Syrian Rebels Meet Setbacks on a New Front

Iblil, Syria, June 4, 2013 by C.J. Chivers

The airstrikes resumed at 7:30 a.m., beginning with a rolling series of explosions in the village of Zoghba. An extended roar shook the northern Hama Plain.

In nearby Iblil, rebel fighters listened knowingly. If the pattern held, shells and rockets would soon follow — and hundreds of opposition fighters in villages they had recently claimed would face another punishing day.

Roughly six weeks ago, as foreign governments were focused on whether chemical weapons had been used in Syria’s civil war, several rebel groups made a decision blending boldness and risk. Eager to break a painful near-stalemate that has settled over the war since late last summer, they opened a front here on the arid flatlands east of the Aleppo-Damascus highway.

At first the rebel thrust moved swiftly. But as the fight has unfolded, the battle here has assumed the war’s seesawing and bloody rhythm, capturing many of the dynamics of a conflict exhausting its mismatched adversaries, and putting the nation on a path toward disintegration.

The rebels had calculated that a successful offensive through the network of villages here would bypass government strong points near the cities and create fresh opportunities for severing Syria’s main highway.

In this way, they might deplete the ammunition and other supplies of army outposts in Idlib and Hama — sources of much of the shelling of civilian neighborhoods — so that the outposts could be defeated piecemeal. And it might also take pressure off a long-running siege. “We are making a corridor not to Hama, but to Homs,” said Abu Hamza al-Hamwi, from Ahfad al-Rasul, or the Grandsons of the Prophet, who commands part of the rebel forces on this new Hama front. Homs is a major city south of Hama.

The military has replied with intensive shelling and repeated airstrikes. Villages along the way have been abandoned and partly destroyed. And tensions have flared, with forces divided on sectarian lines and neighbor turning on neighbor, for profit, power and personal gain.

For many of the fighters, the new offensive had an especially emotional character, of a sort played out often in Syria’s displaced population: These were men trying to return to villages from which they had been driven at gunpoint.

In recent decades, the northeastern Hama Plain had been a demographically mixed area, its villages populated by Alawite, Sunni and Bedouin families.

After the Syrian Army was deployed into the cities in 2011, these villages assumed a tactical significance. A formerly quiet patch of not especially fertile farmland was now a buffer that insulated Hama, where the army is thickly garrisoned, and the eastern side of the Aleppo-Damascus highway, one of the military’s logistical lifelines.

The area’s new importance brought with it loyalist militias, criminal opportunities and sectarian troubles. The Alawite-led military, rebels said, set about forcing Sunni families away from villages and neighborhoods, and established a network of outposts, often supported with tanks and armored fighting vehicles, and within range of supporting rocket and artillery fire from larger outposts near the highway.

The war took an intimately ugly shape. Mohammad Ibrahim Derey, 45, a farmer and business owner from the plain who is now a rebel battalion commander, said one of his Alawite friends, Rifaat Baroudy, became the leader of a loyalist militia, known among rebels as shabiha, and began ordering Sunni farmers and families to leave.

Mr. Derey said he called Mr. Baroudy for permission to remove his possessions from his own home. He was told he could not. “I had never thought of such a thing,” he said. “I found myself jobless, homeless.”

That a man he knew well had turned on him made Mr. Derey’s losses even more disorienting. “We were friends, we had some trade together,” he said of Mr. Baroudy. “We used to have breakfast together.”

Mr. Derey left his village last summer. The two men remained intermittently in touch by telephone as rebels became more potent. When harvest time arrived last year, Mr. Derey said, he called Mr. Baroudy and asked if he could return to take the crop from his pistachio groves.

“He said to me in an ironic tone, ‘You are my brother. I will pick your harvest for you,’ ” Mr. Derey said.

Their loyalist neighbors were selling crops taken from Sunni properties, displaced men said.

Mr. Baroudy could not be reached.

Mr. Derey, like several other commanders, lamented the war’s escalation on such sectarian lines.

“I have tried to get the sectarian thinking out of the minds of the Sunni and the Alawites,” he said.

This rebel offensive started in April with hopeful signs for the opposition. Several fighting groups collaborated under a formally unified command; their thrust across the flatlands made progress.

And armed detachments that rebels left behind to watch over and harass the government outposts managed to keep pressure on the army units there.

With their fighters massing for a large flanking move, the rebel units overran a patchwork of villages: Iblil, Zoghba, Tleisiya, Ras al-Ain, al-Qahira, Ghrab, Sha’tha, Jinina, Qasr Mukhrram and Duma.

They acted more like a light military force than many had before — organizing resupply convoys, rotating diverse units through the front lines, and appointing a sole tactical commander.

Mr. Derey had formed his own battalion, which called itself the Martyrs of Abdullah Azzam. He fought under Mr. Hamwi as rebel gun trucks and columns gathered momentum.

And when rebels moved on Tleisiya, he said, this time it was Mr. Baroudy who called him.

Tleisiya is an Alawite village; Mr Baroudy’s wife’s family came from there. He asked Mr. Derey not to burn his in-laws’ home.

Mr. Derey said his fighters did not resort to arson and that his rival’s home was spared. “There was not a single house burned,” he said. “What was destroyed was destroyed from the battle.”

This could not be independently confirmed; when The New York Times tried to visit villages beyond the edge of Iblil, the rebels forbade access, saying the shelling and airstrikes were too intense. Not long after, a series of airstrikes hit along the way to Tleisiya. The village could not be reached.

But there is no question that many of the villages have been severely damaged, whether by sectarian rage or sustained government shelling. Rebels said that on some days they had counted more than 2,000 incoming shells, a cascade of fire punctuated by airstrikes.

Many villages, even villages away from the fighting, now are deserted. Mr. Derey said he would not use the word “liberated” to describe villages the rebels had taken in such conditions.

“ ‘Liberation’ is when you get to the village and the people are still there in their homes, and they live securely,” he said.

“This is not that. This,” he said, and paused, looking at the rebels gathered around him, “is necessity.”

Another fighter, Hussein Homoud al-Homoud, pointed to Tal Khanzir, a formerly mixed Sunni and Alawite village on the plain behind the rebel lines. It should have been safe. Instead, it was virtually empty, too.

“There was an Alawite neighborhood in that village,” he said. “The regime asked them to leave, then bombed it with airstrikes. Now you can see that the houses were destroyed.”

The battles have shown the strains on all sides in a war in its third year.

The rebels are pulled between the limits inherent to a lightly equipped and fundamentally guerrilla force and their urge to fight with the battlefield weight of an army.

And the Syrian Army and its loyalist militias are simultaneously trying to maintain a sprawling network of outposts on territory sympathetic to the opposition, while repositioning forces with hopes of reversing the rebels’ gains of the past year.

By late May the rebels had moved as far as Ma’an and al-Fan al-Shamali. Mr. Derey’s battalion, with others, was advancing toward Samra, his home village.

Late last week, Gen. Abu Qutayba, an army officer who defected and now serves as the battle’s operations officer and coordinates between the fighting groups involved, stood on a small hill and pointed out over the battlefield.

He named village after village the rebels had swept through. But he and Mr. Hamwi noted that the government had brought its firepower to bear on the ground that had changed hands. The army had tanks, multiple rocket launchers and artillery batteries, and an air force that made several bombing runs each day in what seemed to be the preparatory moves for an impending attack.

For at least a week, he said, the rebels opted not to withdraw when the government massed, as guerrilla forces often will. The open terrain left few places to hide beyond inside buildings that were often under barrage. In these they bunkered down.

By Sunday, the fight was shifting again, and rebels were reconsidering their plans. A Syrian Army armored column from Hama, after more artillery and rocket barrages, had retaken Tleisiya.

Some rebel units, not able to fight tanks head-on and considering it unwise to cluster under sustained barrages, were pulling back to safer areas, while the army set up a new outpost at Tleisiya, the Alawite village. The rebels held their positions elsewhere, still under shelling, with light weapons, contemplating their next move now that their thrust had been checked.

One fighter said that the army’s counterattack was no victory, and that the rebels would make other plans.

“We don’t really consider this a loss,” Hussain Hussain said. “This is how battles go. What matters is to remember the great difference between the two sides.”

He added, “The army came to us, so it spares us time and efforts to go to its defensive lines.”