The white minivan packed with armed Syrian fighters hurtled along the narrow winding road and passed old stone houses nestled among lush orchards of apples, pomegranates and figs clinging to dry-stone terraces stepped into the soaring pine-covered mountains and rocky ravines of Jabal al-Akrad in Syria's northwestern Latakia province. The seven men munched on potato chips as revolutionary songs, mainly Islamist but a few secular, played through the van's speakers: "We are your soldiers, Osama [bin Laden]. We seek martyrdom," went one. There was another soundtrack playing outside - the roar of MiG fighter jets and the soft thump-thump of helicopter rotor blades before they opened their doors to drop large improvised explosives packed into barrels. A MiG suddenly swooped directly overhead, prompting the van to screech to a halt. The men clambered out and hid under the sprawling branches of a walnut tree by the side of the road. A rebel 23-mm anti-aircraft gun nearby (heard but not seen) chased the jet with several thunderous rounds. It was joined by several other anti-aircraft guns of various calibers. All missed their target. A chicken clucked. An old man in a red and white checkered headscarf, riding an ash-gray donkey a shade darker than the color of his whiskers, slowly continued up the steep path, seemingly oblivious to events around him. After 10 minutes and several circular passes, the jet again dived in low and unleashed its explosive payload into an adjacent hill, creating plumes of white smoke that obscured the gentle, rounded mountaintop like a vertical cloud. The men of the Ansar al-Din battalion got back into the van and drove toward the many other plumes of smoke rising from the hills. They were headed to one of the most important front lines in the Syrian civil war: the battle for the mountain heartlands of President Bashar al-Assad's Alawite sect, his ancestral homeland and the backbone of his regime. Demographic battles Sunnis make up about 70 percent of Syria's population, Alawites some 12 percent, with the remainder composed of Christians, Druze and Shiites and Kurds of various sects. In these mountains, however, the demographics are reversed, with Sunnis in the minority and Alawites the overwhelming majority. When the Syrian uprising began in March 2011, it was a popular protest against an authoritarian regime, not a Sunni fight against the country's Alawite leader, but it has morphed into a civil war with an increasingly sectarian tone. Many of Assad's opponents are Sunni because most Syrians are Sunni. Many of Assad's supporters are Alawites because the Assads (Bashar and his late father and predecessor, Hafez) built a formidable clan-based Alawite substructure in the security and armed forces and within the elite political and economic classes. Still, there are Sunni soldiers fighting for the regime, as well as men from other sects, and there are a few (but not many) Alawites in the opposition. These Alawite mountains are where many believe Assad might not only retreat to - should he lose the capital, Damascus - but also try to establish a breakaway Alawite state. That state would include the rounded spine of mountaintops of Jabal al-Akrad and the adjacent Jabal al-Turkman chain, down to the Mediterranean coastal plain and the country's two main port cities of Latakia and Tartous. To date though, Latakia province has largely been shielded from the full force of the war's destructive power, protected by some of the Syrian military's most formidable units - both uniformed and the nonuniformed paramilitary "shabiha" militias. As a result, its coastal capital, Latakia, has become a refuge for tens of thousands of people fleeing the fighting elsewhere. Parts of it, however, have fallen out of the regime's hands. Last year, Islamist rebels won control of most of Latakia's Sunni villages in the countryside bordering Turkey. Since then, the front line here has been largely frozen. The Islamists waited in Salma and Doreen, the closest Sunni villages to regime-controlled Alawite territory. Then in the first week of August, they pushed forward, quickly snatching 11 Alawite villages in fierce clashes. Foreign fighters The men in the van disembarked in a small Sunni hamlet near Salma, narrowly dodging an artillery round that landed some 50 meters from their vehicle. They were to relieve colleagues stationed in the Alawite villages. But in a sign of the ferocity of the fight and the regime's bid to hold on to these mountains, on August 19, just five days after the team from Ansar al-Din arrived from Turkey, all 11 villages were swiftly retaken by the regime in the span of some 48 hours. I can't go to battle and have the Free Army telling the regime my plans. We work alone [without the FSA], but we are not living on our own planet. Omar, Jabhat al-Nusra fighter

• published: 29 Aug 2013
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