The Mountain Hawks Brigade, also known as the Falcons of Mount Zawiya Brigade (formerly) and Liwa Suqour al-Jabal, was a secularist rebel group in Syria, founded in December 2011. It was a secularist and Islamic democratic organization, and the United States equipped it with BGM-71 TOW missiles.
History[]
Founded in December 2011, the Liwa Suqour al-Jabal unit was first led by Yousif Yahya during the Syrian Civil War. The organization advocated Islamic democracy and secularism, and it joined the Syrian Revolutionaries Front (SRF) rebel group at one point, with Qatar funding it. The brigade eventually split with the SRF and joined the Free Syrian Army, and by October 2014 the United States' CIA was supplying and funding it, including supplying TOW missiles. On 30 September 2015, Russia began bombing the positions of both the Islamic State and moderate rebel groups in Syria, and on 7 October they destroyed the brigade's main weapons depot in Aleppo Governorate; this came a few days after it was announced that the Pentagon was weighing the option of military action against Russian forces in Syria to help the moderate rebels. Later, the group would be renamed "the Mountain Hawks Brigade".