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.

A video posted online shows a convoy of dozens of vehicles transporting SRF fighters and heavy machine guns. The SRF media office said that they were heading to Marea, in the Aleppan countryside, after IS reached its outskirts.

In the same video, SRF leader Jamal Maarouf, standing with fighters and heavy weaponry as a backdrop, announced, “The first troops of the Syrian Revolutionary Front brigades arrived at Marea, in Aleppo, in response to our people’s calls there to deter Bashar al-Assad’s bloody militias and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s [IS] mobs.” He added, “God willing, we promise God and our people that we will send hordes after hordes until the Aleppo countryside, Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor are freed from the evils of Assad’s and Baghdadi’s mobs.”