight (in fact, it was an open secret), nor were the fronts quiet as low-level skirmishes continued.

On a recent day in late January, several of the groups around the Zahlanee checkpoint took part in a failed attempt to try to take the position. They were outmaneuvered and exposed. There’s little between the two sides except neat olive groves lining a gentle slope, their trees too widely spaced to provide much cover, branches heavy with black fruit that is usually harvested when it is green. The loyalists may have seen them coming.

The rebels lost 10 men that day, almost half the group that participated in the raid. “We started after dawn prayers,” one of the participants, Abu Mounzer, said as he returned from the front at midmorning. He was covered in mud and clearly exhausted. “We are trying to remove the wounded but we can’t reach all of the dead.” More than three weeks later, three bodies have yet to be retrieved. They join at least 16 others that have been at the checkpoint for over a month.

The rebels are relying on cutting off the various supply routes to the loyalists inside Idlib province. Toward that end, the Abu Duhoor military airport has been under siege for months. Supplies for the troops are airdropped by helicopters that fly in from air bases in Hama. The rebels have also upped their attacks on the airport. A few days ago, they downed a Russian-built MIG warplane in the area.

War of Attrition Still, the task of cutting off the crucial M5 highway that ferries military supplies from Hama and Damascus north to Idlib and Aleppo has largely fallen to the rebels of Heesh, a town about 17 km from Wadi Deif. (Maaret al-Numan is also a critical point along this highway.)

At one end, in an olive grove on a slight inclination 900 m from the highway below, Abu Mahmoud and his men from Katibat Dara al-Ansar lay in wait, ready to ambush any government vehicle that passes. Two days before TIME met them, they blew up an overpass on the stretch of asphalt that passes below them, using an improvised explosive device planted under cover of darkness. The destroyed overpass, which is clearly visible from their position, cut off part of the highway. Now they were hoping to destroy the rest of it.

Four snipers hid behind a makeshift wall of white stones piled atop one another, a little over waist-high, their scopes trained on the road below. Several other men, rifles at the ready, stood behind a thin cinderblock wall, a structure unlikely to offer any protection should the tanks stationed several hundred meters away near a loyalist outpost on a hill overlooking the highway turn their turrets in the rebels’ direction. Abu Mohammad, a tall man with a black-and-white kaffiyeh around his head, green army pants and a black leather jacket, checked in with spotters positioned near the highway to know if a vehicle was on its way. “Number 10, come in, Number 10,” he said into a walkie-talkie. There were no vehicles passing that afternoon, but the day before, a tank was destroyed on this stretch of highway, and towed away by a BMP armored vehicle. (TIME was at Maaret al-Numan and heard the chatter from Heesh about the tank over a walkie-talkie.)

At the other end of Heesh, a short motorbike ride through olive groves pitted with shallow craters formed by mortar strikes, several groups were busy digging a trench leading to their end of the highway. In two days, they’d shoveled out a ditch some 50 m long amid the olive trees. The trench got progressively deeper as it approached the end of the grove. The problem was the wide-open empty grassy field beyond the grove that led directly to the straight strip of asphalt. There was no cover. On the day TIME visited, the rebels still had some several hundred meters to dig, through the open field, as MIGs continued to pound the already devastated town.

Meanwhile, at Colonel Suleiman’s office elsewhere in Idlib, local military leaders were signing up for the fight and announcing what they intended to contribute. “We are going to bring 7 BKCs [machine guns], about 5 RPGs [rocket-propelled launchers], a 14.5 and a 23 [antiaircraft guns]. If it’s a clear day the planes will be out and we’ll need them,” said Shukrallah Assaf, military commander for Liwa Daraa Idlib, Abu Obaida battalion. “We have a shortage of 14.5-mm ammunition, just so you can take that into account when you distribute it.”

A red-bearded man with freckles and a black turban, a flak jacket under his suit jacket, Kalashnikov slung across his shoulder, walked into the colonel’s office with a palm-size piece of paper. It was a request for 400 meters of electrical cable and 400 meters of phone cable, to be retrieved from a nearby underground depot.

The depot also housed the supplies the council has received so far for the fight: 75,000 Kalashnikov bullets, 15,000 BKC bullets, some 100 RPGs, 10,000 14.5-mm bullets, 10,000 for 12.7-mm antiaircraft guns. “That’s what we have received for the battle for Wadi Deif,” Suleiman said. “What we received was about 10% of what the battalions themselves offered to bring to the fight.”

It’s not enough for a sustained fight, the colonel said, adding that the recent terrorist designation of Jabhat al-Nusra had hurt the FSA’s support, and thinned the weapons and funding provided by Qatar and Saudi Arabia. “What is happening now with the Syrian revolution is that they offer enough support to keep it going but not enough for us to bring down the regime,” he said. “Naturally, the terrorist designation has affected us, from the countries that move in the American orbit — that is, most countries. The Americans can tell the Saudis, ‘Don’t extend support because here they have a terrorist organization.’ They can tell any country, ‘Don’t help this revolution, one of its components is a terrorist organization.’” Still, the lack of support didn’t seem to faze the colonel, or any of the men on the various front lines. On the contrary. “We can thank God that we are indebted to no one,” Suleiman said. “We will erase the name Wadi Deif, and we will be indebted to no one.”

Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/02/07/ground-war-syrias-rebels-prepare-to-take-a-province-from-assad/#ixzz2Lbf81Y00