Al-Nusra has emerged as the most effective fighting force in the Syrian Civil war. Man for man their fighters are better than any fighting for Assad or Hezbollah. Unlike the other rebel units, in areas they take over, Nusra tries to create law and order.

In Eastern Syria, Nusra not only controls towns, they also run Syria’s oil fields. They provide electricity and fuel to the territories they and their FSA allies control. Nusra However, they are growing weary about the organization that helped spawn them al-Qaeda in Iraq known formally as The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Syria). ISIS is your typical al-Qaeda outfit, just committing terrorism the local population, killing Christians and oppressing women. They are composed primary of foreign Jihadists, while Nusra nowadays is strictly Syrian.

The local population and Nusra are getting tired of ISIS and their terror antics. This is setting the stage if Assad falls, for the FSA and Nusra to fight ISIS. This would be a replay of when Iraqi Sunnis turned on AQI and helped the US defeat them.

The al-Qaida-affiliated commander in charge of the oil company in Shadadi, eastern Syria – a lean, broad-shouldered man who is followed everywhere by a machete-wielding bodyguard – was explaining the appeal of jihadi rule to the people of the newly captured town.

“Go and ask the people in the streets whether there a liberated town or city anywhere in Syria that is ruled as efficiently as this one,” he boasted. “There is electricity, water and bread and security. Inshallah, this will be the nucleus of a new Syrian Islamic caliphate!”

The al-Nusra Front, the principle jihadi rebel group in Syria, defies the cliche of Islamist fighters around the Middle East plotting to establish Islamic caliphates from impoverished mountain hideaways. In north-eastern Syria, al-Nusra finds itself in command of massive silos of wheat, factories, oil and gas fields, fleets of looted government cars and a huge weapons arsenal.

The commander talked about the services al-Nusra is providing to Shadadi’s residents. First, there is food: 225 sacks of wheat, baked into bread and delivered to the people every day through special teams in each neighbourhood. Then there is free electricity and water, which run all day throughout the town. There is also al-Nusra healthcare, provided from a small clinic that treats all comers, regardless of whether they have sworn allegiance to the emirate or not. Finally, there is order and the promise of swift justice, delivered according to sharia law by a handful of newly appointed judges.

[….]

The tactics with which al-Nusra is waging its war are no less brutal than those of its al-Qaida-affiliated counterparts in other areas of the Middle East. A few weeks before our visit, after a feud with a local tribe over oil, al-Nusra fighters had surrounded the village of Albu Saray and taken the whole male population of the village prisoner. A few of them were accused of killing an al-Nusra commander, and were executed, and many of the houses in the village were flattened. “Do you know why the Americans and Israelis are winning and we Arabs always lose?” asked the emir. “Because we Arabs are emotional.”

[….]

n what many considered a coup against al-Nusra, the leader of the Iraqi branch of al-Qaida, Abu Bakra al-Baghdadi, declared that he would merge his own organisation with that of his Syrian brothers, under his leadership. The feud that followed was reminiscent of the infighting between warring branches of the Ba’ath party in Iraq and Syria in the 1960s.

“Yes, in the beginning they [al-Qaida in Iraq] did give us weapons and send us their leadership,” said the commander. “May Allah bless them. But now, we have become a state. We control massive areas, and they are but a faction. They don’t control land in Iraq: they were defeated. We have been sending them weapons and cars to strengthen their spear against the Iraqi rejectionist government, but now they want us to be part of them. That, I don’t understand.”

[….]

“They say that al-Nusra has become soft, [that] they deal with the infidel FSA and co-ordinate with them and fight together,” said the commander. “The reality is that many of the people who have accepted al-Nusra in these area and started to accept our ideology did so because they saw people of the area join them. Now, they have retreated because al-Qaida entered very heavily.”

He cites an old Arabic proverb, which states that the people of Mecca know its valleys better than the outsiders. “We know better than the outsiders, who are here just to fight and kill. We have to learn from the mistakes of Iraq and the mistakes that toppled al-Qaida there and turned the tribes against them.”

It is clear that al-Qaeda and al-Nusra are 2 distinct entities. Al-Qaeda just wants to terrorize populations and has no military organization. Al-Nusra on the other hand has military organization and is building civilian infrastructure in an attempt to win hearts and minds. Their goal is a Syrian based Caliphate like that of the Ummayads, while al-Qaeda wants a transnational Islamic Caliphate.

In many ways al-Nusra is more dangerous than al-Qaeda. They are more than just terrorists and are actually laying the groundwork for a state. This organization needs to be monitored by Western intelligence very closely.

Update: The conflict between Free Syrian Army rebels and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham has begun.

Syrian rebels said on Friday the assassination of one of their top commanders by al Qaeda-linked militants was tantamount to a declaration of war, opening a new front for the Western-backed fighters struggling against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

Rivalries have been growing between the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Islamists, whose smaller but more effective forces control most of the rebel-held parts of northern Syria more than two years after pro-democracy protests became an uprising.

“We will not let them get away with it because they want to target us,” a senior FSA commander said on condition of anonymity after members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant killed Kamal Hamami on Thursday.

“We are going to wipe the floor with them,” he said.

No word yet on which side al-Nusra will support. Being that they are mostly Syrian, I would not be shock if Nusra sides with the FSA against ISIS.