BEIRUT -- Al-Qaida's branch in Syria has recruited thousands of fighters, including teenagers, and taken territory from government forces in a successful offensive in the north.
Since March, the branch known as the Nusra Front has recruited 3,000 new fighters, in comparison with an average of 200 to 300 a month before, according to Rami Abdurrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group monitoring the conflict. He cited contacts within the Nusra Front. Other activists said hundreds living in camps for displaced people in the north have joined the al-Qaida branch.
When Russia and the U.S. brokered a cease-fire between Syrian President Bashar Assad and opposition forces in February, the Nusra Front and Islamic State were excluded, allowing Assad's troops and Russian and American airstrikes to continue to hit them. The hope in Washington and Moscow was that other rebel factions would shun both extremist groups.
Instead, the cease-fire faltered within weeks as Assad's forces fought rebels around the opposition-held part of Aleppo, and peace talks in Geneva stalemated. That boosted the Nusra Front's credibility as the force that kept up the fight against Assad and stood against any compromise leaving him in power.
Turkey's president said during a rally Sunday that the United States, Russia and Iran were contributing to Syrians' pain by not deposing Assad.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked: "What business have Russia and Iran [in Syria]? What business do the U.S. soldiers dressed up with the so-called patches of a terror organization have there?"
He was referring to photos that surfaced last week showing American troops wearing the insignia of the Syrian militia, which Turkey considers to be a terror organization because of its links to Turkey's outlawed Kurdish rebels. Army Col. Steve Warren said that while U.S. special operations forces have historically and routinely worn the insignia of foreign troops with whom they work, the soldiers weren't authorized to wear the patches because of political sensitivities.
Maj. Jamil Saleh, commander of Tajammu el-Ezzah, a U.S.-backed rebel group, said the Nusra Front is gaining recruits in part because the international community has not pressed for Assad's removal at the peace talks, discrediting moderate factions that agreed to the negotiations.
"It is impossible for the rebel factions to enter into this battle [against the Nusra Front] so long as Bashar [Assad] remains in office," Saleh said.
Syria an al-Qaida hub
Because of the Nusra Front, Syria has become a critical hub for al-Qaida. Al-Qaida's central leadership, believed based in the Afghan-Pakistan border region, has been sending prominent figures to aid the fight in Syria.
"Syria is right now the central front for al-Qaida's jihad," said Thomas Joscelyn, senior editor of the Long War Journal and an al-Qaida watcher for The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a U.S.-based think tank. "I don't think a lot of people realize how many resources al-Qaida has invested in Syria."
The alliances that al-Qaida has built with other Syrian rebel factions have been key to its success. That's in contrast to the Islamic State, which declared a caliphate in the territory it controls in Syria and Iraq, and considers as infidels anyone who does not accept its rule. As a result, the Islamic State has battled Syrian rebel factions -- and the Nusra Front -- more than it has battled Assad's forces.
But battlefield success and the push for new recruits have brought to the surface tensions within the Nusra Front over the group's future path, observers say.
A hard-line faction within the group wants to emulate the Islamic State group and declare an Islamic caliphate in the areas under its control, a step al-Qaida has long rejected because it does not want to alienate its allies in the Syrian opposition. On the other end of the spectrum, a Syria-minded camp within the Nusra Front wants to focus entirely on the campaign to oust Assad and to break ties with al-Qaida.
"There are leaders in Nusra who are saying we are strongest, why are we not ruling and why don't we declare a caliphate?" said Radwan Mortada, an expert on jihadi groups who writes for Lebanon's Al-Akhbar newspaper. "There are others who say the world will not leave us alone so long as we are related to al-Qaida. So the least we can do ... is declare our dissociation with al-Qaida."
The Nusra Front is unlikely to declare a caliphate in areas it controls because that could bring even more airstrikes and alienate its allies, who might then unify against it, said Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who now heads the Soufan group, a private risk-assessment firm.
Instead, with the backing of al-Qaida's leadership, Nusra Front leader Abu Muhammad al-Golani appears to be working to keep the group's factions behind a more pragmatic policy focused on keeping allies by the group's side, rather than pressing an ideological agenda. Al-Qaida's traditional stance has always been that while an Islamic state is the ultimate goal, it must wait until regional leaders are overthrown and other Muslims rally around the cause.
The Nusra Front and al-Qaida's leader Ayman al-Zawahri "are really fearful ... that they will be stabbed in the back by people like Ahrar Sham or Islamic Army," Soufan said, referring to some of the Nusra Front's Islamic allies.
Rebels regain villages
Syrian rebels independent of the Nusra Front retook two villages from Islamic State militants Sunday, activists said.
Rebels retook the villages of Kafr Shoush and Braghida, expanding their buffer around the rebel-held town of Azaz, home to tens of thousands of people displaced by war, according to the Local Coordination Committees, an activist network inside the country.
Islamic State militants took Syrian rebels by surprise on Sunday when they launched an offensive that threatened to seize Azaz and isolate Marea, another rebel-held town north of the contested city of Aleppo.
More than 160,000 civilians have been trapped by the fighting. The international medical organization Doctors Without Borders evacuated one of the few remaining hospitals in the area.
The rebel pocket around Azaz, which connects to the Turkish border, is surrounded by Islamic State militants on one side and the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces on the other. Syria's Turkish and Saudi-backed rebels accuse the Kurdish group of colluding with the government in the country's civil war.
The Islamic State advance prompted a rare deal between the Syrian Democratic Forces and rebels Saturday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It said the rebels surrendered control of a village near Marea to a Syrian Democratic Forces division in exchange for allowing 6,000 civilians to evacuate to areas under Kurdish control.
Yet rebels also shelled a Syrian Democratic Forces-held neighborhood of Sheikh Maqsoud in nearby Aleppo on Saturday, killing four people, the Observatory said.
Elsewhere in Syria on Sunday, government forces shelled an opposition neighborhood of Homs, Syria's third largest city, local activists said. The Local Coordination Committees network said the strikes on the al-Waer neighborhood killed four people and injured 17, including a number of children. Local media activist Mohamad Sabai also reported the attack.
Al-Waer has been under government siege since 2013, according to the monitoring group Siege Watch. The U.N. humanitarian aid coordinator for Syria, Jan Egeland, said Thursday the situation inside was "horrendously critical."
The U.N. says nearly half a million people are trapped in sieges in the Syria war, which began more than five years ago as a protest movement.
Information for this article was contributed by Sarah El Deeb and Bassem Mroue of The Associated Press.
A Section on 05/30/2016