ALEPPO, Syria — News emerged Sept. 12 that Syrian rebel factions, including the Syrian Revolutionary Front (SRF), had signed a nonaggression pact with the Islamic State (IS). The claim, originally published by Agence France-Presse (AFP) and citing the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, has been strenuously denied by Ibrahim Barakat, an SRF spokesman, in an interview with Al-Monitor.
“We are still fighting this organization, which is murdering our children, and more reinforcements are on the way to combat it,” said Barakat. On Sept. 13, the SRF, operating primarily in Idlib province, in Syria’s northeast, had sent military reinforcements to the northern Aleppo countryside, following an IS attack on the region.
