From special forces officer to brigade-hopping rebel, Abu Jaafar has seen Syria’s uprising from all angles.
However, after years of setbacks, culminating in cuts to US support, he feels disillusioned.
The 31-year-old spent three years in a Syrian prison and once counted himself among his US trainers’ most admired fighters, but with more than 330,000 dead and millions displaced, Abu Jaafar expressed exhaustion and anger.
“I fall apart, I get annoyed and I want to leave, but I say no — if I leave and others do too, the country will be even more destroyed than it is now,” he told reporters via a messaging app.
In some ways, his trajectory has tracked Washington’s shifting policy, which originally backed anti-regime factions, but is now focused on battling the Islamic State group.
US President Donald Trump’s administration last month announced it was ending Washington’s four-year program to back rebels.
Abu Jaafar, who worked with two groups supported by that program, but now receives separate Pentagon backing, was left convinced that opposition groups were pawns in a proxy war between outside powers.
“Rebel factions were pieces on a chessboard. The board is in Turkey, Trump is on one side, and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is on the other,” he said.
Originally from the central province of Homs, Abu Jaafar — born Khaled Karzoun — enrolled in the special forces’ officers school at the age of 17. When protests erupted in 2011, he was stationed on Syria’s Mediterranean coast and ordered to fire on the few demonstrations in the regime stronghold.
“The oppression was brutal in a way I cannot describe,” he said.
In September 2011, he was accused of liaising with rebels and sentenced to 15 years in the Saydnaya prison, where his wife was able to visit him only twice a year.
“Three hours before the visit, I would be taken out to be tortured and beaten so that I would come out for the visit covered in blood,” he said.
Abu Jaafar was released on June 14, 2014, after a string of amnesties cut his sentence to three years.
Within a week, he joined the rebel Hazm Movement, at a time when the opposition still controlled swathes of Syria, including half of Aleppo.
Washington and its allies were training and arming rebel groups, including Hazm, through a Turkey-based operations room known by its Turkish acronym MOM.
Abu Jaafar spent a month training in Saudi Arabia, but returned to Syria disillusioned by what he perceived as corruption among Hazm members.
“I missed the most amazing years of the revolution because I was in jail. By then, I saw the revolution had been turned into a business,” he said.
“I rebelled for honor, someone else was against injustice, another because his brother was in jail,” he said. “That’s why we were with the revolution, but now everyone is rushing to expand his faction for his own personal interests.”
In September 2014, Abu Jaafar left Hazm as it lost territory and weapons to al-Qaeda before folding the following year. For several months, he worked as a school bus driver outside second city Aleppo. His wife, who taught at the school, gave birth to a boy.
“He lived 21 days. There was an airstrike and he died,” he said.
Early last year, Abu Jaafar was recruited by the Fastaqim Union, a rebel faction in Aleppo.
“We got weapons on a monthly basis, as well as salaries, medical equipment, vehicles, and relief materials” from the MOM, he said.
He led month-long training courses for Fastaqim members in Turkey and Qatar.
“I had a great relationship with the Americans. They liked me a lot,” Abu Jaafar said.
However, the group was weakening as it and other rebel groups lost their hold on urban Aleppo. In the middle of last year, Abu Jaafar transferred to the Pentagon-backed Mutasem Brigades.
The move meant Abu Jaafar was now fighting the Islamic State group instead of the army — a shift already months in the making in Washington.
However, with the end of US support for the MOM, Abu Jaafar wonders if his latest brigade will be around much longer.
“Maybe soon it’ll be our turn,” he said.
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
Former Lima mayor Rafael Lopez Aliaga, a Peruvian presidential hopeful, gathered hundreds of supporters in Lima on Tuesday and gave authorities 24 hours to annul the first round of the country’s election over allegations of fraud. Lopez Aliaga is locked in a tight three-way race with two other candidates for second place in Sunday’s vote. The election runner-up wins a ticket to June’s presidential run-off against front-runner Keiko Fujimori. “I am giving them 24 hours to declare this electoral fraud null and void,” said Lopez Aliaga, surrounded by a crowd of several hundred supporters. “If it is not declared null and void tomorrow,
Four contenders are squaring up to succeed Antonio Guterres as secretary-general of the UN, which faces unprecedented global instability, wars and its own crushing budget crisis. Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, Argentina’s Rafael Grossi, Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan and Senegal’s Macky Sall are each to face grillings by 193 member states and non-governmental organizations for three hours today and tomorrow. It is only the second time the UN has held a public question-and-answer, a format created in 2016 to boost transparency. Ultimately the five permanent members of the UN’s top body, the Security Council, hold the power, wielding vetoes over who leads the
A humanoid robot that won a half-marathon race for robots in Beijing on Sunday ran faster than the human world record in a show of China’s technological leaps. The winner from Honor, a Chinese smartphone maker, completed the 21km race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, said a WeChat post by the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, also known as Beijing E-Town, where the race began. That was faster than the human world record holder, Ugandan Jacob Kiplimo, who finished the same distance in about 57 minutes in March at the Lisbon road race. The performance by the robot marked a significant step forward
RSS