Latakia, November 2013: From a base in Sandreen, Latakia governorate, ISIS militants began to attack and raid FSA bases in Latakia and Idlib.

Sources say that at first, the raids happened at night, under cover of darkness, and the ISIS militants wore masks, so the FSA did not know who exactly the culprits were.

In early November 2013, during one of these raids, the ISIS militants shot dead an FSA commander at the entrance to the village of al-Najiyah, Jisr al-Sughur district, Idlib governorate, on the border with Latakia governorate.

A couple of days later, a gang of masked ISIS militants drove up to an FSA checkpoint somewhere near Ain al-Ghazal, Latakia and started to shoot at the FSA fighters stationed there. Two or three FSA fighters were killed as well as one ISIS militant.

After the ISIS militant was killed, his friends left, leaving his body behind. And when the FSA removed the mask of the dead ISIS militant to try to figure out who he was, they saw that he was a Russian-speaking individual, apparently a Tajik.

So the FSA informed members of Muslim Shishani’s Jama’at and those with Abu Musa Shishani (Abu Musa was the military amir of Ansar Shaam in Latakia at the time; Muslim was independent, but he had close links with Ansar Shaam), who helpfully came to see what was up and took the corpse away.

Abu Ayman gets upset

A day or two later, things escalated. ISIS’s amir in Latakia, Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, drove to a nearby village for a showdown with the FSA. The local leader there, a Syrian, was one of the amirs of Akhrar Sham, and he tried to negotiate between ISIS and the FSA. Abu Ayman started yelling at this local Syrian, saying that he was supporting “apostates” (i.e. the FSA). Abu Ayman clearly had some anger management issues, since he grabbed his gun and shot the local Syrian leader dead. Not satisfied with this display of violence, Abu Ayman and his group took some five of the FSA fighters in the village captive, and drove off with them.

Sayfullakh Shishani makes an unpleasant discovery

At the end of October 2013, Sayfullakh had travelled from Aleppo to Latakia for talks with Muslim and Abu Musa regarding uniting their forces: the three amirs had published a video on 31 October on this topic.

Sayfullakh had remained in Latakia, or at least two weeks later when these events happened with ISIS, he was back in Latakia again (he drove around a lot).

And so it happened that, as Sayfullakh and a couple of members of his group were driving along the road close to the village where the FSA fighters had been kidnapped by Abu Ayman’s group, he noticed a couple of cars, ISIS cars, driving out of the forest there. Sayfullakh later explained that he figured he should check out where the cars had driven from, since they seemed suspicious to him. So he and his comrades went into the forest to investigate. And there they had an unpleasant surprise: they found the fresh corpses of some five Syrians. It turned out that these were the very same Syrians that Abu Ayman had kidnapped a short while before.

But they were apostates…

After Sayfullakh discovered the bodies, he went to report back to Muslim and Abu Musa. And that’s when a group of Chechens from the brigades of Muslim, Abu Musa and Sayfullakh decided to intervene. They drove out to ISIS’s base, which was a very lavish villa that they had appropriated from its Syrian owner, in a village named Sandreen. Below are some maps showing where the villa was (and still is). As you can see it is not a particularly modest dwelling, and belonged to a wealthy Syrian whom ISIS had evicted on the convenient grounds that 1. He was an apostate and 2. God had decreed the villa belonged to them.

Among the ISIS militants hanging out in the stolen villa were a group of Russian-speakers, including some Tatars, a few Dagestanis and an Ingush, who had previously lived in Moscow.

Anyway, the Chechen delegation told the ISIS militants that their murder of the five Syrian FSA fighters was unacceptable. One of the militants, whom the Chechens believed had been involved in the killings, explained that the FSA fighters had been apostates, and therefore it had been totally OK to kill them. The Chechens asked the Russian-speaking ISIS militants whether, if the Chechens decided that one of them was in fact an apostate, he would mind awfully if they took him out back and shot him in the head. The ISIS militants thought for a bit and said they would actually mind quite a bit and they really rather they didn’t do that. That point made, the Chechens pointed out to the Russian-speaking ISIS militants that Assad’s forces were but a very short distance away and if they liked, they could go fight them instead of raiding FSA bases. But despite these attempts, the talks got nowhere and the Chechens eventually left.

Things get worse

The situation continued to escalate, and a few days later the FSA detained three ISIS militants, two from Dagestan and a Tatar. In retaliation, ISIS detained a group of Syrians.

Things were getting worse, and it seemed that soon there would be an all out war, or at least a nasty fitna, between ISIS and the FSA in Latakia. So Muslim and Abu Musa decided to try to nip things in the bud. They started to drive between the FSA and the ISIS luxury villa base (you can see on the maps below the locations of both). Abu Musa acted as negotiator with the FSA and Muslim had the more difficult and dangerous task of dealing with ISIS. Eventually, the two sides agreed on a prisoner exchange.

You can see in the map below the location of the prisoner exchange.

The exchange was captured on video—here are some screen grabs (it’s at night so not terribly clear but you can see the FSA convoy and the exchange by the side of the road).

In the map below you can see the following locations:

This is where ISIS killed the FSA commander, at the entrance to the village of al-Najiyah, Jisr al-Sughur district, Idlib. This is where the shootout happened, when ISIS ran away leaving the corpse of a Russian-speaking militant, near Ain al-Ghazal, Latakia This is roughly where the prisoner exchange took place, you can see it in more detail on the other map