A Sunni Syrian from Homs living in the Alawite Heartland

[TheGrumpyGeeljire]

The Syrian conflict is not binary; Sunnis vs Shias. On the contrary there are many shades of grey.

Observations of a Homsi living in Tartous
by Aboud Dandachi
Written for Syria Comment, January 20, 2014

*Aboud Dandachi is a Syrian activist from Homs, currently living in Istanbul. He is the author of the blog “From Homs to Istanbul” at www.adandachi.com/istanbul (The Dandashi family is a well known Sunni family.)

Over the course of the Syrian conflict, the port city of Tartous has been regarded as a bastion of loyalist support, a regime stronghold, and a city whose populace are loyal to Bashar Assad.

In fact, only two of the above statements are true.

I moved to Tartous in late March 2012, after being displaced first from my home in Homs, and then from my village of Telkelakh. Like all displaced persons since the beginning of time, I thought my troubles would be a temporary and I’d be able to return home once the situation improved. I hoped.

But as it turned out, I spent eighteen months in Tartous, living my life in an area no bigger than ten square kilometers. During those months, Tartous was like a small passenger boat; crowded, but offering safety from the storm raging in the middle of an infinite sea of tidal waves of anxiety and war.

The situation was surreal. By March 2013, the anniversary of my move to Tartous, half the populace consisted of displaced people who had relatives actively at war with relatives of the other half. I myself came from a village well known for its opposition to the regime; three cousins of mine and numerous distant relatives had taken up arms against the state, whose own rank and file consisted of the relatives of the taxi drivers, shop keepers, hotel staff and restaurant workers of the city I looked to for refuge. It was absurd.

And yet, in eighteen months in Tartous, I never once heard a single word of abuse or experienced any act of aggression. Tartus before the war was equal parts Christian, Alawite, and Sunni. My being a Sunni from Homs was never held against me.

On the contrary, anytime the topic of Homs came up with a native of Tartous, the conversation would invariably lead to reminiscing about Homs’ previous status as “Um el fakir”, as Homs was called, the Mother of the Poor; memories of shopping for Eid cloth in a city where Eid shopping was much cheaper than the coast or Damascus; where one could get one’s car fixed for half the price a workshop would charge in Tartous; a city where rents and the very cost of houses were ridiculously cheap by the standards of any major cities. To a native of Tartous, pre-conflict Homs used to offer a cheap alternative to the much higher cost of living of the coastal areas.

And almost every such conversation would end in someone voicing eternal damnation on the souls of the Saudis, Turks, Chechens, Pakistanis, Libyans, Jordanians etc etc who had supposedly infiltrated Homsi society and turned it into a “well of terrorism”, and a place where the most barbaric acts of inhumanity were regularly practiced on those who had not sold their souls to Zionism-Wahabism-CIAism and were still loyal to…well, what a good Syrian should be loyal to exactly depended on the person you were speaking with.

It’s inevitable that when a people’s lives have been disrupted and affected by events, people will spend a great deal of time discussing and debating those events. In Tartous, the most honest opinions could always be gleaned from discussions that took place late at night; in the hotel lobbies when only the staff and a few night owls were left awake; at the restaurants or sidewalk cafes closing up for the night and the only ones left were the staff drinking one last cup of coffee before heading home, or in the Internet cafes, sparsely filled with customers taking advantage of the ultra cheap midnight rates to Skype with relatives in Europe or Canada.

The president. The regime. The state. To a Homsi whose city had suffered the worst of the conflict up to that point, all three were one and the same, inseparable. The revolution was about getting rid of the president, to cause the downfall of the regime, and create a new state. What the nature of the new state would be was something the myriad groups that made up the opposition never did get around to agreeing on.

The president, the regime and the state. To a Tartousian, these were three very distinct and separate entities, a fact that took me a very long time to understand. Being a “loyalist” meant different things to different people. In eighteen months, very few people had a kind word to say about the president Bashar Assad. Explicit criticism of his person was never voiced openly, of course, but there were plenty of criticisms of the “strategy” of the war, of its “handling”, and many wistful nostalgic yearnings for the “wisdom and experience” of Hafiz Assad. I lost count of the number of times I heard it said that Hafiz would never have allowed things to reach the point they did. One didn’t have to scratch much beneath the surface to detect a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the younger Assad’s abilities as a war leader.

Which was not to say that having no faith in Bashar’s abilities to handle the conflict, meant that a person was part of the opposition. Among the people of Tartous, there was a clear and very well defined distinction between the president, the regime and the state. I met no one who expressed much love for the president. The vast majority however, felt that the regime was a necessity, and would have gladly been happy to see the current regime headed by a new president.

And every person in Tartous felt that they were part of a struggle to preserve the very state and its institutions. Tartousians did not want to live in a failed state, and if the state collapsed, the average person in Tartous felt like they had nowhere else to run to. While I myself never experienced any discrimination or hostility as a displaced person from Homs, I heard nothing but scorn and contempt whenever the topic of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who had fled to Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt or (especially) Turkey came up. In Tartous, a person who seemingly abandoned the country to live in a refugee camp was regarded as being beneath contempt.

In a way, it wasn’t hard to understand why this should be so. The people of Tartous had their backs to the sea, in almost a literal sense. If the war reached the city, there would be no place for them to flee to. Many Sunnis from other parts of Syria had fled to the Gulf and other countries. Alawites, Christians and those Sunnis who had remained loyal to the regime could count on no such welcome. For the most part Tartousians didn’t have the luxury of contemplating a life as refugees in other countries, it was a convenience that would not be afforded to them.

Well, displaced people who found themselves in Tartous did infact contemplate very much life as refugees in other countries. By the summer of 2013, the number of Sunni and Christian refugees in Tartous overwhelmingly outnumbered the local Alawites in the city. Every Christian displaced family I knew was biding time until relatives abroad could arrange for them to get visas. Canada and Sweden were particularly favored as destinations. One Christian female doctor from Aleppo had made no less than eleven visa requests to the USA, Canada and European countries.

Evert day saw a massive crush of applicants at the Immigration and Passports department, which is a small three story building, designed to handle many fewer applicants then the hordes now trying to leave the country. At the beginning of the uprising and as late as March 2012, a person could walk into the Tartous passport department in the morning, and leave in the afternoon with new passports for himself and his family of six kids, a widowed sister, and her six kids.

When I went to renew my passport,the place was a hell hole. My name was put on a waiting list and I was given an appointment five weeks away. On the appointed day, if your name wasn’t on the appointment list, there was no way you were stepping inside the building, no matter how desperate your sob story, who you had tried to bribe, or how urgently you needed to leave the country. It was the only way to bring order to an insanity created by the fear that at any day, the state’s institutions might collapse, and those without passports would become refugees without travel documents for the rest of their lives. Even after submitting all the required paperwork, it would take another month for a new passport booklet to be issued, such was the shortage in new passports.

In August 2013, a new fast track system was implemented. Pay 16,000 liras, and you could get your passport two days later. People cynically referred to it as Assad’s idea of a “reform”.

For Tartousians, the preservation of the state and its institutions were essential to their own survival; the preservation of the president, not so much. Indeed, spend enough time in Tartous, and one would get the unmistakable impression that the president himself was increasingly seen more as a liability; what the people of Tartous wanted was a more capable leader to lead the same regime and ensure the preservation of the same state.

As the number of displaced people fleeing to the city increased, the cost of living screamed up, leaving most with no way of coping. Apartments whose rent had been 5,000 liras a month were going for five times that, putting them out of reach of the ordinary Tartousian. Daily, the city experienced traffic jams that rivaled those of the major metropolises. In the eighteen months I was in Tartous, the price of food, taxi fares and cloth more than tripled.

You could also see the demographics of the city change before your very eyes. It would be no exaggeration to say that females outnumbered males to a ratio as high as twenty to one. At any time, one’s favorite shawerma vendor, shopkeeper, vegetable seller or barber might suddenly close shop, having been called up to “perform his national duty”, and serve in the reserves for an undefined period of time. “Talbeno”, they requested him, was a phrase that was dreaded in Homs. It meant the security forces were after a specific person. The same phrase in Tartous meant that a person was being called up into the reserves, to be sent to God knows what front line.

And yet throughout all this, there was never a backlash against the newly arrived displaced persons. A woman could walk in the streets in a niqab without a second thought, in contrast to the stories that were coming out of some of the areas of Syria that hardline Islamist groups had taken over.

Within the ten square kilometer “bubble” that made up the safe areas, life went on as normal. The regime’s security forces didn’t have a single checkpoint set up within the city itself. The only time weapons were fired inside the city was during military funerals, or right after one of Assad’s (mercifully infrequent) speeches or interviews. And the day that the Egyptian army deposed Mohamed Morsi. That party lasted well into the night.

Which is not to say that security in Tartous was lax. Some days, the queue of cars waiting to pass through the checkpoints on the city’s outskirts would stretch for miles. If you were on the run from the regime, Tartous was not the place to hide in. Twice I heard of individuals from my home village being arrested in Tartous (they were later released when it turned out they shared similar names with individuals on the regime’s shit list). My favorite mobile phone shop owner was hauled in by the State Security branch to explain where he got the money for his opulent lifestyle (amazingly, there was never any shortage of the latest iPads and smartphones in Tartous).

I myself was interviewed three times by mukhabarat from the State Security branch during my stay in Tartous. It was standard practice, even before the conflict, for checks to be made on anyone staying long term at hotels. The interviews were conducted in the lobby of whichever hotel I’d happen to be staying at, and were friendly and polite. I was asked a bunch of questions about my family relations, the answers to which I had no doubt whatsoever the agents already knew.

Indeed, during the first interview, the person interviewing me seemed more concerned that I was running away from some vendetta in Homs. “Did someone threaten you back in Homs? Are you running away from some gang?”

No, I was running away from a military occupation. My home neighborhood of Inshaat was being choked by frequent raids and random arrests being conducted every few weeks. In Homs, if I wasn’t home by 4 pm, my relatives would start collecting ransom money in the expectation that I’d been kidnapped by the shabihas. In Tartous, I’d hear the same shabihas complain at night over coffee about late salaries, long assignments with little leave, and a desire to see the regime “get serious about finishing off the terrorists”.

The shabihas got their wish on August 21st 2013. I woke up to frantic Whatsapp messages from relatives in the Gulf with news of the Ghouta chemical weapons attack.

In a moment, the very atmosphere in Tartous changed. There had always been an undercurrent of tension in the city, as if people somehow knew in their bones that the calm they were enjoying couldn’t possibly last indefinitely. Overnight, Tartous had turned from a safe haven, to ground zero in any NATO attack on the country. I started seeing in my fellow Tartous residents, the same sickening fear and sense of impending doom I’d feel back in Homs, whenever I heard rumors of military buildups.

That Saturday, the 25th of August, was the most nerve racking day I’d experienced since coming to Tartous. People in Tartous were convinced that a NATO attack was all but inevitable, and that a long overdue reckoning was at hand. The chemical weapon attack on Ghouta was just the excuse the “conspiracy” needed to finally finish off what had been started by the “armed groups”. That night, the lobby of the hotel I was staying at turned into something resembling a refugee camp, with families vacating their rooms on the upper floors and instead choosing to spend the night downstairs.

The next day, more than half the hotel staff didn’t show up for work, and the normally bustling commercial street in which the hotel was located was eerily quiet. Most of the hotel’s occupants were Christian families from Aleppo, who had been biding their time until relatives in Europe and North America could arrange visas for them. A lot of these same families decided, screw it, it would be much safer to wait in Beirut.

On August 29th, I was sitting in the lobby when I heard gunfire out on the cornice, with exuberant chants of “We are shabihas, we are shabihas!” OK, a demonstration to demonstrate the city’s defiance and “steadfastness”, I thought to myself.

Actually, it turned out to be a celebration. The British parliament had just voted to reject any involvement in any military action in Syria. Just as suddenly as the atmosphere in Tartous had changed to a city on the edge of a catastrophe on August 21st, the emotional pendulum swung the other way round; the long feared specter of foreign military intervention, the consequences of which Tartous would have borne the brunt of, in one night had had a stake driven through its heart, and buried in a six foot grave.

Tartousians were euphoric, as only someone who has survived a close brush with death can be. The regime had spat in the eyes of the “NATO dogs”, and gotten away with defying the “great powers”.

As the following days and week saw Barack Obama desperately try to squirm his way out of his “red line” commitments to make Assad pay for any chemical attack, many an unflattering remarks were heard in the hotel lobby and cafeterias regarding Obama’s manhood, or lack thereof. The man who was once feared as the embodiment of everything tormenting Syria, in the space of one week become an object of derision and scorn; a bumbling clown who was flailing at the deep end of a swimming pool.

For me, it was a clear indication living in Syria had become untenable. Anyone who remained in Syria could only look forward to increased brutality by a regime that had discovered it had absolutely no consequences to fear. There was now nothing to stop Assad from butchering the population wholesale, and the countries neighboring Syria were not going to keep their borders open indefinitely. In early September, I left Tartous and crossed into Lebanon.

I left behind a city that had sheltered me during eighteen months when the rest of the country was experiencing hell, a city whose populace realized that they were stuck between Assad’s extremists and Al-Qaeda’s, with no way to save the country. A city whose populace did not want to live under the Islamists who have come to dominate the opposition, but who were desperate to preserve the state as it was, lest they become, like so many Palestinians and Iraqis in the region, themselves stateless.

[TheGrumpyGeeljire]

Both the Assad and the majority Al-Qaeda led 'opposition' are sectarian. However, the average Syrian citizen is anything but. Another interesting article I found.

The letter that follows is part of a project that draws on citizen journalists to depict daily life in war zones where international reporters cannot travel due to threats from the warring parties. The author is writing under a pseudonym for his own protection. The project, based at Stony Brook University’s Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting, is funded by the Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation. Istanbul-based journalist Roy Gutman edited.
Tartous—When Syria’s national uprising began six years ago, and young people everywhere else in the country were calling for the overthrow of the regime, up to a thousand loyalists would march in the streets of Tartous in support of President Bashar al-Assad.

“Al-Assad! Or we burn the down the country,” chanted the regime elements among them.

Tartous has the biggest concentration of Syria’s Alawite minority and is the heartland for Assad’s Alawite-dominated government. So when the regime summoned the sons of our sect as backup forces against what it called a terrorist threat, Alawite families willingly sent their men and boys.

As many as 100,000 have been killed and well over 50,000 wounded in the province, out of a population of 2 million.
Today Tartous is in mourning, with as many as 100,000 dead from the fighting and well over 50,000 wounded, out of a population of 2 million in the province. Women in black fill the streets of this city of 800,000, grieving for their sons and husbands, and a dozen or more coffins arrive every day from the front. Many of the young men of Tartous are now in hiding—by some estimate 50,000 of them—and the government has to conduct house-to-house raids to find recruits.

This is no longer a city of fools. A small minority still believe that Assad is fighting terrorism, but most people I know think Assad has cheated his own people by sending them into an endless, pointless war.

Tartous today is a city of the poor. The province is packed with 1.2 million displaced civilians fleeing active war zones, but with the exception of one camp for 20,000 internally displaced people, or IDPs, they’ve been left to fend for themselves, driving up the cost of housing.

The Syrian pound has collapsed, and costs for staples have doubled, while salaries have gone up just a fraction. The only meat most families consume is chicken, and that’s once a month. Even heating fuel for the winter is a dream for most—it will cost half your salary. Utilities are the worst ever; we have electricity six hours a day.

Security forces have arrested most of the political opposition and civil-society activists—anyone opposing the regime.
Tartous is also a city of the intimidated. The security forces, always heavy-handed since Assad’s father took power in 1970, spun off the National Defense Force, widely known as the Shabiha, and together they have arrested most of the political opposition as well as civil-society activists—anyone opposing them. Regime intelligence circulated “black lists” of those supporting the revolution, and most were beaten up, expelled, or killed. Today no one can voice his thoughts, even to a family member, even less to a neighbor.
The exception is at funerals, where families of the dead often curse Assad and the regime. When a cousin of mine died in the summer of 2014, the family was in a state of rage. His mother collapsed, his father seemed bewildered. An honor guard brought the coffin but wouldn’t allow the family to open it and see the body. His mother started cursing Bashar al-Assad and “his damned war.”

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Almost every family has a tale of losses. Rihab, a 40-year-old widow I know, is typical. Her husband, an elementary-school teacher, volunteered for the National Defense Force militia in late 2011. “He wanted to write his own story of patriotism. He thought it would be an easy task, and the terrorists were weak foes that he and his comrades could crush without difficulty,” said Rihab, which is not her real name.

During an attempt to storm the Waer neighborhood in Homs early the following February, he was felled by a mortar. “All I got from the regime was some empty words and a small sum of money,” she said. (Families of fallen soldiers receive a lump sump equal to $1,000, and half-salary, which amounts to about $30 a month.)

The bigger calamity occurred the following September, when her eldest son began his compulsory military service. “We let him join his friends, thinking they would not put him in a dangerous place because his father was a martyr,” she said. But he was sent to Tabqa air base near Raqqa, in northeastern Syria, which the Islamic State extremists captured in August 2014. Two days before the base fell, most of the officers were airlifted to safety, leaving behind hundreds of common soldiers and a few officers who were captured and beheaded by ISIS.

“I envy those who lost a loved one in this war, for I lost two, my husband and my son.”
“The image of my son never leaves my mind, except when I remember my husband dying of a mortar shell, his limbs flying in the air,” she said. “I envy those who lost a loved one in this war, for I lost two, my husband and my son.”

The call to patriotism lost its impact years ago, so the regime tried to replace it by putting the economic squeeze on Alawites. Economic pressures were easily brought to bear, because a great many Alawites are on the state payroll, either in the security forces or as government employees. I know many who enlisted in the military reserves only after they were threatened with the loss of their jobs and income.

The privileges that Alawites enjoy are deceptive, for the regime’s motivation in granting them is to secure control. Even the Alawite faith, a Shiite offshoot that borrows from other religions, has been corrupted by regime appointments of retired army officers as sheikhs in the faith. Of the five clerical sheikhs in my village, three are former army sergeants. This has added to the loss of a moral compass among so many Alawites.

The alleged animosity between Alawites and Sunnis is a stereotype—it was the regime that fomented sectarianism.
The drive to stir sectarian hatred is a different story. The stereotype is that Alawites have a great animosity toward Sunnis and vice-versa, but from my perspective, that of an Alawite dissident, that is not the case. When the revolution began, Alawite opponents of the regime took to the streets in Baniyas, a predominantly Sunni town just north of Tartous, and formed a Sunni-Alawite Local Coordination Committee. During the height of the revolution, there were never any hostile communal acts against Sunnis. We’ve received Sunni IDPs by the hundreds of thousands without problems.

It was the regime that stirred sectarian hatred. Its propaganda machine constantly told Alawites that the Sunni majority wanted to topple the regime and take out revenge against them, and the Baath party apparatus constantly referred to “Sunni terrorist jihadis.” The rhetoric began in June 2011, when Sunni rebels attacked offices of the Alawite-dominated security headquarters in Jisr al-Shughur; the government circulated videos showing the violence. This sowed anger among young Alawites and helped the regime in its recruitment.

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With Iran’s backing, the regime gave the Shabiha a green light to attack Sunnis, leading to a massacre in Bayda and Baniyas in May 2013. The regime ignited the killing spree when it turned over the body of a young Sunni man who died in prison to his family. When they saw the body and all the signs of torture, they got out weapons and fired in the air. This was the pretext for the regime’s order to Alawite militias to kill the Sunnis of Bayda and Baniyas and to burn down their houses. Regime intelligence members penetrated the militias and egged them on. Hundreds of Sunnis were summarily executed. But Sunnis did not exact revenge, and the sectarian propaganda slowly lost its effect. Still, the regime continued to demonize “Sunni jihadis.”

This reached a high point in May 2016 with a wave of explosions that killed about 180 civilians. Four were in Tartous and five in Jabla, a city in the Latakia mountains—all occurring within a 15-minute time span. ISIS claimed responsibility on its website, but the regime blamed the Islamist Ahrar al-Sham rebel force. Many analysts suspect the regime sponsored the bombings in order to intimidate the population.

Checkpoints surround both cities, and police patrol them day and night and raid suspected houses, so it would seem nearly impossible for anyone to carry out the attacks simultaneously and precisely unless it was the regime itself. And we all know the regime had staged incidents before this that it blamed on terrorists [high-level security officials who defected to the opposition say the regime staged a series of bombings of security installations from late 2011 to mid-2012 and blamed them on Al Qaeda, before the militants had set up a presence in Syria].

Today the regime cannot make its case for Alawites to risk their lives, and all that’s left to it is forced recruitment. Early in March, security forces conducted raids in Tartous, gong door-to-door to seize youths for the military service. More than 600 were arrested and taken to join the fighting in the northeast.

Alawite society, which once bought into the regime’s sectarian propaganda, now protects young men trying to evade military service. An acquaintance of mine named Ammar from the Qadmous area northeast of Tartous was arrested at a checkpoint in Damascus in May 2014. After his deployment to the frontline in Zabadani, a mountain town near Damascus, where he saw half his comrades die, he deserted his unit and is now hiding in a small village in the Tartous mountains.

“I can’t work or travel. I can’t leave my village. But this is better than being in the army,” he told me. “I cannot choose death. For whom shall I die? And for what?”

Today the anger is spreading even though it is largely muted and expressed in private. When Syria’s prime minister, Imad Khamis, visited Tartous last month, Ahmad K, a farmer, was entertaining guests at his home in the village of Himmin. For years Ahmad had tuned into state television for the news, but in the past year he’s switched to Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based news network, and Al Arabiya, the Saudi-owned pan-Arab channel.

As they watched Khamis speaking on TV about the regime’s new projects for the region, as well as its drive against ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate (which changed its name last year to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), and other groups, the guests started mocking the projects.

Suddenly, Ahmad exclaimed: “There can’t be any terrorism worse than that. They kill the sons of the poor to keep the corrupt in their posts, at the top of which is Bashar al-Assad.” His guests, embarrassed, laughed into their jackets.

But no one is ready to challenge the regime in the open.

[TheGrumpyGeeljire]

The story of FSA rebels who defected to the Syrian Army after uncovering Israeli plot..

QUNEITRA, SYRIA—Ahmad Kaboul has big shoes to fill. Earlier this summer, his childhood friend and commanding officer of the Golan Brigade, Majed Hamoud, was killed by Jabhat Al Nusra, Syria’s al Qaeda affiliate, which now goes by the name Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham.

Founded as one of the dizzying array of fighting units in Syria’s six-year civil war, the genesis of the Golan Brigade was one of the most remarkable. The brigade was established in 2014 by Syrian fighters who had defected from the Free Syrian Army rebel group after they made a shocking discovery: their unit had been coordinating with the Israelis.

After switching sides to support the Syrian government, they witnessed the Israeli military providing direct air cover for attacks launched against them by Al Qaeda. The Israelis even tried to kill Majed on several occasions before Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, Nusra, finally did him in.

This July, I met veterans of the Golan Brigade and heard their stories. They painted a picture of the war that stood almost entirely at odds with the dominant narrative of the conflict spun out in Western mainstream media. And this is perhaps why they have received so little attention.

The Golan Brigade is one of four battalions that comprises Syria’s National Defense Forces (NDF), a coalition of paramilitary groups formed in mid-2012 to recruit and organize non-soldier citizens who wanted to fight as volunteers against the armed insurgency that was overrunning the country. Those who joined come from all backgrounds, including retired military personnel, young men who weren’t eligible for conscription because they were the only son in the family, and even a dentist.

Ahmad was Majed’s right-hand man and now he is his replacement. He’s 28, but looks 22. With his shy demeanor and soft eyes, it’s hard to believe he now leads a brigade of over 300 fighters.

The defectors

Majed, the founding leader of the Golan Brigade, was a former bodybuilding champion who defected from the Syrian army in 2011 due to mistreatment from his superior officers. “He was angry about the corruption in the Syrian army,” Majed’s father told me at a Golan Brigade outpost in Majed’s hometown of Khan Arnabah, located by the separation fence with Israel.

Majed joined the FSA out of spite and encouraged other guys from his village to do the same. Ahmad had also been dealing with mistreatment by his superior officers after being injured by shrapnel at the T4 oil pipelines near Homs where he was stationed. Ahmad told me he defected to the FSA out of anger and because he was caught up in the revolutionary fervor sweeping the region at the time.

For two years Majed and Ahmad fought against the Syrian Army in an FSA unit called Liwa al-Mutassim Bilaa. They launched attacks in the towns and villages that run along the separation barrier with the Israeli occupied side of the Golan Heights. But over time Majed and Ahmad became disillusioned with the corruption and shadiness they witnessed among the loose coalition of FSA divisions they fought alongside. The last straw came when they discovered the FSA’s relationship with the Israelis, which included logistical, military and medical aid.

“At first we didn’t know about it. But then the Israelis offered to open a gate for us at the Israeli fence for Khan Arnabah. Majed confronted the FSA guys who were working with the Israeli officers in Beir Ajam and he immediately told them that we won’t deal with anyone cooperating with the Israelis. The rebel groups tried to assassinate him at this time. We didn’t have any other choice, so we decided to come back to Khan Arnabah and contacted the reconciliation committee there.”

Khan Arnabah reconciled with the government in 2014. It's one of dozens of Syrian towns that were held by the opposition but ultimately chose to reintegrate into the Syrian state.

Since as far back as 2012, the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), the peacekeeping mission responsible for monitoring the 1974 ceasefire line between Israeli and Syrian forces in the Golan Heights, has documented dozens of interactions between Israeli and Syrian insurgents. It is also an open secret that the Israelis have been providing medical treatment to insurgents, including al Qaeda and possibly ISIS fighters, in Israeli hospitals and then sending them back into battle against government-controlled areas.

According to an investigative report by journalist Nour Samaha, Israel has dramatically expanded its support to include “facilitating cross-border travel for residents into Israel, regular deliveries of food, clothing, construction equipment and educational materials, airstrikes on pro-government positions and the establishment of an Israeli-backed opposition faction in rebel-held southern Syria.”

Soon after learning of Israel’s involvement with the FSA, Majed struck up a relationship with the head of the National Defense Forces, who had been reaching out to Syrian army defectors in an attempt at reconciliation. The leader of the NDF, who asked not to be named, told me he became very fond of Majed. For eight months the two communicated over the phone, building up a trusting relationship. It wasn’t easy. Majed’s brother had been imprisoned by the government and the NDF leader’s brother had been killed in an ambush by the FSA. But with time they grew close and after intense negotiations with the security apparatus, Majed decided to defect from the FSA and join the NDF as head of the Golan Brigade in Khan Arnabah.

“It was the first real reconciliation in the whole Syrian conflict. It was completely organic,” said the head of the NDF.

They created four battalions. Majed was the leader of the first battalion which was responsible for the towns of Khan Arnabah and Jeba. And he convinced many of those in his FSA faction, around 40 people, to defect with him to the NDF. They all received amnesty from the government. Majed’s main argument was that they were duped, that this wasn’t a real revolution and that foreign hands were behind the FSA, with the most unacceptable being Israel’s. As young men from the Golan, an area of Syria that remains occupied by Israel, Israel’s support for the FSA was particularly objectionable. About ten people remained with the FSA and were absorbed by other opposition units, recalled Ahmad. The Golan Brigade has since swollen to around 300 people in Majed’s battalion and some 1,500 overall.

ISIS headquartered on Israel’s border, Israeli air support for Al Qaeda

The Israelis tried to kill Majed on at least two occasions in targeted airstrikes but failed, according to Golan Brigade militiamen. What the Israelis couldn’t accomplish, Al Qaeda did.

In June, a Syrian member of Jabhat al Nusra from the Daraa neighborhood of Nawa, Mohammad Abdul Hamid al Mitheab, followed Majed into the office of one of his colleagues. Wearing an army uniform and a backpack filled with explosives, the attacker blew himself up, killing Majed.

Those I spoke with who knew Majed expressed affection for him, describing him as charismatic, tough and extremely persuasive. People in Khan Arnabah referred to him in terms reserved for superheroes. His fellow militiamen reminisced about him constantly.

“He was a good guy, a true leader,” the NDF commander said. "That’s why Nusra targeted him. They thought if they killed Majed, the city and our forces would collapse. They were wrong."

Five days after Majed’s death, Nusra launched an attack on Medinet al Baath, or Baath City, in cooperation with FSA units. The Israelis provided air support for the Al Qaeda-led offensive, striking at Syrian army and NDF forces and equipment during the battle, suggesting direct coordination with the jihadist groups.

“This is the first time the Israelis helped Nusra openly,” said the NDF commander.

The battle was fierce and lasted around 10 days, with the NDF and Syrian army repelling the attack.

“We lost count of how many times the Israelis have attacked us,” said Ahmad. “They killed two of our soldiers last year. They confuse us and the Syrian army with Hezbollah.”

According to senior sources in the Syrian army, Hezbollah does not have a military presence in the Golan. Hezbollah has a light presence in the Damascus countryside near Quneitra, but that’s it. But the Israelis insist otherwise and have openly stated their preference for al Qaeda at the Golan border over Hezbollah or anyone allied with them, including the Syrian government.

Meanwhile all of Nusra’s command centers and bases are located at the border between Syria and the Israeli-occupied side of the Golan. I’m told there is a Nusra hospital located next to the barrier beside the U.N. command center in the ceasefire zone between the Israeli and Syrian forces. “We can’t attack there because we don’t have precision weaponry. We can’t risk hitting the U.N. command,” says a senior Syrian army source, showing me a map of the area.

Guiding me through the different colors on the map, he continued, “Nusra controls about 15 kilometers of territory along the separation fence in Quneitra all the way to west Daraa, where there is some mixed control between Nusra and the FSA. ISIS controls the Yarmouk triangle. Al Yarmouk valley, where the Yarmouk river flows, is entirely controlled by ISIS. The jihadist group’s leaders are headquartered in Jamla, nearly 300 meters from the Israeli border. How do you want to convince me that Israel is not supporting them?” he asked.

The black flag behind the green flag

According to the NDF leader, the de-escalation agreement implemented in southern Syria is holding in Quneitra between the Syrian government and the FSA. Nusra, however, has continued to launch attacks.

“Where there is Nusra, there is no de-escalation,” he said. “The main players in Syria are the Russians and Americans. The agenda to destroy Syria was planned by the American government, so when the Americans and Russians reach an agreement, we can see the results on the ground. The FSA attacks that we faced in 2012 and 2013 have stopped 100%. There are no attacks from the so-called Free Syrian Army against our bases or military checkpoints. Now we are only fighting ISIS and Nusra,” he said.

“The main thing I want to explain to you, all this revolution, the FSA logic from the beginning was based on Wahhabism and takfirism [an extremist theological doctrine that enables Muslims to brand other Muslims as infidels and sanctions violence to punish their heresy]. But it was hidden behind this green flag. America and Israel want to support that, but they can’t do it openly under the black flag, so they need this green flag to facilitate their support,” he said.

“They always claim that the Syrian government is sectarian. How come we are sectarian? Yes, the president is Alawite. And his wife is a Sunni from Homs. The minister of defense is a Bedouin Sunni. The minister of Interior is a Sunni. The foreign minister is a Sunni. The head of intelligence in Syria, which oversees all intelligence, is a Sunni from Damascus. Why is America selling a lie that our government is sectarian?”

He went on to stress that the Golan Brigade represents the diverse social fabric of a country whose minorities are estimated at 30 to 40 percent of its mostly Sunni population. “You can find Sunnis, Alawites, Druze and Christians in this brigade. One battalion is led by a Sunni, another by an Alawite, another by a Christian. That’s why we’re strong. Go to the other side. Can you find an Alawite or Christian?” he asked.

As for the Israelis, “they are still playing a dirty game. When you are supporting Nusra at your border and let them put their tanks at the demarcation fence with the flag of Nusra, you are playing with fire,” he warned.