In the past year or so, Syria’s chaotically divided insurgency has slowly but surely coalesced into ever-larger blocs of fighters. At the grassroots level, there are still several hundred factions battling the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, but it is now possible to identify a handful of large coalitions spanning all or part of Syria, in addition to perhaps ten or fifteen second-tier alliances that seem to stand head and shoulders above the rest.
The most recent such group to form is the Mujahideen Army, or Jaish al-Mujahideen in Arabic. Made up of thousands of fighters, it dominates a chunk of the strategically important countryside west of Aleppo and exerts influence over at least some of the main supply routes from Turkey to Aleppo. The Mujahideen Army is not, however, a cohesive force. It was created on January 3, 2014, in a statement that listed the following main member factions: