The events at Abu ad Duhur form another telling chapter of the uprising’s evolution, and for the tit-for-tat fight between the government and its adversaries.

The crackdown by the Assad government has descended in stages since it started last year. It began with arrests but quickly shifted into a bloody campaign by loyalist militias and a conventional army using mortars, artillery and tanks. This summer, as the campaign slowed in the face of swelling rebel ranks and roadside bombs, the government escalated again. It turned loose helicopters and then jets to attack rebels and their neighborhoods.

After the government moved its battle to the sky, at least hundreds of fighters from the mountains diverted some of their attention from the remaining army outposts near their homes and began infiltrating into the lowlands. Armed with a paltry assortment of weapons, they began hunting the aircraft that were hunting them.

Mr. Marouf, 37, is from Deir Sonbul, a village in Jebel al Zawiya, an area of rolling mountains where mosques and Muslim cemeteries stand beside Roman ruins and where olive groves cloak the slopes. Before the war he had been a construction contractor in Lebanon.

Now he is one of the rebels’ most prominent field commanders, his stature elevated in part by YouTube videos in which he is seen striding among the flaming wreckage of MIGs to stand over the bloodied remains of Syrian pilots still strapped to their parachutes. In one video he declared that if the world would not protect Syrians by enforcing a no-fly zone, then the rebels would create a no-fly zone themselves. That statement was fired in part by adrenaline, made moments after knocking a Russian-made jet from the sky.

In an interview after last Friday’s prayers, Mr. Marouf offered a more measured view and an assessment heard throughout the rebel-held zones. The Syrian opposition, he said, needs antitank weapons and shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles, which would help the rebels defeat the government’s armor and ground its planes. Then he again offered a confident declaration.