05/09/2013 - #Syria - Deir Ezzor - Rebel snipers in action
8:30AM GMT 04 Nov 2012
Jude Law probably doesn’t know it, but Aleppo’s best-known rebel sniper is called after him. He claims to have notched up 76 kills – up to when he stopped counting - and says he has no name other than “Sniper Moscow”.
Sniper Moscow? His colleagues laugh when asked why. “It is after that film, with the Russians in the war,” one says.
The vague description clicks. “Oh, you mean ‘Enemy at the Gates’?” “Yes,” they shout in unison. “Jude Law, Jude Law.”
In the 2001 film ‘Enemy at the Gates’, Law plays the Soviet Union’s top sniper in the Battle of Stalingrad, snaking his way through the fox-holes and smashed buildings of the city, forever hunted by his would-be nemesis, a German opposite number played by Ed Harris.
In Syria’s war, Sniper Moscow’s role is not so different. He crawls through gaps hammered between apartments to find vantage points from which to fire on his regime counterparts. The Hollywood reference is natural: melodrama looms large in the Syrian conflict, and Sniper Moscow and his pals are not the only ones to think of themselves as figures from the silver screen.
Fighters in black bandannas love posing dramatically with their AK47s for journalists, while anyone not holding a weapon seems to be holding a video camera. The cameras have recorded every move in the last 20 months, shakily telling the world extreme tales of courage, tragedy and brutality.
Sniper Moscow certainly played up to the role. Unlike many of his colleagues, he was a professional soldier, trained in the Assad army before he defected six months ago. Now he divides his time between the closest of front lines and stints at the rear training the raw recruits with whom he is forced to work.
It was an incident involving those recruits - and the raw and bloody reality that their inexperience adds to their Hollywood scripts - that led us to Sniper Moscow. On Wednesday, there had been a battle in Karem Jabal in the east of Aleppo that had led to a catastrophic, if minor, defeat for the rebels, and its circumstances were unclear.
Sniper Moscow was there.
When we found him, he was sitting astride a motorbike. Smart in a regular uniform and with neatly trimmed hair - unlike the shaggy mops and beards, jeans and second-hand tunics of the irregulars - he narrowed his eyes as he told us about himself.
First thing was that all forms of identification were out - no photographs, and no mention of his real name. He said he was originally from Al-Bab, a town east of Aleppo, but had been based with the army in Deraa, in the south of the country, before he managed to get away. Since then, he had fought in “a large number” of Aleppo’s battles. “And I was on the winning side in each one too,” he added.
He said he had stopped counting his kills last month after reaching 76, when it seemed pointless to go on. His rifle had brought him a measure of notoriety, but it was not much use against the regime’s tanks and heavy artillery, except for his three best hits, when he managed to hit tank navigators through their vision-flaps.
“I have the bullet casings of each one of those 76,” he added. Was there an Ed Harris, a possible regime adversary? He said there were certainly snipers on the other side, but that the opposition had decided on a more direct way to deal with him.
“The regime sent two men to assassinate me,” he said. It knew about him from the graffiti: he used to leave his signature, “Sniper Moscow was here”, on the walls. On one occasion, in the bitter fighting over the suburb of Suleiman Halabi, from which the rebels ultimately withdrew, regime soldiers had found it and discovered who their adversary was.
“There were these two guys asking after me,” he said. “It was about ten days ago. They were paying money for information about me.
“They were dressed as civilians but people got suspicious and they were arrested by revolutionary security. They both had pistols with silencers attached. They are in prison now.” Three and a half months after the rebels swept into Aleppo and Damascus in their biggest gains to date, their momentum has slowed.
The battles for both cities have becoming grinding. In Damascus, they make gains in the suburbs before being cleared by the Assad army’s firepower.
Across the country, small rebel advances are punished by aerial attacks, often striking behind the lines as a form of punishment on the communities who support the Free Syrian Army. This last week, attention turned to Idlib province, south-west of Aleppo, where rebels seized a key road used to resupply regime forces.
The Sunday Telegraph watched from hiding outside the town of Taftanaz as a helicopter from a nearby air base, surrounded by rebel forces, sought to distract attention by dropping missiles on to local villages. On this occasion there were no casualties – most of the women and children have already fled to Turkey – but Abu Abdo, a local rebel commander, said 15 civilians had died in Taftanaz alone in the previous month.
Sometimes, though, it does not take air power to bring a rebel advance to a halt. In Aleppo, we eventually discovered what had happened in the battle for Karem Jabal, where rebels had tried to seize a regime outpost protecting a major military base that has been fought over for weeks.
A doctor at the rebel hospital serving the area, Dr Ahmed Radwan, told us that the rebels had advanced at dawn on Wednesday but that something had gone wrong. About ten had died, he said.
Mustafa Abduljaber, a local commander, confirmed that two squads of men at the foot of Karem Jabal had tried to encircle and attack the outpost, but one had been pinned down and decimated by grenades.
It was Sniper Moscow, who had been with the squad on the left flank, who filled in the details. The squads had been supposed to creep round the post using the backstreets and rubble for a shield – there is no shortage of rubble here, a spot that has been fought over, shelled and bombed for weeks. “We were going to squeeze it like the neck of a snake,” he said.
They were making good progress when it all went wrong. He and his men heard the familiar shouts of “Allahu Akbar” from the far side of the post. The other squad had broken cover and were charging full frontal.
That was a mistake, he said. The outpost was a defensive position, and its defences were in order. The regime’s own sniper took aim from the roof, and suddenly the squad was pinned down, unable to move forward or back.
The regime troops were merciless. Some men were taken down by the sniper, some by grenades lobbed into their hiding place. Sniper Moscow could only lie in his hiding place in despair.
“They lost control, discipline,” he said. “They thought they had a victory.” They didn’t. They had just taken out three officers – a captain and two lieutenants – and got carried away.
This is the problem of conducting a Hollywood war with men who are mostly country boys – amateurs from the farms and villages of the Aleppo countryside. They get a maximum of 25 days’ training – more like 15 in most circumstances. Fighting takes precedence. They are inspired by leaders who were local businessmen and shop-keepers until last year – Abu Tawfiq, who currently heads the biggest brigade in Aleppo, the Liwa al-Tawhid, sold shoes in a town north of here.
The farm-boys were eventually brought back to a hospital not far away.
Dr Radwan saw them come in. Several he treated himself: two died on his operating table, he said, one from shrapnel wounds to the heart, the other to the liver. A third critically injured man he managed to save.
Back on the hill the next morning, the battle resumed – men in bandannas firing round corners at an enemy well hidden and unhittable; the return fire peppered the walls in front of us. But there were fewer men now to call upon. Of the 25-man squad that got pinned down the day before, just 15 made it back alive. Ten men dead; in their towns and villages that night, they let off gunfire into the night sky to celebrate their martyrs. There were no cameras.
