For more than a month, insurgents fighting President Bashar Assad's forces had been on the march in central Syria, getting within few miles of the fourth-largest city of Hama. Many in the opposition hoped they would cut a main government supply line to Aleppo and ease the pressure on the rebels there.
The five-week offensive, which saw insurgents break government defenses and capture more than two dozen villages and towns, was spearheaded by the Salafi-jihadi extremist Jund al-Aqsa group.
The advance so alarmed Syria's army command that it eventually rushed one of Assad's most trusted and prominent officers, Col. Suheil al-Hassan, and his elite unit to defend the strategic region.
On Oct. 7, heavy fighting broke out in the nearby Idlib province between Jund al-Aqsa and the powerful, ultraconservative group Ahrar al-Sham. That group blamed the other for assassinating several of its local commanders.
Both groups then withdrew from battling government troops, allowing the army to launch a counteroffensive and regain control of 14 villages and towns since the weekend.
The infighting "turned the situation upside down," said Turkey-based opposition activist Ahmad al-Ahmad, adding that government forces within three days regained 30 percent of the ground they lost in a month.
"We have many goals, and one of them is to cut the regime's road leading to Aleppo," a commander with Jund al-Aqsa in Hama said last week. The commander, who goes by the name of Lt. Col. Karmo, did not elaborate.
On Tuesday, the same commander said that while his men had not withdrawn, Ahrar al-Sham had pulled its fighters from front-line villages in Hama province, helping Assad's troops regain control of much of what they lost in the past five weeks.
One of the main disagreements that slowed the Hama offensive was how to run the city once it fell to the insurgents. Many in Hama feared that Jund al-Aqsa's extremist ideology would be implemented, and they wanted only gunmen from the city to be in charge of security, the activist said.
