How brothers fighting for Syria were defeated by never-ending conflict

There was a time when Reda and his nine brothers looked forward to going to war. From the house they had turned into a base in Aleppo’s southern suburbs, they would load up the truck most days and drive to the frontlines just beyond the city limits to take the fight to Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

Things were simpler then. The 10 brothers in arms knew their friends and their enemies. Now, none of them are sure of much anymore – except that the cause to which they devoted themselves is dying a slow death.

“Nothing can save it,” said Reda, the youngest of the brothers, now a refugee in Germany. “And no one wants to help anyway. When the Russians started bombing, it became more serious than before.”

In early 2013, the Guardian showcased the brothers, who were then the causes célèbres of the rebel groups in the eastern half of Aleppo, held by those trying to force the Syrian leader’s removal.

Like nearly all the opposition fighters in the county’s second city, they were men from the countryside who had flooded in eight months earlier when regime control, which had been resolute for decades, started to crumble. Aleppo had always seemed distant to them, a hub of establishment money and power that had remained far from the reach of the rural poor. But insurrection had sparked an opportunity to change that and the brothers soon left their lives in the town of Sarmada, near Idlib, in search of weapons and backers.

When they reached the city, they dug in alongside other rebel groups, among an unfamiliar urban landscape, each staking a claim in neighbourhoods emptied of people, some of whom had left cooking pots on stovetops and laundry hanging on racks.

When nine of the brothers posed with their weapons in February of that year, excitement was palpable.

They had secured the weapons they were looking for and had quickly become a spoke in an umbrella organisation of rebel groups who had pinned down the Syrian army and paved the way for a push they believed would oust Assad and lead to a recalibration of power in Syria – the culmination of a popular current first evident on the streets of Deraa in early 2011.

Five years since the beginning of the uprisings that ignited the war, only three of the brothers are still fighting. One has been killed (he was holding the rocket-propelled grenade in the portrait). Two more are working at medical centres in Aleppo, and the rest, like Reda, have faded away.

Disillusionment crept in slowly, he said, and had a number of factors. It started with the realisation that frontlines, which had appeared brittle and dynamic early in 2013, had become stagnant later that year.

By then, jihadis who had been slowly gathering strength in the second half of 2012 had also moved into eastern Aleppo, first the al-Qaida-aligned al-Nusra Front, and then an even more visceral, uncompromising group – Islamic state. Their presence complicated a cause that until then had little to do with broader ideological or regional grievances.