The Lions of Tawhid: The Times’s C.J. Chivers travels with an antigovernment fighting group in and near Aleppo, where the war for Syria’s future has hardened all involved.
TAL RIFAAT, Syria — Abdul Hakim Yasin, the commander of a Syrian antigovernment fighting group, lurched his pickup truck to a stop inside the captured residential compound he uses as his guerrilla base.
His fighters had been waiting for orders for a predawn attack on an army checkpoint at the entrance to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. The men had been issued ammunition and had said their prayers. Their truck bomb was almost prepared.
Now the commander had a surprise. Minutes earlier, his father, who had been arrested by the army at the same checkpoint in July, had called to say his jailers had released him. He needed a ride out of Aleppo, fast.
“God is great!” the men shouted. They climbed onto trucks, loaded weapons and accelerated away, barreling through darkness on nearly deserted roads toward a city under siege, to reclaim one of their own.
Mr. Yasin was pensive as he drove, worried that the call was a ploy to lure him and his fighters into a trap. “Often the government does this,” he said. “Usually it is an ambush.”
He had sent an empty freight truck ahead, he said, to check the way. But he never slowed down.
During five days last week, Mr. Yasin and his group, the Lions of Tawhid, allowed two journalists from The New York Times to live and travel beside them as they fought their part in the war to unseat President Bashar al-Assad.
This group falls under the command of Al Tawhid Brigade, a relatively new structure in Aleppo Province that has unified several groups and fights under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, the loose coalition of armed rebels.
While broad extrapolations are difficult to glean from one fighting group in a complex society, the activities and personal stories of these men, a mix of civilians who took up arms and dozens of army defectors who joined them, offers a fine-grained look of the uprising, and the momentum and guerrilla energy it has attained.
Mr. Yasin, 37, was a clean-shaven accountant before the war. He lived a quiet life with his wife and two young sons. Now thickly bearded and projecting a stoic calm under fire, he has been hardened by his war in ways he could not have foreseen.
He roams the Aleppo region with dozens of armed men in camouflage, plotting attacks with other commanders, evading airstrikes, meeting with smugglers and bombmakers to gather more weapons, and rotating through front-line duties in a gritty street-by-street urban campaign. He prefers to sleep by day, and fight by night.
His fighters are a cross section of a nation at war with itself. They include a real estate agent, several farmers, construction workers and a nurse who owned a short-order restaurant. These men fight side by side with a cadre of army defectors, who say the government they once served must fall.
The civilians started with stones and firearms bought for hunting. Their first more powerful weapon was a huge slingshot for hurling Molotov cocktails and small homemade bombs. As professional soldiers have joined them, they have gradually acquired assault rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled and hand grenades. They now control a captured armored vehicle and two tanks.
As they have grown in numbers and strength, they have organized into a force that mixes paramilitary discipline, civilian policing, Islamic law and the harsh demands of necessity with battlefield coldness and outright cunning. They have informants and spies, and eavesdrop on the government’s military radios while trying to form a nascent government themselves in the territory under their control.
But mostly they yearn to fight, seeking to destroy the Assad government and its better-equipped forces by most any means. Their collective confidence that they will prevail both bonds them together and informs their sense that this is their time.
From Protests to Arms
For the people of Tal Rifaat, a city of roughly 20,000 people on an agricultural plain, the uprising moved in stages from peaceful demonstrations to open war. It began with protests early in 2011, which the government tried to smash.
