Aron Lund is a Swedish journalist and a fellow with the New York-based Century Foundation, which recently published his report Into the Tunnels. It provides a detailed history of the insurgency in Syria's Eastern Ghouta, drawn from interviews with Syrian rebels and regime supporters, Arabic-language news media, and other sources.

First came the tanks, a line of hulking Soviet-built T-72s, adorned with black Islamic flags. Then, the anti-aircraft guns, the armored troop carriers, and a line of flatbed trucks with automatic cannons. Finally, platoon after platoon of soldiers marched onto the scene, lining up before a stern, black-bearded figure watching the parade from a viewing stand—their leader, Zahran Alloush.

It was March 18, 2015, in the rebel-held Eastern Ghouta enclave near Damascus. The display, videotaped for posterity and recruiting, had been staged by the Islam Army, a rebel faction whose commander was the closest thing that this bombed-out pocket of 400,000 people had to a ruler. The 45-year-old Alloush was a firebrand preacher with a record of political violence that some saw as utterly necessary to free his beleaguered district from the siege waged by Syrian President Bashar Assad, but which others considered the hallmark of a sectarian and power-hungry warlord.


“Today, the world conspires against us,” Alloush roared from the platform, his voice breaking in a pitch of passion and rage. “Know that Paradise is found under the swords,” he screamed, “know that Paradise awaits us!”

It was bravado, but Alloush and his soldiers were not without hope. Though the four-year-old war in the Eastern Ghouta was now a stalemate, a meaningless daily carnage of tit-for-tat shelling and airstrikes, the rebels knew that Assad was running low on loyal troops and money. His army had suffered painful losses against other Islamist rebels in northern Syria and against the so-called Islamic State in the east. There was no sign yet of a weakening in their area near Damascus, but the rebels told themselves that time was on their side. If a day came when Assad lost his iron grip on the capital, no one would be better placed to fill the void than Zahran Alloush.

Seated on a podium, Zahran Alloush watches Islam Army fighters and vehicles parading through the Eastern Ghouta, 2015. | Source: Rebel Video

But at that very moment, as he stood bellowing from his podium, Alloush was at the peak of his political power. In the Eastern Ghouta, he hoped to build an Islamist mini-state ruled by sharia law, as a blueprint for how he envisioned a post-Assad Syria. But he was already experiencing the pressures—both political and economic—that would be the undoing of the Eastern Ghouta rebellion. For all his military might, Alloush had failed to unite the fractious insurgency. It left his position frailer than many knew, and by the end of the year he would be dead, hastening the decline of the Islam Army and dealing a blow to the Eastern Ghouta rebellion from which it would never recover.

The failure of Zahran Alloush to consolidate power in the Eastern Ghouta and to present a united front against Assad was more a failure of governance than of military strategy. Like other local rebel leaders, Alloush depended on supplies to pass through an elaborate network of tunnels connecting the Eastern Ghouta to the outside world. Ultimately, his skills as an orator, his command of scripture, and even his military power would matter little if he could not master the complexities of the enclave’s siege economy. This was precisely what he failed to do. Alloush was starved of resources by the Assad regime and unable to exert unrivaled authority over the smuggling network. His ambitions bogged down in petty disputes over religious doctrine, prestige and money, crippling his leadership months before his death in a missile strike.

The story of the rise and fall of Zahran Alloush demonstrates the ability of a charismatic and well-funded demagogue to muster an embittered community against a despised dictator, but it also shows how quick the Islamists were to adopt the same violent, autocratic abuses of power that had inspired their rebellion in the first place. Based on interviews with rebel commanders, religious leaders and civilian activists in the Eastern Ghouta, this account explains how a once-impenetrable stronghold of the Syrian opposition has slowly succumbed to the stranglehold of a brutal regime—and how its fate hinged on the life of one man.

‘The fairest place on earth’

The 14th-century Arab historian Ibn al-Wardi spoke of the Ghouta as an exquisite oasis of flowers, trees, water and bird life—“the fairest place on earth, and the best of them.” A lush agricultural belt around Damascus, it had been the pride of the ancient city for thousands of years. But modern Syria was less kind to the Ghouta. In the 1990s and 2000s, its pastoral beauty was swallowed up by drab concrete slums, asphalt roads and industrial expansion, slowly reducing the Ghouta to an unhappy agglomeration of working-class suburbs, satellite towns and farming villages.

Many inhabitants of the Ghouta and the bulging suburbs of eastern Damascus were new arrivals, escaping from drought-stricken parts of Syria to compete over low-paying, menial jobs. They bristled at the glittering wealth, the class divides and the corruption of the capital. Others were part of the Ghouta’s original population, but among them, too, anti-regime sentiment grew alongside the social crisis of the early 2000s. In conservative Sunni towns like Douma, known for its piety as “the city of minarets,” the Sunni-fundamentalist teachings of Salafism were gaining ground. The Salafists excoriated the secularism of the ruling Baath Party and its rapacious corruption as two sides of the same coin.

This was the environment of simmering anger in which Zahran Alloush grew up. Born in 1971 to a Saudi-trained Syrian Salafi scholar who preached in Douma’s Tawhid Mosque, Alloush spent the 1990s at the Islamic University in Medina, learning at the feet of famous Wahhabi scholars like Ibn Baz and Ibn Othaymeen, the men whose ultraconservative worldview had shaped the politics of Saudi Arabia.

Later in the 1990s, Alloush returned to Douma to continue his studies at the Sharia Faculty of Damascus University. He then went into business, marrying and living what outwardly seemed like the quiet life of a devout Muslim family man. Behind the scenes, however, he ran an underground Salafi network, organizing illegal study groups and printing and distributing religious tracts by Saudi ideologues, some of whom secretly funded his work. In Alloush’s understanding of Islam, a strictly sharia-based Sunni theocracy was the only legitimate system of government, and the Baathist regime would one day have to be swept away. He loathed the dictatorial rule and corruption of the Assad family, hated their alliance with the Shia leaders of Iran, and, like most Salafis, he viewed the president’s Alawite faith as an anti-Islamic heresy.

Yet, Alloush was not part of the militant Salafi-jihadi movement, which had begun to infiltrate Syria as a consequence of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. He seems to have considered Al Qaeda a misguided though possibly well-intentioned group, opposing its adventurist policies and its attacks on countries like Saudi Arabia. But like the vast majority of Syrians, he sympathized with the Sunni resistance in Iraq, of which Al Qaeda was a prominent part, and though it seems he never crossed the border to join the Iraqi rebels, he may have provided support for them in other ways.

Smokes billows after a strike by pro-Syrian government forces in Shefounieh, near Douma, a rebel-held town east of the capital Damascus, on July 13, 2016. | Getty

Around 2008, Assad’s secret police initiated a country-wide crackdown on Sunni fundamentalists, partly in response to U.S. pressure but also because the regime was growing concerned with the rising Salafi radicalism. Alloush was arrested in 2009 and charged with gun possession, though the main reason for his arrest seems to have been his Salafi activism. He was sent to Seidnaya Prison, north of Damascus, and would remain there for two years, rubbing shoulders with Iraq War veterans and learning the insurgent tactics they had used to bog down the Americans since 2003.

The Syrian Uprising

It was the Arab Spring that freed him. In March 2011, demonstrations erupted in several areas of Syria, including Douma. The regime arrested and shot at demonstrators, and the country tumbled toward civil war. Whether as a concession to the opposition or as a way of poisoning it with sectarian extremism, Assad quickly began to release political prisoners in a series of amnesties, including hundreds of violent jihadists. Alloush was freed after one such amnesty, on June 22, and he arrived home just in time to join the budding rebellion in Douma.

At first, he joined a local band of fighters claiming to be part of the Free Syrian Army—a brand name of sorts, used by many different groups—but it was not sufficiently religious for his tastes. Soon, Alloush had created his own group, known as the Islam Company, which drew on Douma’s pre-war network of Salafi activists, Islamist ex-prisoners, and friends and students of his father at the Tawhid Mosque.

The Islam Company quickly established itself as a force to be reckoned with. Its pious image and reputation for religious incorruptibility formed part of the appeal. The Salafis’ discipline was a great asset in Syria’s chaotic insurgency, while Alloush’s zeal and charisma drew recruits and energized the troops. Alloush’s deep pockets also played a part. Gulf-based Salafi preachers like Adnan al-Arour, a Syrian televangelist-in-exile and old acquaintance of the Alloush family from Saudi Arabia, collected huge sums in donations from the faithful. By offering strong leadership, religious legitimacy and a regular salary, Alloush was able to poach members from the smaller Free Syrian Army factions in Douma, which were often no more than poorly organized local gangs. By 2013, the group had expanded from Douma to the wider Eastern Ghouta region and was even spawning affiliates in northern Syria. To mark its growing power, Alloush renamed it the Islam Brigade.

In late 2012, the Syrian regime decided to cut its losses by cordoning off the Eastern Ghouta instead of trying to retake it. In April 2013, Assad sent an armored column to Oteiba, a desert town on the eastern fringes of the area that had served as a way station for supplies trickling in from Turkey. “The battle of Oteiba was a tipping point between success and disaster,” a member of a local rebel faction later recalled, pointing to its crucial role in supplying the insurgency. “It was not the only such place,” he said, “but it was the last one.”

A rebel fighter holds a position in a damaged building in the northeastern Syrian city of Deir Ezzor on November 24, 2013. | Getty

The rebels were trapped. Despite months of fighting, they could not break the siege. Soon, they were bogged down in heavy fighting in the suburbs of eastern Damascus, where they suffered relentless airstrikes and even chemical attacks, culminating in an August 21 massacre with nerve-gas tipped missiles that killed hundreds and nearly drew the United States into the war. Assad’s plan worked. Though rebel mortars still made life unsafe in Damascus and fighting flared along the front line, the Eastern Ghouta insurgency had been fully contained by late summer 2013. Paradoxically, however, the siege also helped bring the rebels together by delineating the boundaries of the local insurgency.

In autumn 2013, money poured into the Eastern Ghouta from Salafi preachers in Kuwait, whose regular fundraising telethons brought in millions of dollars for the Syrian opposition. Much of that money seems to have ended up with Alloush, whose religious views dovetailed with those of the Kuwaiti funders and whose large and well-run faction seemed a natural choice to lead the enclave. The Saudi royal family, or at least a faction of it, also appears to have thrown its considerable weight behind Alloush around this time. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the head of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence, is said to have reacted angrily to the U.S. refusal to order airstrikes after the August 21 massacre. The Saudis reportedly decided to overlook Alloush’s ties to dissident Salafi clerics on bad terms with the government in Riyadh, and began to rush support to his group and many other Syrian rebels as a way of raising pressure on Assad.

Flush with cash and arms, Alloush went on a buying spree. All through autumn and winter, he ushered dozens of smaller factions into his organization, which renamed itself the Islam Army at a grand ceremony in October 2013. Now indisputably the alpha rebel of the Eastern Ghouta, he would soon discover that with rising power came growing resistance.

Strongman Rule

At 10:40 p.m. on December 9, 2013, armed men broke into a Douma office housing several civil society organizations and abducted Razan Zeitouneh, Wael Hammadeh, Samira al-Khalil and Nazem Hammadi. The Douma Four, as they would become known, were prominent human-rights activists on the secular fringe of Syrian opposition politics. In 2011, they had fled Damascus and found shelter in rebel-held Douma, where their group, the Violations Documentation Center, began to create a database listing tens of thousands of dead and disappeared Syrians, most of them victims of Assad’s army and secret police. This common foe would appear to make them natural allies of Alloush, but it was quite the opposite. Alloush disapproved of their calls for secular democracy, their contacts with Western governments and their friendly ties to a rival rebel group that opposed the Islam Army and its Salafi preachers. He denied involvement in the kidnappings, but the Douma Four would become a potent symbol of his authoritarian ways, and it was far from the only incident of its kind.

Since 2012, when the rebels took control of the Eastern Ghouta and expelled Assad’s regime, they had struggled to install a proper government to fill the political void. Rival commanders set up their own sharia courts and revolutionary tribunals, but these only spurred new conflicts. The imposition of the siege in April 2013 made things worse by empowering smugglers and organized crime, and by feeding the opposition’s well-founded fear of infiltration. Soon, rebels were spying on each other and paying informers to tell on their neighbors, effectively copying the police-state tactics of the regime they sought to overthrow. Though other factions committed egregious abuses, too, the Islam Army gained an especially chilling reputation. By 2014, terrifying reports had begun to trickle out from the Repentance Prison in Douma, a secret jail where opponents of the Islam Army were tortured and killed on the orders of the group’s religious tribunals.

Zahran Alloush (C) delivers a speech during a meeting in the eastern Ghouta region of the capital of Syria, Damascus, on March 30, 2015. | Getty

Despite this brutality, Zahran Alloush seems to have maintained a solid base of support. His fundamentalist views shocked Western observers and secular Syrians, but they did not seem to offend conservative Sunni Muslims in the Eastern Ghouta. His repression of dissent and the growing evidence of financial corruption inside Islam Army ranks were dismissed by his supporters. Other factions were no better, only less successful, they argued, and harsh tactics were needed to end crime and anarchy. Many seem to have reasoned that only a strongman like Alloush could unite the enclave and harness the full potential of the perpetually divided insurgency against Assad.

Indeed, for the first time in years, unity seemed within reach. In late June 2014, most of the Eastern Ghouta’s sharia courts merged into a single structure, led by a panel of Islamic scholars appointed by the major rebel factions. In late August, this was followed by the creation of the Unified Military Command, a politico-military body over which Zahran Alloush presided as supreme commander, flanked by the leaders of the Eastern Ghouta’s second- and third-ranking factions: Ajnad al-Sham, a Muslim Brotherhood-friendly network of Sufis, and the Free Syrian Army-flagged Failaq al-Rahman. For the first time since the expulsion of the Baath regime, the Eastern Ghouta was beginning to create a cohesive legal and political system. It was no small matter. All over Syria, rebels had tried to establish similar judicial and military councils, but nearly all of these experiments in local governance had failed since participants always had the option to simply walk away from a ruling they did not like. In the Eastern Ghouta, that wasn’t possible. The siege had created a self-contained political universe that was big enough to be a threat to the Syrian government, but also small enough to be dominated by a single strongman: Zahran Alloush. Though he paid little heed to the Unified Military Command when the other members tried to restrain him, he was fond of using the system to deflect responsibility for unpopular actions, and he jealously guarded its primacy.

Not all factions in the Eastern Ghouta had joined the new institutions. The Al Qaeda-aligned Nusra Front refused to dissolve its own sharia tribunals, citing doctrinal differences. But the main challenge came from a group of Free Syrian Army commanders, old enemies of Alloush from Douma, who banded together in an opportunistic alliance to oppose the new order and protect their autonomy. Outraged, Alloush announced that there could not be “two heads on the same body” and launched a major crackdown, later admitting to rounding up some 1,300 of his opponents. Most were eventually released, but not all. Abu Ali Khibbiyeh, a prominent anti-Islamist leader who had been fighting to keep Alloush off his turf and out of his smuggling business, was convicted in a secret tribunal of trading in narcotics, collaborating with the Islamic State and the Assad regime, and being a homosexual. Opposition sources later claimed that Khibbiyeh’s corpse had been paraded through the streets of Douma on a pickup truck, as a warning to would-be challengers.

Through winter and spring 2014–15, Alloush proceeded to root out the Eastern Ghouta wing of the Islamic State, while press-ganging a series of small rebel groups into the ranks of the Islam Army, already several thousand strong. In February 2015, the Unified Military Command decreed a ban on the creation of new rebel groups in the Eastern Ghouta, which put a lid on rebel fragmentation and helped the insurgency to congeal around its four main factions: the Islam Army, Ajnad al-Sham, Failaq al-Rahman, and the rogue jihadis of the Nusra Front.

The consolidation of opposition forces came at an opportune time. Assad’s forces were exhausted by years of fighting and economic trouble, and since late 2014 they had been losing territory in other parts of the country. But the rebels in the Eastern Ghouta found themselves unable to take advantage of the regime’s predicament: Prisoners in their enclave, they struggled to cope with the mounting costs of the siege.

The Siege Economy

First imposed through the Syrian army’s retaking of Oteiba in April 2013, the siege on the Eastern Ghouta had been tightened a year later to include a blockade on food, medicine and other imports. Prices of basic goods rose sharply through 2014. In March 2015, a bag of flat bread, which is a staple food in Syria, could be bought for the state-regulated price of 35 Syrian pounds in Damascus (about 12 cents) but reportedly sold for close to 700 Syrian pounds in the Eastern Ghouta. Hunger spread, and at times starvation was near, but it was the shortage of medicines and hospital equipment that seemed the most lethal threat. The pro-opposition Syrian American Medical Society counted some 200 deaths due to the lack of medical care or food in the first two years of the siege, and Amnesty International labeled the Syrian government’s policies toward the Eastern Ghouta a crime against humanity.

Though it was at times very harshly enforced, the blockade on the Eastern Ghouta was never airtight. It sometimes seemed designed to be leaky, and while always strict enough to cause shortages, it was also porous enough to create markets where shrewd middlemen could thrive. Much like in the Gaza Strip, the blockade served to empower a new class of siege-busting smugglers who found ways to move goods across the front lines, often by working with regime commanders. Rebels and smugglers entered into a symbiotic relationship, incentivizing corruption and competition among the insurgents—a threat to your smuggling profits was also a threat to your military posture.

The Syrian regime eagerly exploited its newfound leverage. It would sometimes choke off the enclave entirely, which sent prices skyrocketing. Then it would allow deliveries through a particular checkpoint, either to reward behavior or simply to collect bribes. On their side of the checkpoints, the rebel leaders jockeyed for control and were drawn into murky deals with their counterparts on the regime side and with each other, which slowly fused the insurgency and the siege economy into an inseparable whole. It was demoralizing, and it did much to fuel tension in the enclave. War-weary and hungry civilians bristled at the sight of ostentatiously pious Islamist leaders who hoarded food, money and fuel for their own use—and, in some cases, for profit.

The most important of the Eastern Ghouta’s new trade routes was the no-man’s-land northeast of Douma, near the regime-held Wafideen camp for Palestine refugees. At some point in 2014, the Syrian government had opened a checkpoint there to allow a Ghouta-born businessman with friends in the presidential palace to bring in food, alongside a small-scale trade in other goods. Run by the Syrian military on one side and by rebels on the other, the Wafideen Crossing became known in Damascus as the “million pound checkpoint” in reference to the bribes collected by commanders on both sides.

Though the Islam Army jealously guarded its control over the crossing, it denied making any money off of the Wafideen-Douma trade. “The role of the Islam Army in all of this is simply to provide security, so that agents of the regime do not infiltrate via the crossing,” said Mohammed Bayraqdar, a member of the Islam Army’s political office. But rival commanders insisted that Alloush’s men profited handsomely, with one activist claiming in spring 2015 the Islam Army was taking a 30-percent commission on each shipment. For all its economic and political importance, however, the Wafideen Crossing mainly brought in food and other civilian items, like cigarettes. To get hold of guns, ammunition, fuel, medicine and other banned or undersupplied goods, and to smuggle people in or out of the enclave, the rebels had to find other ways.

They went underground.

Rebel fighters, reportedly belonging to the Faylaq al-Rahman brigade, wait in a concrete pipe during an operation in the area of Marj al-Sultan's military airport, three days after it was recaptured by the Syrian troops, on December 17, 2015 in the rebel-held region of Eastern Ghouta, on the outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus. | Getty

In early 2014, the Syrian army had forced the eastern Damascus suburbs of Barzeh and Qaboun to sign separate truce deals. Local fighters remained in charge of their neighborhoods, and both areas remained under siege, but civilian traffic and trade resumed through a maze of regime and rebel checkpoints. Almost immediately, Barzeh and Qaboun transformed into transit depots for the Eastern Ghouta by way of tunnels reaching into the rebel-controlled suburbs. Rebel-connected entrepreneurs turned the tunnels—originally dug for military and logistical purposes—into a business, hiring unemployed local men to do the dangerous underground work. Most tunnels were crudely carved dirt corridors barely one-man wide, but some were professionally constructed subterranean roads, large enough to drive a car under the front line.

The most important of these tunnels passed between Barzeh and Harasta, a working-class suburb on the western edge of the Eastern Ghouta. Apparently untouched by the army, the tunnel operated around the clock in triple shifts, moving everything from food and people to medicine and livestock, and also, almost certainly, weapons and ammunition.

The man in charge of the tunnel was Abu Khaled al-Zahteh, a local boy from Harasta who had wriggled his way up through rebel ranks to become the ruler of his neighborhood. A man of uncertain ideology but evident ambition, Abu Khaled at one point ran a minor Free Syrian Army faction backed by the Muslim Brotherhood, but in 2014 he entered into a complicated on-off relationship with Ajnad al-Sham, a much larger group of conservative Sufi militants. He seized Harasta in the winter of 2014–15, initially by aligning himself with Alloush to grab the tunnel from one of his rivals, and then by using his newfound economic power to buy off competitors. Once in charge of the Harasta-Barzeh route, Abu Khaled began to extort other commanders who depended on the trade for their supplies; they tried to compensate by opening rival smuggling tunnels from nearby neighborhoods.

By summer 2015, the Eastern Ghouta was trapped in a vicious circle of competitive smuggling, profiteering and pricing disputes. Though the Islam Army ran its own tunnels, it was left with too thin a slice of the trade to support its hopes for hegemony, and a frustrated Alloush began to flex his military muscles.

When Money Ran Out

As he sat glumly on his podium in March 2015 watching the soldiers and tanks of the Islam Army file past him, Zahran Alloush resembled nothing so much as a traditional Arab president. His armed following was said to account for more than half of the enclave’s total military power, and he had become one of the most powerful men in the Syrian opposition. But Alloush knew that to finally subdue internal resistance and unify the enclave, he first had to gain control over the tunnel economy that propped up his rivals. Others knew it, too.

In early 2015, the Syrian military bombed Alloush’s tunnels, disrupting the trade and increasing the Islam Army’s dependence on Abu Khaled al-Zahteh. Foreign support also seems to have tapered off, partly because of U.S. pressure on the Gulf Arab states to rein in Islamist fundraisers, some of whom had been sponsoring Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. According to reports in the Arabic press, Alloush was eventually forced to borrow money from local merchants to make ends meet.

In May 2015, the Islam Army leader had himself smuggled out of the enclave to go on a panhandling trip through Turkey and Jordan, where he met with Islamist benefactors and officials from Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Scrambling to clean up his image, Alloush also gave his first-ever interview to a Western reporter, insisting that his calls to cleanse Syria from Alawites and Shia Muslims had been the result of “psychological stress.” He may have met with U.S. officials, too, but, if so, he failed to make an impression. Members of the Islam Army later claimed that the Americans had aired a laundry list of what they considered unacceptable behavior, including the shelling of central Damascus, Alloush’s sectarian rhetoric and his alleged role in the disappearance of the Douma Four. Though his round trip did seem to bring in fresh donations from the Gulf or other sources, it could not offset his dependence on Abu Khaled’s smuggling business.

Safely back in the enclave, Alloush decided to make a move on the tunnels. “The Islam Army leadership began erecting earth berms around the town of Harasta and they banned people from entering or exiting,” recalled a supporter of Abu Khaled al-Zahteh. That summer, Alloush ordered tanks to the outskirts of Harasta, but, with impeccable timing, Abu Khaled had just rediscovered his interest in religion and was accepted back into the ranks of Ajnad al-Sham, which told Alloush to back off. The Islam Army leader was furious, but he could do nothing unless he wanted to trigger a major battle with several factions at once. He withdrew the tanks. But with the Islam Army’s logistical needs still unmet and its appetite for power unsatisfied, the status quo was unsustainable. In an enclave now teeming with distrust and accumulated ill will, all sides began to prepare for the coming confrontation.

To the population of the Eastern Ghouta, the bickering rebel leaders looked like vultures feeding from a carcass. They were incapable of breaking the siege, but in the eyes of local activists they didn’t even seem to be trying, instead squandering their resources on venal feuds over the tunnel trade. A 2015 study by the London School of Economics found “widespread resentment” against the insurgent commanders, even among solidly anti-Assad respondents. All the while, Assad kept up a relentless drumbeat of airstrikes against the Eastern Ghouta, killing hundreds of civilians and creating an intolerable state of paranoid suspense and terror.

That summer, the enclave was rocked by street protests of hungry civilians, who accused the rebels of profiteering and of seizing food for themselves. Graffiti appeared on the walls of Harasta calling Abu Khaled “a murderer of children through hunger.” As the Unified Military Command’s supreme commander and by far the most powerful figure in the Eastern Ghouta, Zahran Alloush took the brunt of the criticism—including for the greed and graft of the tunnel trade, in which he held a much smaller stake than some of his rivals. “Hey Zahran,” read a placard carried by protesters in August 2015, “we don’t want you to fight your brothers over a tunnel, we want you to fight our enemy above the tunnel!” Intra-rebel conflict bled into the civilian outrage as all factions incited their own followers to demonstrate against rival groups and blame them for civilian hunger. In response to the protests, rebel fighters kicked downs doors and arrested troublemakers, and on at least one occasion, troops from Failaq al-Rahman fired into the crowds, wounding and killing demonstrators.

The power-sharing arrangements created a year earlier now began to crumble, threatening Alloush’s achievements. In late summer, Ajnad al-Sham and Failaq al-Rahman decided to boycott meetings of the Unified Military Command, arguing that the Islam Army was merely using it as cover to pursue its own political and financial interests. Alloush reacted as if he had been betrayed. At a gathering of Ghouta notables in a bunker-like basement a few days later, a leaked video recording showed the Islam Army leader hurling accusations at his rivals, a streak of unhinged desperation creeping into his voice. The leaders of Ajnad al-Sham and Failaq al-Rahman were profiting from starvation, he screamed, and the criminal Abu Khaled had hoarded a thousand tons of food in his Harasta warehouses. They were the exact same charges that his rivals had leveled at him.

Things went from bad to worse in September 2015, when Russia suddenly threw its military might behind Assad, sending its own air force and vast amounts of military equipment to aid his beleaguered regime. The government went back on the offensive all over Syria, including in the Eastern Ghouta. As bombs rained down over the enclave, killing hundreds of insurgents and civilians, local activists called out for unity and a counterattack. Instead, they got another fight over tunnel profits—now involving the Nusra Front, which had decided to sell food at cut-rate prices, thus threatening the financial base of its rivals.

Zahran Alloush who was killed on December 25, 2015.

And then, the central pillar of the enclave’s political order suddenly snapped. On Christmas Day, 2015, a volley of missiles slammed into a nondescript farm building near Hammouriyeh in the Eastern Ghouta. Later that day, the Islam Army solemnly announced the martyrdom of Zahran Alloush. The strongman of the Eastern Ghouta was gone.

A Power Vacuum

By the time of Zahran Alloush’s death, the window of opportunity for unity in the Eastern Ghouta was already closing. Now it slammed shut. Syria’s fragmented insurgency had always been too divided by personal ambition, political and religious doctrine, and foreign connections to unite spontaneously from the bottom up. The Eastern Ghouta was no different. But the start of the siege in 2013 and the consequent rise of Zahran Alloush had changed the game. His charisma, leadership skills and powerful backers, combined with an unswerving dedication to the war against Assad and a seemingly boundless thirst for power, briefly seemed to set the Eastern Ghouta on a path to centralized control. But Alloush, too, found himself bogged down in the siege economy, unable to suppress his rivals and end the centrifugal tendencies of the rebellion. Once this controversial and contested but undisputedly central figure was lost, the Eastern Ghouta’s rival groups quickly spun off in their own directions.

Although the Islam Army quickly handed power to a new leader—a stocky, muscular veteran of Douma’s Salafi underground named Essam Boueidani—he had trouble filling Alloush’s shoes. Religious hard-liners began to drift out of control, roaring threats toward other groups. “We had some minor problems with Zahran Alloush when he was alive, but thanks to his charisma, he was mostly able to maintain discipline in the Islam Army,” recalled Wael Olwan, then a leader and spokesperson for Ajnad al-Sham. “That has changed now. We didn’t see this aggressive rhetoric from the religious officials of the Islam Army while he was alive, but now we do.”

Olwan’s own group was not innocent of what would happen. The lesser commanders of the Eastern Ghouta all aspired to Alloush’s mantle, and in February 2016, Ajnad al-Sham merged into Failaq al-Rahman, positioning the group as a main rival of the Islam Army. Some weeks later, the one-time Sufi moderate Abu Khaled al-Zahteh decided that he was now a jihadist and brought his Harasta brigade into an alliance with the Nusra Front. In a matter of weeks, the factional landscape of the Eastern Ghouta had been whittled down to three big groups, two of which plotted their revenge on the third.

The Islam Army lashed out to protect its position, and in March 2016, Failaq al-Rahman accused it of trying to assassinate its leaders. This set in motion a spiral of tit-for-tat violence that escalated into a civil war within the civil war.

In a surprise attack on April 28, Failaq al-Rahman and its allies robbed the Islam Army of its two main smuggling tunnels in the Damascus suburbs and of large stockpiles of weapons; the group would never recover from the blow. Internecine violence raged for weeks, during which Assad retook the southern part of the enclave and threatened to march deep into the Eastern Ghouta. A rebel cease-fire was brokered by Qatar on May 24, but, although major infighting stopped, the two camps refused to reconcile. “We now have two military councils, one belonging to Failaq al-Rahman and one belonging to the Islam Army. We have some educational institutions belonging to Failaq al-Rahman and others that belong to the Islam Army, and the provincial authorities … have also split into two parts,” complained a local activist.

Indeed, the enclave was now two enclaves, and the Syrian regime cleverly exploited the new situation by focusing its firepower solely on the Islam Army-controlled eastern end of the Ghouta, while allowing U.N. aid to reach the Failaq al-Rahman-held suburbs of Damascus for the first time in years. Just as it calculated, no rebel reinforcements found their way across the divided enclave before it was too late. Town by town and field by field, the opposition’s hold on the Eastern Ghouta began to slip.

A year after Zahran Alloush’s death, the rebels are still fighting, but nearly half the territory of the enclave has been lost. In Harasta, Abu Khaled’s men have tried to negotiate the terms of a surrender with the government, and similar talks have taken place in Douma, quietly overseen by the Islam Army. In February 2017, Assad raised the stakes by launching an offensive on Qaboun and Barzeh, attempting to plug the tunnels and finally strangle the insurgency. The rebels put on a brave face in interviews conducted earlier this year. “God willing, if the regime makes such a stupid move, it will come to greatly regret it,” said Saeed Darwish, a high-ranking Islam Army leader. “They will not succeed in this plan,” insisted a civilian activist. “We will persevere in our land, and we will not leave it except as conquerors going to Damascus,” said another.

Indeed, the attacks on Qaboun and Barzeh touched off a violent rebel counteroffensive against eastern Damascus, and fighting still rages in late March. But it is unlikely to save the rebellion.

The time has long since passed when the insurgents of the Eastern Ghouta could unite in the face of Assad’s superior firepower, never mind turn the war around to threaten his hold on power. Two years after the day when Zahran Alloush watched his forces march past the viewing stand, the once-fearsome Islam Army is struggling for survival, the Eastern Ghouta gasps for air, and the Syrian opposition is trapped in a spiral of disintegration and defeat.