The French photojournalist who reports from behind rebel lines in Syria using the name Mani has produced another striking video report for Britain's Channel 4 News, an intimate portrait of the Free Syrian Army's Farouq Brigade first broadcast on Monday.
The report shows rebels fighters who withdrew from the city of Homs six months ago battling forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad less than 10 miles north of the city, in the town of Talbiseh.
For the past three months, Syrian opposition activists have been posting video online showing rebel fighters and civilians fleeing from heavy shelling on the streets of Talbiseh and huge clouds of smoke rising over the town after airstrikes.
In one part of the French filmmaker's report, he shows rebel fighters scattering as a helicopter gunship attacks, and then shooting back with a captured antiaircraft weapon.
In a previous report for Channel 4 News, Mani captured in vivid detail the desperate struggle of rebel fighters to hold on to the Homs district of Baba Amr under intense shelling in February. In his new report, he watches as the fighters from Homs plot an attack on a Syrian Army checkpoint that they hope will open the way for them to return to the city.
The filmmaker also found evidence of the increa singly sectarian outlook of some of the Sunni Muslim fighters in the brigade. “We want to open the road to Homs,†one fighter told him. “Our families are there. They're being butchered by the Alawites, the Shia and their militia. It's not about the army anymore or toppling the regime. It's a sectarian conflict.â€
As my colleague David Kirkpatrick reported last week, the Farouq Brigade, one of the largest rebel brigades, is led by Lt. Abdul-Razzaq Tlass, “a relative of Mr. Assad's former defense minister, Mustafa Tlass, whose family members were early defectors.â€
Christoph Reuter of the German magazine Der Spiegel interviewed Lieutenant Tlass during a visit to Rastan, near Talbiseh, two months ago and found him extremely confident of victory:
When we encountered Tlass in the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs last December, he was leading a small band of pitifully armed defectors. An attempt to meet him again this summer turns into a searc h for a phantom. Everyone knows his name and his Farouq Brigade is now the largest in Syria, with 7,000 men fighting under its banner in devastated Homs alone. But where is Tlass? First we are told he is in Homs, then in Rastan and then in Talbiseh, always in a different place. After a week, a messenger arrives and tells us to be ready that evening.
At the appointed time, a car arrives and takes us across the city to a house located hardly a hundred meters below a military tank position. No one would expect him to be here, says Tlass, probably the most wanted man in Syria. He sits down in the middle of the room. It will only take a few weeks more to bring down the government, he says.
And then? Will he return to the new army as a lieutenant? He smiles briefly. “I will go where the people want to have me,†he says. He has immense power, and he knows it. He also insists that the revolution is not an end in itself, “but it's a fight for our rights. We want dem ocracy, not the next dictatorship!â€
