On patrol with the 'Syrian Free Army'

Channel 4 News is broadcasting extraordinary footage tonight of Syria’s fledgling revolutionary army, smuggling themselves into the country illegally from Lebanon and in the dead of night.

The fighters of the “Syrian Free Army” claim that they operate under a unified command based in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan as well as inside Syria itself. Estimates of their numbers go as high as 15,000, which may well be an exaggeration, yet the situation on the ground is clearly changing.

True, the footage does not show armed combat.  A small band of men are seen closing in on a Syrian army base. Their commander, known as “Abu Ali”, draws a plan with his knife in the ground. The men move within a hundred metres of a Syrian army tank. So close that they can hear the soldiers talking.

Yet they are told not to attack, only to report back on the opposing troop strength, because some of the rebels are armed with just hunting rifles and are clearly outgunned.

“We are well organised, but we don’t have anti-tank missiles”, says one. “Hopefully we will have.”

But listen to the bravado: “My shotgun is equal to the enemy’s tank,” another fighter says, “and we will achieve freedom.”

One of his comrades claims that he has blown up a Syrian tank with a rocket-propelled grenade in the recent past, killing the entire tank crew.

“I feel proud that I’m on the front line and I’m serving my country,”  he says.

“We can defeat them,” he says of his own army, “all that we need is a no-fly zone.”

These rebels see themselves as the natural inheritors of the Libyan uprising; yet unlike Libya’s revolutionaries, their bid for for NATO protection has fallen on deaf ears so far. Fears of Syrian fratricide outweigh any desire, in the West at least, to assist in ending the Assad regime’s 41 year grip on power.

In October President Assad warned of an “earthquake” and “tens of Afghanistans” if foreigners intervene. Any intervention would likely first have to be sanctioned by the Arab League, which meets in Cairo tomorrow and has focussed its efforts on brokering a ceasefire.

The men filmed for Channel 4 News are from villages near Homs, the current epicentre of the violence. Many of the men say they they defected because either they or their colleagues had been ordered to shoot Syrian demonstrators dead. Given that those shootings are being reported with horrific frequency, the number of defections seems set to rise.

The man in charge operates under the nom de guerre of “Abu Ali”. He says he defected from Syrian Military Intelligence rather than being party to crimes against his own people in Homs.

“We received orders to ‘crush’ the demonstration,” he says. ” Crush means “do whatever you want”. We were authorised to do whatever we want and the orders came directly from the leader, from Bashar (Al Assad). So it was a very easy kind of genocide. The army went down and shelled houses with tanks.”

The Syrian government says the likes of Abu Ali are terrorists, either jihadists or a front for the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, claims these rebels hotly deny.

“We are not fanatics,” says one. “We are from all sections of the people. We want to live in dignity.”

The men say their missions so far have included evacuating injured protestors for medical treatment, and shooting back when unarmed demonstrators have been fired upon.
And what is becoming increasingly clear is that Syria’s unarmed insurrection is now accompanied by an armed insurgency.

That civil war many predict if President Bashar al-Assad is deposed…. well it may have already started.

Jonathan Rugman is on Twitter, follow him @jrug

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