Syrian rebels cling to bullets and hope

While the west looks elsewhere, President Bashar al-Assad’s regime is exploiting sectarian divisions

Martin Chulov in Jebel al-Zawiya

Syrian mother Imm Khaled, right, mourns her son, who was killed by regime troops earlier this year, and also displays portraits of her husband, killed in 1987. Photograph: John Densky/AFP

In the shadow of the monolith they call the Corner Mountain, Firas Abu Hamza was carefully counting his most prized possessions. He removed a dirty sock from his camouflage vest and spilled its contents, 13 old bullets, on to the fire-scorched concrete in front of him.

“I’ll use them if I have to,” he said. “But I have to be very accurate. And there has to be a good reason to fire.”

At $4 each, one bullet is more expensive than the total sum Abu Hamza and the 12 rebels around him spend in a week on food. And three bullets are worth more than the monthly salary of many of the young defectors like him who now live in this shabby concrete room in northern Syria.
The coveted rifles they fled with from the Syrian military, worth at least $4,000 each on the black market, hang on nails driven into a dirty white wall. Two green wooden boxes in the corner contain extra rounds of ammunition and three explosive heads that fit on to the end of rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPGs).

An officer, Abu Ahmed, walked into the room and asked the latest defector to have joined the rebel ranks, a 19-year-old from the ruined Baba Amr district of Homs called Adnan, to display the RPG heads. “They are $1,000 each,” Abu Ahmed said. “Beyond anyone here’s wildest fantasies.”

Just as incredible to many of the men who live in this makeshift outpost, known as Katibat al-Harameen al-Sharifeen, is that they had finally found a way to break the shackles tying them to the Syrian military and Bashar al-Assad‘s uncompromising regime.

“I would never have thought this possible,” said Mohammed Razaq, a young rebel who fled from a nearby base in January and was taken in by the rebel group. Like his counterpart, Adnan, he is not from this area, a 40km mountain range near Idlib known as Jebel al-Zawiya (which translates as Corner Mountain). “But the revolution continued and slowly we found the strength to make this decision.” Both young men, now signed up members of the rebel force, the Free Syria Army, said they could only manage to flee their units when they were granted leave. And even then, they were forbidden from travelling to their home villages, just in case they defected.

So, both Adnan and Mohammed slipped out of their bases in the pre-dawn chill and went looking for the nearest rebel stronghold. “He came walking down this road 19 days ago still in his army uniform,” said Abu Ahmed of Adnan, pointing towards a potholed road that swept around the bend of the grey mountain. “He was carrying his service weapon and he was scared. We welcomed him and brought him in to the base.”

Home now for all these men is an abandoned farmhouse, the courtyard of which is shared by a cantankerous mother duck, her offspring and three stray cats. Outside, a group of women till a cucumber field in front of the base, which gently spills towards the banks of a dam, its still silver waters shimmering in the late spring warmth.

Adnan is playing the role of a new recruit: washing up, cooking and dutifully answering to officers. In return he is given extra television privileges.

Through a vintage pair of black binoculars, Adnan can just make out his old base on the far edge of the lake. On another corner of the lake is the regime base that in March led the invasion of this small village, named Lig, and briefly ousted the rebels. “They threw a fire bomb in here,” said Hassam Shamsi, a fighter from the nearby town of Jisr al-Shughour.

Lake winds sometimes stir ash from the blackened room, which then floats outside and coats a nearby mulberry tree. In the front room of a modest house up the hill, a local man, Abu Khaled, described how the army came and seized his son that day in March, shooting him once in his temple in a lonely nearby lane.

“Just because he was young and they thought he could be recruited to the revolutionaries,” the old man said tearfully.

These memories are far from the only reminder of the regime’s rampage. When troops were done with the base, they moved down the road to Abu Ahmed’s shop and house, blowing up both and forcing his family to flee to the plateau that soars above Lig village.

During 16 months of revolt, this vast tract of high ground has become one of four main nationwide hubs of the Syrian uprising. In the view of the regime in Damascus, it is a hotbed of Islamic militancy – a centre of a foreign-backed insurgency that wants to oust Assad and weaken its key patron, Iran.

Defectors from the restive north of the country have rallied here and regularly used the cover of rocky valleys and supportive villages to launch large and lethal attacks against army units.

Vengeance against them has never been far behind. Regime positions dot the landscape. Tanks can appear from anywhere – behind lush apple or peach orchards, or from loyalist towns still peppered across the plateau. Bloody raids into rebel enclaves are frequent. So too are arrests for those who dare to brave a regime checkpoint.

Abu Ahmed said he has lost scores of men to ambushes and detentions. A Saudi-based businessman until the uprising erupted, he returned to take a leadership role in the nascent guerrilla force. He now holds the rank of lieutenant colonel, one of about five such senior officers in the dozen or so villages between here and the encircled city of Idlib, which was retaken by loyalist forces in March.

“They are cruel and they are evil,” he says of his enemy. “And they will never stop killing and lying. To them and those who blindly back them, we are Muslim Brotherhood and Muslim Brotherhood is al-Qaida. Both claims are dishonest.”

At this base and all the others the Guardian visited during five days in Syria, a television was playing in the background. Each set of hosts would insist on showing the Syrian state TV channels, then the rebel-backed TV and pan-Arab networks.

On state television, the al-Qaida line is relentless. The narrative has become essential to the regime’s bid to hold on to power. Rallying support for state repression is easier when people believe it is needed to combat a global jihadist “terrorist” plot against a secular Arab nationalist state.

“They are always talking about al-Qaida,” said Abu Hamza of the state coverage. “They are stopping at nothing to make us look like devils when they know very well that the Free Syria Army are no more than men who have seen the light. Have you seen their claim that there are 3,000 foreign Arabs fighting here with us? There is not one.”

Rebel groups across Jebel al-Zawiya sense that the regime’s narrative of al-Qaida-backed groups taking a lead in the insurgency is starting to prevail – in the western psyche, in particular.

And they bristle at what they regard as both the indignity of the claim and the consequences. While foreign fighters and weapons from Libya and Tunisia have made it to the western Syria rebel heartland near Homs, rebels around Idlib insist that neither men nor military supplies have reached them.

“They are not welcome here, and they have not tried to come here,” said a rebel colonel, also named Abu Hamza. “You need to understand this society to know it would be impossible for groups like this to come here and operate,” he said. “Everyone would know about it very quickly. They would need to be received by the community and there is no way around this.

“It may be different in Dayr az-Zawr [the eastern Syria region that borders Iraq’s Anbar province], because members of the Duleimi tribe live in both Iraq and Syria, and perhaps some men have crossed from Jordan into Dar’a. But travel anywhere you want around here and you will not find anyone [from al-Qaida] here.”

The road to the rest of Jebel al-Zawiya skirts around the edge of the dam, past ploughed fields left emerald green by a soaking winter.

It winds up towards the plateau passing through small stone villages, whose residents live solely off the land. The few cars that move here give way to black-and-white dairy cows.

Neither the flag of the Assad dynasty, nor the pre-Ba’athist banner now adopted by the rebels, can be seen anywhere. A waterfall pours down a brown rock ridge sending a torrent of pristine water on to the road and onwards towards farmers’ fields. A rebel has parked his motorbike directly underneath for a free wash.

“They are with us,” said the Free Syria Army guide of the local population. “But the army can come here anytime it wants, so the people have to hide for now.”

Loyalist villages dot the 30 or so kilometres that gradually descend towards pastures of wheat and crops on the other side. The path through them and the Syrian army positions and loyalist towns is an improvised maze of goat trails, dirt tracks and muddy shortcuts through olive groves and cherry orchards.

These are the routes the rebels use to move their meagre supplies and to evacuate the wounded to Turkey, a precarious 90km journey. “May God protect you,” a young shepherd girl offered on the slopes of a valley worn brown by the sun. “He will leave soon [Bashar al-Assad] and so will all the regime.”

A large flock of sheep and goats ambled across the trail, causing a delay. The animals have climbed from rolling pastures on the plains of Hama far below. Beyond them a mountain juts starkly from the ancient soil. The simple rural tranquillity seems unchanged for centuries. An indelibly beautiful scene far removed from the imminent threat of violence just over the nearby mountain ridge.

In the town of Signa, another 20 or so kilometres along, rebels and locals do not share the shepherd’s optimism. “Nothing will happen before the American elections, will it?” one man asked rhetorically from the floor of his sitting room. “And the French are too busy at home. Turkey and Saudi Arabia will do nothing without America, so it will come down to us.”

The men around him chain smoked, sitting cross-legged on cushions, their eyes hazy from the grey nicotine cloud that swirled around them with the aid of a creaking ceiling fan.

“You have seen what we have,” said one man. “Nothing. We now know that help isn’t coming.”

In a nearby house, a Syrian mother, Imm Khaled, is mourning her son, who was killed by regime troops on the outskirts of town earlier this year. He is the second member of her family to have been killed by the regime; her husband was killed 25 years ago. “People come to see us and tell us how they feel for us, but no one does anything,” she screamed. “I will not accept my husband and son dying for nothing. Where is the world?”

In each village, the story was the same. Scores of men, most of them defectors, seek town hall-style meetings to discuss the uprising. They talk about their martyrs, their families and recent battles. “Life after Assad won’t be easy,” said one first lieutenant, who defected in March.

“I was in Zabadani when the rebels took the town,” he said. “They were telling us it was al-Qaida and we all knew it wasn’t. They agreed to a ceasefire and some of the rebels put down their weapons after the officers said they would not be harmed. They were all killed. They were betrayed. And that’s when I left.”

In all the discussions, a key theme constantly emerged. “All the defectors in this room are Sunni,” said Mohammed Faisal, a defector from Aleppo.

“There is no escaping that this has become sectarian in nature, but it’s not what we want, it’s what the regime wants. I have Alawite friends. I can’t talk to them since I have left, even though I think I can still trust them. I just have to be careful now. A valley is between us and there is nothing we can do.”

A large majority of Assad’s support base comes from the Alawites, a heterodox sect aligned to Shia Islam. Assad is an Alawite and the minority hold most, but not all, of the country’s key positions. They are staunchly backed by Iran, which uses Syria to advance its interests in the Arab world.

In a gathering in another nearby village, Salim, 31, from the besieged town of Jisr al-Shughour, closer to the Turkish border, said: “I don’t hate the Alawites. They are just taking this position to protect themselves. They don’t hate us for being Sunnis. They are just too scared to break away from the regime, which supports them.”

Salim’s second family home is in the Baghdad suburb of Ameriya and he had lived there for most of his life until fleeing to his original homeland in late 2006. There had been no more dangerous neighbourhood in the world at that point in Iraq’s civil war. “Al-Qaida ran the neighbourhood,” he acknowledged. There were thousands of Arabs from other countries. Every day there were bodies on the street.”

As the sun descended across the valley close to Salim’s hometown one evening, he called me aside and offered a cup of bitter Iraqi-style coffee. “I really fear the al-Qaida organisation,” he said. “I’ve seen what life is like with them [in Iraq]. If they come here, it will change.”

For now, he cannot return to Jisr al-Shughour. The hundreds of other rebel fighters we met are also exiles within their own country. “This is our war,” said Abu Hamza.

“But can you finish what you started?” he is asked. Pausing, he looked towards the ground and offered an “Inshallah” (if God wills) that seemed short on conviction. “The regime cannot [be allowed to] win because they will behave like Genghis Khan if they do. But without weapons it is difficult.”

---