A man of many guises stands in the road east of Afrin. Wearing a red beret, and dark glasses despite the sunless sky, Hakim Anza plays the part of a Free Syrian Army military police officer, deployed to the route with his men to halt looting of Kurdish property. “We have an independent court,” he announces solemnly in a video clip filmed by a local cameraman on Monday along the road linking Afrin with the northern Syrian town of Azaz. “We’re not going to allow any of these bad people to exploit the name of the FSA or distort the FSA’s image by doing bad things. We swear to God that we will stop and punish them!”Anza has been many things over the past…

Source: The Times March 23, 2018 17:03 UTC