Estimates vary as to the number of defections, writes MARY FITZGERALD, Foreign Affairs Correspondent, in Al-Bab, Aleppo province
LITTLE OVER a month ago the man known to his fellow rebels as Abu Azzam was a captain in the Syrian army.
He had been posted to Homs, the restive city in central Syria where Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s efforts to snuff out the revolt against him have been particularly brutal.
What Abu Azzam saw and heard there sickened him. “Is an army supposed to kill its own people?” he asks. “They are murdering people who could be my family, my brothers. I could not take it any longer.”
So Abu Azzam defected, slipping out of Homs to join opposition forces here in this town just north of Aleppo.
He now serves as head of the Salman al-Farsi brigade, named after one of the prophet Muhammad’s companions.
The brigade participated in the routing of government forces from Al-Bab last month after fierce fighting during which the regime used tanks, artillery and mortars, with the support of helicopter gunships.
Asked why he didn’t leave the military earlier, given Syria’s uprising is now 17 months old, Abu Azzam replies: “Fear, and only fear.”
Thousands of Syrian soldiers like Abu Azzam have deserted and joined the rebels since the uprising against Assad began in March 2011.
All of the men who serve in the Salman al-Farsi brigade are army defectors.
The top layers of Assad’s military, one of the most formidable in the region with 220,000 regulars and 280,000 reservists, have remained largely intact, though a number of generals and senior officers have broken away and are now based in Turkey. The Apaydin camp, just inside the border in Turkey’s southern Hatay province, is home to 2,000 Syrian army defectors including more than a dozen generals, according to Turkish officials.
Estimates vary as to how much the Syrian army ranks are haemorrhaging.
Opposition activists claim between 500 and 1,000 are deserting each day, almost all of them Sunni Muslims. Turkish officials have said up to 30 defectors cross the border daily.
But the rebels themselves admit the number has not yet reached what might be considered a tipping point, though those who have defected paint a picture of an increasingly demoralised force.
“It will happen,” argues Abu Azzam, sitting in the former security base that now serves as his brigade headquarters.
“Every day more and more soldiers I know personally are leaving. They are breaking the fear barrier.
“You have to understand the level of fear, the extent to which this regime controlled its people for more than 40 years. It goes very deep in our minds.”
Those who have defected and joined the rebel side bring a range of experience and insider knowledge with them.
Mohammed Ibrahim, who comes from a village near Aleppo, deserted a month ago, bringing with him a wealth of information on what he refers to as the regime’s “electronic warfare” strategy.
He says he was stationed at a base near Damascus airport, where his job was to monitor phone and internet communications of suspected opposition activists and rebel fighters. Last year an Iranian engineer joined his unit.
“He said he was here to help Assad,” Ibrahim recalls.
“Soon after the uprising began, we started getting new, much more sophisticated monitoring, surveillance and scrambling equipment from Iran and Russia.”
It was clear, he says, that this activity was a priority for the Syrian government.
“Our work was very important for the regime,” he says. “We were ordered to pick up communications from the thowar [revolutionaries] and cut or scramble them so it would be much more difficult for them to co-ordinate and organise.”
Abu Azzam says this “electronic warfare” has seriously hampered the rebel’s efforts. A small number of brigades have satellite phones but his does not.
“We are relying only on mobile phones and more often than not the network is cut,” he says.
Even satellite communications equipment is not reliable – signals have been interfered with in several parts of the country.
“Forming a united opposition force is more difficult when you can’t communicate with other brigades in other parts of the country,” says Abu Azzam.
“Unfortunately, this is one of the reasons why our revolution is taking more time.”