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The fighter Brahim is worried.
"There is a control of the army in the entrance of the road," says the farmer, which means that escape routes are cut from Jebel Zawi. We feared something like this, so the very few foreign reporters have decided to leave Syria, at the risk of getting stuck. But it seems that we're late.
Finally, after dark, Brahim has a solution.
He mobilizes three cars, driven in the dark, trying to find an alternative route. After hours of waiting, they manage to make us cross the enemy lines by another point. Brahim laughs, pleased: "The Syrian Liberation Army has found a way out !" He says.
The convoy takes us to a country house where we expect another group that will be evacuated with us. And then comes the surprise: there is a group of three Libyans, who, in their own words, have come not to fight, but "to assess the needs of the Syrian revolutionary brothers." The Libyans do not try to hide their identities. These are men close to Abdelhakim Belhadj, the current military governor of Tripoli and former jihadist with links to al Qaeda in the past.
One of them turns out to be an old acquaintance of the reporters who covered the war in Libya:
Mehdi al-Hatari, the former commander of the Brigade of Tripoli, which played a key role in taking the capital and the fall of Gaddafi. The second, Adem Kikli, says he works for Belhadj, and for almost two decades living in exile in the UK. The third, Fuad, seems to be a bodyguard.
"We are here on our own personal initiative, not by command of anyone," said Adem. He emphasizes that Harati publicly renounced his position in Tripoli on 11 October. Adem also claims that he has been with other Libyans, "a few dozen', which have moved to Syria on their own to help the insurgents.
Harati, no doubt, is a man of action. The character came to the fore after participating in the Gaza Flotilla in the spring of 2010. "I was wounded in the assault on the Mavi Marmara, and spent nine days in jail in Tel Aviv," he says. In February, Harati, who lives in Dublin and has Irish passport, said goodbye to his wife and son, along with other exiles in Ireland, and went to Libya. There he created the Brigade of Tripoli, a group of elite fighters, trained by consultants from Qatar, who fought ferociously in the final battle for the capital.
ABC has found, moreover, their recent visit to places like Bahrain, Sudan and Ankara, for unclarified purposes. Recently, Harati was involved in a bizarre episode, when, by his own account, a gang of robbers raided his home, taking plenty of jewelry and 200,000 pounds (238,000 euros). Harati told police that a large amount of money had been delivered by an agent of the CIA for financing his group's fight against Gaddafi.
The fighter left those 200,000 pounds to his wife, in case anything happened to him and took the rest to Libya.