The Free Syrian Army is being taken over by groups of jihadist thugs

Ghadi had spent the past two years on the run from the Syrian regime but it was the rebels fighting against the government, the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA) who finally caused him to abandon the revolution and flee Damascus. He had made the mistake of speaking out against one of the big FSA brigades running the Yarmouk district of the capital. ‘They are thieves and gangsters,’ he told me. ‘One Facebook post about what they’re doing will get you killed.’

I met Ghadi in a Beirut café, after he had made the long trek over the mountains from Syria to Beirut. Other activists joined us, all bitterly disillusioned by the corruption, looting and kidnapping that has consumed the uprising. When FSA fighters in Yarmouk had car trouble, they said, they would casually set up a checkpoint to seize another vehicle ‘for the revolution’. Mercedes were popular.

Ghadi, a tall young man of about 30, had helped to run a centre collecting food for refugees. But FSA fighters arrived, and without apology or explanation piled the food into a pick-up truck and drove off. This was the final straw for Ghadi, but he’d had doubts about the ‘resistance’ for months.

As a ‘citizen journalist’, he followed the FSA, camera in hand. One day the local commander led him down into a basement and said: ‘Look at this.’ Ghadi’s video shows five men sitting, all rigid with fear, stripped to the waist, blindfolded, hands bound behind their backs. Ugly bruises cover most of their upper bodies. They had been seized from a suburb loyal to the government. They included a clerk in the foreign ministry, a new recruit to an artillery regiment and a secondary school headmaster.