But don’t worry, none of the U.S. weapons the FSA units will be carrying will fall into al-Qaeda’s hands.

BEIRUT (AP) — The military commander of Syria’s main Western-backed opposition group visited rebels in the coastal province that is President Bashar Assad’s ancestral homeland following recent opposition advances in the area, a spokeswoman said Monday.

Over the past week, rebel fighters in Latakia province have swept through a string of villages that are populated by members of Assad’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. The advances have not shifted the strategic balance in the area, but they did embarrass the regime in a region that has been under tight government control since the Syrian revolt began more than two years ago.

Assad’s forces have launched a counteroffensive to try to dislodge the rebels, and activists say fighting is raging over several villages in the mountainous region.

In a video posted on the opposition Syrian National Coalition’s Facebook page, rebel military chief Gen. Salim Idris walks with a small group of fighters through hilly terrain. Dressed in civilian clothes with a shoulder holster and a pistol, Idris tells them that he visited the front to see the “important achievements and great victories that were made by our brother rebels in the coast.” […]

Islamic extremist rebel groups, some of which have links to al-Qaeda, do not recognize Idris’s authority, although they do occasionally coordinate with brigades that fall under his loose-knit command.

That has been the case in Latakia, activists say, where secular-leaning rebel groups fighting alongside al-Qaeda-linked jihadi factions including as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant captured 11 Alawite villages last week.