As our colleagues Duraid Adnan and Rick Gladstone reported, Syrian rebels seized the capital of the northern province of Raqqa on Wednesday, driving government forces from the town and capturing two high-ranking prisoners, the governor of Raqqa Province and the local chief of the ruling Baath Party.
They also appeared in a video posted online that showed their high-profile captives on an ornate sofa in the governor’s palace with a jihadist fighter seated between them. Togethr, the three men gave similar descriptions of the events that led to the fall of the palace and the capture of the governor, Hasan Jalali, and the party chief, Suleiman al-Suleiman.
The video captured something intangible about the conflict in Syria, which will mark its second anniversary next week. The video was apparently recorded before the town was under total rebel control, with military and intelligence forces still entrenched in their local headquarters, but the rebels are nevertheless shown as jubilant and proud. The captured government officials are visibly exhausted, looking both defeated and bewildered at the same time.
Rebels in the video name two different groups who participated in the attack on the palace, the Islamic Front for Unity and Liberation and the Shura Council Front. Little is known about either group, and neither one appears to have a significant Web presence.
The rebel seated between the two prisoners in the first video is re! ferred to as a leader of the Islamic Front for Unity and Liberation, and can barely bring himself to say the name of the Free Syrian Army, the disorganized umbrella rebel group. He instead said the seizure of the palace was a victory for “the Islamic fronts.â€
The man conducting the interview, who is not identified, began by cordially asking Mr. Jalali, “Brother, please explain to us the details of what happened today.â€
Mr. Jalali, visibly tired, glanced around the room in disbelief before responding.
Brother, the secretary of the party’s branch and I were in the governor’s palace. A clash erupted between people outside and members of palace defense inside the palace. And there were some injuries and there was damage inside the building. And to stop the bloodshed, brothers from the national reconciliation committee intervened and they tried to put an end to the bloodshed on both sides and to resolve the issue.
The interviewer then asked a man identfied as the rebel leader to speak. The rebel leader, who is never named, appeared unwilling to give the Free Syrian Army credit for the rebel victory in Raqqa. He claimed it instead as a victory for Islamist groups and vowed to continue the fight to Damascus.
After the Free Syrian Army entered or, to be more accurate, after the Islamic fronts entered Raqqa province, the Islamic Front of Unity and Liberation besieged the governor’s palace, with the help of our brothers from the Shura Council Front. After a siege that lasted several hours and an exchange of gunfire, some brothers intervened and conducted the necessary negotiations to stop the bloodshed of our brothers the jihadists. Of course, as a result of these negotiations, we were able to get the wounded out of the place and we were able to free the detained men who were in the governor’s palace, with the help of our brothers in the Shura Council. Praise be to God, the operation was conducted successfully by the Islamic front! s and wit! h the lowest number of losses. Praise be to God.
Mr. Suleiman, the local chief of the ruling Baath Party, gave a similar account of what happened that day before attempting to defend himself and Mr. Jalali to their new captors. At time as he spoke, he appeared frightened.
“God willing, I hope we have always done what’s right,†he said. “There’s not one day when we worked in a bad way nor do we want anyone to do something bad. And we don’t want anyone to be killed or anyone to kill anyone. From either side.â€
The same men posted a second vido to YouTube that appears to have been filmed shortly before or after the first. It shows jubilant rebels inside the palace defacing a portrait of President Bashar al-Assad and toppling a bust of his father, Hafez al-Assad, who was president from 1971 to 2000. It then shows a brief interview with the leader of the second Islamist militia that stormed the palace, the Shura Front, who said the fighters “seized all the weapons and spoils†in the building and also took 200 to 250 prisoners.
The interviews were posted to YouTube by Orient TV, an anti-regime television station founded by the businessman Ghassan Aboud and based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, after government harassment drove it from Damascus. It is not clear if the man asking the questions on camera was a rebel, a journalist for Orient TV or some mix of the two.
The s! uccessful! rebel push into Raqqa, which is the first provincial capital to fall to rebel forces, was lead by Islamist groups, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which said a particularly strong role was played by Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhet al-Nusra, a group that the United States has linked to Al Qaeda.
The Syrian Observatory, an activist group based in Britain, said that rebels in Raqqa were holding more than 300 government fighters prisoner, and their fates remained unclear. But the rebels also appeared to have freed some prisoners held in government jails. The rights group posted a video to YouTube on Wednesday that showed prisoners that Jabhet al-Nusra released from a jail that was run by the political security police in Raqqa.
It is not clear how many people were killed in the battle for Raqqa, but scattered reports from the Syrian Observatory suggest the several dozen at the very least.
