GAZIANTEP, Turkey -- The fighters with the Free Syrian Army were expecting an attack any day from the jihadists besieging the city of Minbej. They had fortified the carpet factory they used as a base, erecting concrete bomb-blast barriers around the entrance, and the fighters were instructed to shoot any strange vehicles on sight.
But they didn't suspect the teenagers pushing a broken-down sedan past the front gate. Then a boy who looked no more than 14 blew up himself and the car, killing a sentry.
Their leader, Sheikh Hassan, said his Fursan Furat Brigade stood little chance when the jihadists, members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, finally came for them. The militants killed three of his fighters, whom they consider apostates because they accept American support. In the rout that followed, the jihadists wounded 25 more and drove the brigade from its base.
"They call us godless. They attack us from the front, they attack us from the back," Hassan recalled during a two-day break from fighting to visit his family in Turkey.
The militant group quickly took the entire city of Minbej, a provincial outpost in northeastern Syria with an estimated 500,000 inhabitants.
The battle for Minbej provides a snapshot of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an Islamist militant group bent on establishing an Islamic state spanning the northern sections of Syria and Iraq. Emerging strengthened from its fight with President Bashar Assad's forces in Syria, with thousands of fighters, it is now focusing its growing power on the weak central government of Iraq.
Having seized vast areas of Iraqi territory and several large cities, including the country's second-largest, Mosul, it controls territory larger than many countries and now rivals, and perhaps overshadows, al-Qaida as the world's most powerful and active jihadist group.
The fighting in Minbej took place six months ago, but the methods the Islamists used so effectively in northern Syria helped set the stage for their blitzkrieg in Mosul this week.
Detailed descriptions from Hassan and his men, along with several other rebels who have been fighting the jihadists for the past six months, paint an unsettling portrait of the formidable jihadist movement.
The group is a magnet for militants from around the world. On videos, Twitter and other media, the group showcases fighters from Chechnya, Germany, Britain and the United States.
Its members are better paid, better trained and better armed than even the national armies of Syria and Iraq, Hassan said.
Many of the recruits are drawn by its extreme ideology. But others are lured by the high salaries as well as the group's ability to consolidate power, according to former members, civilians who have lived under its rule in northern Syria and moderate rebels.
Other rebel groups often squabble with one another while fighting the government. But the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has stayed cohesive while avoiding clashes with the military of Assad, who seems content to give the group a wide berth while destroying less fundamentalist rebel groups.
In areas that fall under their control, the jihadists work carefully to entrench their rule. They have attracted the most attention with their draconian enforcement of a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic Shariah law, including crucifixions of Christians and Muslims deemed kufar, or infidels.
The group establishes control of local resources and uses them to extend and strengthen its grip. It has taken over oil fields in eastern Syria, for example, and according to several rebel commanders and aid workers, has resumed pumping. It has also secured revenue by selling electricity to the government from captured power plants.
In Iraq on Wednesday, the militants tried to seize control of Iraq's largest oil refinery and power plant in Beiji.
In Minbej, the jihadists initially left bakeries and humanitarian aid groups alone, taking over their operations once they had established military control of the city. The group takes a cut of all humanitarian aid and commerce that passes through areas under its control.
One of the first militia leaders to resist the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Abu Towfik, from the Nouredin Zinky Brigade, said that its sophisticated tactics made its fighters hard to dislodge. Since last year, the militant group has fought with tanks captured from the Iraqi military.
Given that tenacity, Abu Towfik said, they will be hard to drive out of the territory they now occupy in northern Syria and Iraq. "I am afraid as time goes on they will spread their extreme ideology and we'll have a regional war," he added.
A Section on 06/12/2014