Paul Wood

‘If no one helps us, we will turn to the devil’

Syria’s Free Army has no love for al-Qa’eda – but its desperation is increasing

Homs province

Between the distant pop of the mortar when it’s fired, the pressure wave, and the roar of the blast five or six seconds later when it lands, the rebel fighters recited the Shahadah, the Muslim declaration of faith. ‘There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger.’

‘We do this in case one hits us,’ the group’s leader tells me, smiling. ‘So we go straight to paradise. No delays.’

The rebels and I were hiding out in the apricot orchards along Syria’s border with Lebanon. Every night, the Syrian army sent a few dozen mortars crashing down. And although the rebels had no heavy weapons of their own to return fire, they took comfort in stories about the army’s inability to aim in a straight line. When the army start firing, even their own soldiers take cover, it was said.

A lot has been written lately about the growing strength and numbers of the rebel Free Syrian Army. But in the orchards they were desperate, barely surviving. Fighters had sold their furniture to buy bullets, $7 each in Lebanon’s inflated arms market, they told me. Rocket-propelled grenades were up to $500 each. One man took down his Kalashnikov from where it was hanging on the wall and said, resignedly, that he would have to sell it to buy food for his wife and children, refugees in Lebanon.

This little group I was with were smugglers, responsible for getting casualties out and (a trickle of) weapons and ammunition in. Nothing had moved for a week. The rebels said the Syrian army had deployed 800 troops and a dozen tanks to stop all movement along that particular section of the border. In a farmhouse on the edge of the orchards, a bearded fighter lay on the floor, his stomach bandaged, too weak to lift his head.

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Written by
Paul Wood
Paul Wood was a BBC foreign correspondent for 25 years, in Belgrade, Athens, Cairo, Jerusalem, Kabul and Washington DC. He has won numerous awards, including two US Emmys for his coverage of the Syrian civil war

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