WHEN his superiors ordered him to open fire on civilian protesters, back in 2011, Adeeb al-Shallaf, a local police chief, refused. Then, worried that the Syrian regime would kill him for disobeying orders, he smuggled his family out of the north-eastern province of Raqqa and crossed the border into Turkey.

From there, General Shallaf watched as Syria’s peaceful protests gave way to armed revolt. Inevitably crime rose in areas under rebel control, since the state’s institutions were gone. Fellow defectors asked General Shallaf to go back and help create a new police force that would bring order. “The beginning was difficult for us,” says General Shallaf, who spent 30 years in the Syrian police. “How can you launch a police force when there’s no state, there’s a war and you have extremists operating?”

What began as a small, ragtag force of a few hundred men now employs 3,300 officers across three provinces. Money from Western governments has paid for this expansion, making the Free Syrian Police (FSP) one of the largest recipients of non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition.

The West’s reluctance to send arms to rebel-held parts of Syria means the FSP is, for the most part, forced to operate without weapons in a country awash with guns and armed groups. Turkey’s tight control of its official border crossings makes it hard to supply the police with even basic equipment, like truncheons and handcuffs.

At first, General Shallaf bemoaned the West’s refusal to send weapons. He remembers how his officers once failed to stop a robbery at a factory because the thieves came armed with anti-aircraft guns. But he has since come round to the idea of a largely unarmed police force. “Everybody has a gun, so if we carried weapons we’d be seen as just another armed faction,” he says.

Instead, his men focus on community policing. They control traffic, patrol the streets at night, build bomb shelters and ensure that children stay away from sniper corridors. They mend streetlights and cordon off unexploded bombs. The idea is to improve relations with residents, who have grown up in a country where a policeman is more likely to extort than protect. “We want to change the image of the police as a corrupt, violent force that tortures people,” says the general, who now commands the FSP in Aleppo province.

Big challenges remain. The judicial system in much of rebel-held Syria is shambolic. Most armed groups run their own courts, ruled over by religious scholars with dubious credentials who hand down judgments based on conflicting interpretations of sharia (Islamic law). “The donors are worried about sharia, so they stay away from the justice sector,” says Sandra Bitar, a Syrian activist. “They pay for a police force, but if there are no professional courts then how can the police do their job properly?”

Some see in the FSP the foundations of a future Syrian police force. This may be wishful thinking. As the regime claws back territory from the rebels, governments in the West are debating whether to scale back support for the opposition. A new alliance between Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, a jihadist group associated with al-Qaeda, and a handful of more moderate rebel factions has swung the argument in favour of those who want to reduce aid. Western governments have suspended funding to the FSP in parts of the north where the jihadists’ new allies hold sway. Yet that risks perpetuating a power vacuum. In such chaos, jihadism can thrive.