Wholesale Rebel Disunity

"They kidnapped him and tortured him and then killed him and disfigured his corpse, in a way unknown to the Syrian people prior to the revolution, even when it came to the branches of the criminal Assad regime's security bodies."
Statement, Islamic Front

(Now there's a bit of hyperbolic nonsense. Surely it is well enough known and recognized that the Syrian regime has conducted itself in a manner worthy of any pitiless, battle-hardened Islamist terrorist. The detention, abduction and secret imprisonment of men, women and children, civilians and militants alike resulting in torture and death and a return of mutilated bodies to grieving family members -- sometimes no return, just a desolate absence into eternity, seems a speciality of the regime.)

"ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham) denies reality, refusing to recognize that it is simply another group. It refuses to go to independent courts; it attacked many other groups, stole their weapons, occupied their headquarters and arbitrarily apprehended numerous activists, journalists and rebels. It has been torturing its prisoners. These transgressions accumulated and people got fed up with ISIS. Some of those people have attacked ISIS's positions, but ISIS was first to attack in other places, bringing this on itself."
"We would like these [ISIS] brothers to join their brethren in the Syrian revolution. We see them as nothing but another group. They see themselves as a state. They need to drop this illusion that they have come to believe as an established fact. It causes them to treat allies as opponents."
Hassan Aboud, political leader of the Islamic Front

All, then, will be forgiven? Then surely, things cannot be that resolutely serious...? Which needn't necessarily stop the adversaries from beating the living hell out of one another. Another speciality of the geography, the religion, the tribal mentality.

Fighters of al-Qaida linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant carry their weapons during a parade at the Syrian town of Tel Abyad, near the border with Turkey, Jan. 2, 2014.

A highly regarded physician who was also a commander in Ahrar Al-Sham representing one of Syria's largest rebel groups had presented himself to leaders of the ISIS group to negotiate a local dispute in Maskanah, near Aleppo. The negotiations didn't go too well, for Hussein Suleiman. Those to whom he presented his credentials as a negotiator, decided to 'kill the messenger' as it were.

His mutilated body was returned to his comrades, leading the Islamic Front, an alliance of Islamist groups like Ahrar Al-Sham to condemn the killing. The result of which was an attack against ISIS strongholds in retaliation.

Anger at the arbitrary brutality of ISIS's battlefield methods has been on the upswing ever since their arrival in northern Syria in May 2013 with the intention of fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Although many of the Islamist groups are joined in their intention to create an Islamic state in the country, ISIS has even more stringent aspirations; to restore the caliphate, as an Islamic kingdom across the entire Levant, absorbing a huge area of the eastern Mediterranean.

Any  areas under the control of ISIS have learned how dangerous it is to take the demands of ISIS to demonstrate pure and total Islamist piety too lightly. Their reputation for the brutality of the punishments they mete out to any who fail to comply with their interpretation of Islamic law can be fatal.

An activist in the town of Kafranbel, Muhammad Khatib, described how ISIS "tried to impose their ideology on the Kafranbel people. They kidnapped activists and destroyed the media centre. They banned smoking, demanded Islamic attire for all the girls. They tried to ban jeans and casual clothes and asked men to grow beards. The people were fed up in less than a month". 

Leading to an inevitable comparison to the hard-core Islamist vision and implementation of Taliban rule in Afghanistan where similar social and religious strictures were imposed on the Afghan population. Life in Afghanistan under the Taliban was a living nightmare. And it will return, inevitably, as the Taliban gain strength and opportunity with the total withdrawal of an international presence.

The Islamic Front and two other rebel coalitions, the Syrian Revolutionary Front (SRF) and Jaysh al-Mujahideen, have attacked ISIS throughout Aleppo province and Idlib. The conflict has spread to other towns in reflection of tensions that have been on the horizon for months, the border town of Azaz included.

Violent clashes between the rival rebel groups in the town of Manbij where rebels seized a compound garrisoned by ISIS saw sustained fighting. North of Aleppo city, in the town of Tal Rafaat, ISIS Islamists ambushed a rebel convoy, killing fourteen fighters. Dozens on each side have been killed, countless more injured.

Prisoners being killed by ISIS fighters en masse as they abandon positions or defect to the rebels have been reported. Syrian activists have named this the "second revolution", though the Islamic Front has stated it is prepared for a negotiated peace with ISIS which happens to share a common ideology with al-Qaeda.

"For now, this simply represents three days of inter-factional fighting with an overtly anti-ISIS foundation. Should ISIS launch a determined counterattack, then this could come to represent a definitive moment in the Syrian conflict", said Charles Lister of the Brookings Doha Centre who feels that there will be no wider repercussions of these factional conflicts.

What a deadly combination of equally miserable ideologies joining together in a concerted effort to wrest the control of a country from a murderous tyrant whose own brutal exploits are easily capable of comparison to those of the 'terrorists' President al-Assad warned the international community were assaulting his country.

Between his own assaults and that of the Islamist factions Syria is destroyed.