BEIRUT, Lebanon — Seven of Syria’s most powerful rebel groups said that they had forged a new Islamic force seeking to topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad and replace it with an Islamic state.
The new alliance, the Islamic Front, was announced in a
video shown on Al Jazeera television on Friday and featured some of Syria’s most widely recognized rebel commanders.
While some rebels and opposition activists hailed the new group’s formation as a major step forward for the anti-Assad insurgency, it remained unclear to what extent the announcement reflected a true reorganization of rebel forces or what difference it would make in practice.
Most of the participating groups, while maintaining their own command structures, have long cooperated in battle. And through two and a half years of civil war, new rebel formations have been announced frequently, many of them faring no better against government forces than those they preceded.
Some rebels said the unification was also meant as a show of force by mainline rebel factions against one of Syria’s Al Qaeda affiliates, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or
ISIS, which has recruited thousands of foreign jihadists, seized patches of territory and clashed with other groups for resources.
The statement announcing the Islamic Front described it as “an independent political, military and social formation that seeks to completely topple the Assad regime in Syria and build an orthodox Islamic state.”
A spokesman for Al Tawhid Brigade, which joined the group, said by telephone from northern Syria that it was formed after months of discussion among rebel leaders who sought an alternative to the opposition’s nominal leadership, the
Syrian National Coalition, which many fighters consider out of touch.
“The opposition coalition gets its legitimacy from the civilians and fighters inside Syria, so if the coalition can’t fulfill their wishes, it should admit that,” said the spokesman, who gave his name as Abu Harith.
He said the Islamic Front would work to integrate all the forces that joined it and create a single office to receive and distribute military aid. Competition for financing and arms has long created rifts among rebel groups.
Abu Harith denied that the Islamic Front was formed to challenge ISIS, but said it would oppose the group if it oppressed civilians.
“The Islamic Front was born to defend the Syrian people and to achieve their goals of freedom and a decent life,” he said. “So if people complain about ISIS’s behavior, we will have their complaints solved.”
The formation of the Islamic Front is another blow to efforts by the United States and other powers to organize talks aimed at ending the war. It also highlights the increasing irrelevance of the rebels’ Supreme Military Council, formed last year under pressure from the West to bolster more moderate fighting groups at the expense of extremists.
A number of the Islamic Front’s founding brigades were members of the Supreme Military Council. Although it was unclear if they had officially broken with it, none have spoken of the military council as a major source of support.
A spokesman for the council, Louay Mekdad, said that the groups had not quit the council and that he supported all efforts to unify the rebels.
“We see this as a new stage with the formation of this large, respectable group, and we hope that all the forces on the ground will unify,” he said. “The umbrella doesn’t matter to us; the principles of the revolution do.”
Yet a high-ranking member of the military council who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the new group’s formation could harm the rebellion by further splitting support for the fighters.
“If the support we used to get is split between the S.M.C. and the Islamic Front, this means less effectiveness for both sides,” he said.
