JABAL ZAWIYA, SYRIA — The drab building in the center of a quiet hilltop village in Syria's northwestern Idlib province used to be a town hall. But on this afternoon in early August, a dozen young men in ripped T-shirts and camouflage pants, not one over age 30, are lounging in its office's chairs and desks sipping coffee and smoking an endless chain of cigarettes, weapons at their sides. Above their heads, the graffiti spray painted on the wall marks the office's transfer of power: "No traitors here." Having seized it from the Syrian army days before, they are now using it as something of an operations center, though it more often calls to mind the unbridled testosterone of a fraternity house. 

Cars without license plates slam on the brakes outside then scream off again, Kalashnikovs hanging out lackadaisically out their windows. Seventeen-year-old boys chase each other with their guns and tinker with their walkie-talkies, their own form of social messaging in a town where phone lines and internet have been cut for months. “What do you want?” one pages, using a made-up kunya, an honorific nickname invoking a son. “Freedom!” another pages back, giggling, again assigning himself a masculine kunya. Half the time, they forget to charge the batteries.

It has been only days since these men joined tens of thousands of other fighters in wiping out all but a few remnants of the Syrian army from Jabal Zawiya, a picturesque expanse of dry hills draped with fruit orchards and rocky dirt roads in central Idlib province, between Aleppo and the coast. As Assad's forces moved their heavy artillery northeast to join the battle for Aleppo, Jabal Zawiya's rebels exploited their advantage. Starting with the first day of Ramadan on July 20, they seized checkpoint after checkpoint in a push to “clean” the mountains of the army's presence. Only two weeks ago, a targeted rocket had killed the head of one battalion when it landed on his home. By the beginning of August, the checkpoint from which the army had fired was also in the hands of the rebels, said one of his recruits.

A homogeneously Sunni territory at the junction of two of the country's most strategic thoroughfares, Jabal Zawiya has gained the country's greatest degree of rebel autonomy. The area is still hemmed in by military bases along those highways guarded by hundreds of tanks, which constrain the rebels' ability to make their much-needed trips to Turkey for money, weapons, humanitarian supplies and smuggled journalists. After we made our way down to the mountains through the plains of northern Idlib on August 2, and again on the way back up the following week, we lost full days waiting to cross the highway as the army moved 50 tanks toward Aleppo and the rebels blasted IEDS to try to stop them. Each time, the rebels took out about three, but the rest moved along.