ABSTRACT: LETTER FROM SYRIA about the rebel factions fighting against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. For seventeen months, Assad has kept up a grinding campaign against the rebels, which has killed as many as twenty thousand of his citizens. But last month a spectacular series of events recast the pattern of the war. On July 18th, rebels bombed a regime intelligence headquarters in the capital, Damascus, killing four of the country’s senior military and intelligence officials. In the confusion, the rebels launched major offensives, taking neighborhoods in Damascus for the first time. Assad disappeared—sparking wild rumors that he had dispatched his family to Moscow and fled to the Mediterranean coast—and tens of thousands of Syrians left on a panicked exodus to neighboring countries. In the next few days, the rebels also stormed into Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and its commercial center, pressing all the way to the walls of the Old City. A counterattack by the regime was imminent; according to reports, Assad had dispatched a large armored column to retake the city, and rebels to the south were attacking the troops, trying to slow them down. The leader of the rebel force, a lean, bearded figure who calls himself Haji Mara, said that he and his men were ready for Assad’s forces. The regime still had troops within the city, but they were too weak to strike back, he said. The rebels’ main trouble was with snipers and with the shabiha, the paramilitary civilian thugs who serve as the regime’s death squads. For months, policymakers and pundits have debated whether Syria was in a state of civil war. Today, it undeniably is, but not in the schoolbook sense of the phrase, with its connotation of two tidily opposed sides. Most of the rebels, like seventy-five per cent of Syria’s citizens, are Sunni Arabs, while the Assad regime is dominated by Alawites, members of a Shiite offshoot that makes up about eleven per cent of the population. But the country also has Christians of several sects, Kurds, non-Alawite Shiites, and Turkomans, along with Palestinians, Armenians, Druze, Bedouin nomads, and even some Gypsies. Each group has its own political and economic interests and traditional alliances, some of which overlap and some of which conflict. There are Kurds who are close to the regime and others who are opposed. While so far the United States and Europe have decided that the conflict is too complicated to resolve with a Libya-like mission, most countries in the region are taking sides. The Shiite-led states support the government. On the other side, Sunni states back the rebels. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have provided weapons and cash. The Turkish Prime Minister discreetly established a border base camp for regime officers defecting to the F.S.A. Away from the Muslim world, the conflict has been no less divisive. China has aligned itself with Assad, and so has Russia, which has a naval base in Syria and a large-scale arms arrangement with the regime. The United States is unquestionably on the side of the rebels. Writer travels to the towns of Mara and Azaz, recently “liberated” by the rebels, and interviews militia leaders and fighters involved in the conflict.
