It was 5am, and Mohamad Baree was hiding with his fighters behind a large rock. Some 300 metres away, a column of Syrian army tanks was advancing towards Aleppo through the countryside. The group of rebels were waiting for it. Baree watched. He then set off a powerful roadside bomb. It blew two of the tanks up. The others staged a panicky retreat to their base in the northern city of Idlib.
"From a military point of view the operation was successful," Baree tells me a week later, as we bump along in the back of his unit's battle-scarred minivan. Baree, 27, is dressed in khaki fatigues. He carries a Kalashnikov and a pistol. Despite his appearance, he explains that he is actually a pharmacist who has spent seven years living in Odessa; his brother, another fighter in Syria's revolution, a lawyer.
The situation in Aleppo, Syria's largest metropolis, engulfed by fighting since July, meanwhile, is also many-layered. Aleppo is one of the most ancient cities on the planet, home to various Christian denominations, historically a large Jewish population, now all fled, as well as wealthy Sunni traders, many favourably disposed to the regime.
In the mountains just outside Aleppo you find the ghostly ruins of Byzantine churches. There are poor Kurdish hamlets. I find the frontline town of Anadan semi-wrecked and abandoned.
Just over the border, I meet Thaer Abboud, an opposition activist who fled to Turkey from Syria last year. Abboud is an Alawite from the Mediterranean coastal town of Latakia. Some observers have suggested that Latakia and its surrounding mountain villages could form an Alawite heartland, with the regime and army retreating from Damascus and setting up their own an impregnable mini-state there. Abboud, however, says that far from being a loyalist Alawite fiefdom Latakia is split. Some 50% of the town oppose Assad, including some Alawis, a number of whom have been persecuted: "It isn't a matter of Alawis versus Sunnis.
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