The murder of the Syrian regime loyalist Mohammed Darrar Jammo in Lebanon, now said to have been an internal family affair, led to much firing in the air. At Jammo’s funeral in Latakia, there was a heavy presence of militiamen, and militiawomen, who were there to pay their respects to the dead. These fighters belong to a group now known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Iskanderoun/Syrian Resistance, which considered Jammo one of their own. It is led by a certain Mihrac Ural, who works under the nom de guerre of Ali Kayali.
Kayali is a Turkish-born Alawite, and now a naturalized citizen, having lived in Syria since the early 1980s. His background is murky and controversial. He cut his teeth in 1970s Turkey as an ultraleftist, then took up arms against the government and added the cause of Syro-Arab nationalism to his repertoire. From there, he entered the Beqaa Valley-centered underworld of Syrian-backed radical factions, developed a connection to the Kurdish PKK, and also seems to have struck up a lasting relationship with the Assad regime itself. Exiled in Syria since escaping a Turkish prison in 1980, Kayali ran a small splinter faction of his communist sect, the THKP/C-Acilciler, and worked to reattach the Hatay (or Iskanderoun or Alexandretta) province to Syria. This is a longstanding Syrian government demand, and Hafez al-Assad briefly toyed with the Hatay separatists in his cold war with Turkey. But it was a passing fancy, and Kayali himself had been long forgotten by the time Bashar took over and patched up relations with Turkey.
After the start of Syria’s unrest in 2011, Kayali suddenly reappeared as a force to reckon with. He began recruiting young Alawites on the coast to PFLI/Syrian Resistance, and set them to work as a pro-regime militia. The group has been fighting to keep rebels contained to the Sunni areas of northern Latakia, and even made some forays into the Homs region. While it uses Syrian-nationalist and leftist imagery, Kayali’s group has only made half-hearted attempts at hiding its Alawite character. Kayali himself is often accompanied on official occasions by a rising Alawi religious figure called Mowaffaq al-Ghazal. This spring, Kayali’s militia was rumored to be involved in the Baniyas/Beida massacres, a sectarian slaughter of Sunni civilian families and one of the worst war crimes to date in the Syrian conflict. He has also been accused by his enemies of involvement in narcotics trafficking into Hatay and of organizing bomb attacks in Turkey. But details are scarce, and it’s very difficult to tell fact from fiction.
http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/the-militiafication-of-the-assad-regime/