"Abul Hassan, did you hear?"

"...I asked about the rebels' weapons and the clutch of conscripts staggered into the room under the weight of rockets, rifles, ammunition and explosives. "Take this," the General said, grinning as he handed me a two-way radio, a Hongda-made HD668 taken two days ago off a dead Turkish fighter in Saif al-Dowla a few hundred metres from where we were sitting. "Mohamed, do you hear me?" the radio demanded. "Abul Hassan, did you hear?" The Syrian officers roared with laughter at the disembodied voice of their enemy, perhaps in the same block of buildings. We took this ID from the "terrorist", the General said. "Citizen of the Turkish Republic" was printed on the card, above a photo of a man with a thin moustache. Born – Bingol (Turkey) 1 July 1974. Name: Remziye Idris Metin Ekince. Religion: Islam.So, suddenly, we had a name for one of the mysterious "foreigners" who – at least in popular Baathist imagination – staff the "terrorist" army the Syrian military is fighting. And a lot of other names with far larger significance....
It wasn't difficult to work out just how the fighting in Aleppo is developing. Walking the streets for more than an hour with a Syrian army patrol, individual snipers would shoot from houses and then disappear before government soldiers arrived. The army had shot dead one man with a sniper's rifle who fired from the minaret of the El-Houda mosque. The Salaheddine district had been "liberated", the Syrian officer said, and the Saif el-Dowla district was only two blocks from a similar "liberation".
At least a dozen civilians emerged from their homes, retirees in their 70s, shopkeepers and local businessmen with their families and, unaware that a foreign journalist was watching, put their arms round Syrian troops. One told me he had stayed in his home as "foreign" fighters used his courtyard to fire on government soldiers. "I speak Turkish and most were speaking Turkish but some of the men had long beards and short trousers like the Saudis wear, and had strange Arab accents."
So many Aleppo citizens talked to me, out of earshot of soldiers, about armed "foreigners" in their streets along with Syrians "from the countryside" that the presence of considerable numbers of non-Syrian gunmen appeared to be true. ..."