Syria 1st-Hand Feature: Travelling with the Insurgent "Lions of Tawhid" (Chivers)
Wednesday, August 22, 2012 at 11:51 | Scott Lucas in EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran Abdul Hakim Yasin, the commander of a Syrian anti-government 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.