Special Operations Brigade
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The Special Operations Brigade was a Free Syrian Army unit operating in Aleppo. Its leader, Abdul Marik Barad (nom de guerre Abu Ali), had joined the newly-formed Syrian Martyrs' Brigades, then known as the Martyrs of Mount Zawiya Battalion, in December 2011. In November 2012 he formed the Special Operations Brigade as an independent unit attached to Jamal Maarouf's Syrian Martyrs' Brigades. The group was based mainly around Abu Ali's hometown of Taftanaz in northeast Idlib, close to the border with Aleppo. Abu Ali helped to form the Syria Revolutionaries Front alongside Maarouf, but he grew critical of Maarouf's corruption and took his brigade out of the SRF in February 2014. Soon afterward he and his fighters came under attack from al-Nusra and fled to Aleppo, where they joined the Dawn of Freedom Brigades; this formation became a key part of the FSA-YPG alliance known as Euphrates Volcano. The Special Operations Brigade carried out reconnaissance, sabotage, sniper support, and other generally covert tasks in the course of the war against the Islamic State and later against the Islamic Emirate. It maintained contact with the 99th Infantry Brigade, another former SRF brigade which had spent some time working alongside the YPG before returning to its original area of operations in Idlib.