ISTANBUL — Difficult access to its main area of operations has long made the Syrian opposition group Jaish al-Islam (JAI) a relative mystery to the outside world. A video released on April 29 showing a 1,700-strong military parade of its new "graduates" in the Damascus outskirts has drawn greater attention to it, along with a shift from calling for an Islamic state to its leader saying the people should choose the sort of state they want.

JAI spokesman Capt. Islam Alloush agreed to be interviewed by Al-Monitor in mid-May, in a gated complex housing mainly foreigners in Istanbul’s outlying suburbs. With a reddish-brown Islamist-style beard, wide-set eyes and a polite demeanor, Alloush claims no family relation to the group’s leader, Zahran Alloush.

The thickset 30-year-old former regime captain and military trainer from Idlib told Al-Monitor that he had first met Zahran in 2009 in the Sednaya prison, where he spent a few months and the future rebel leader was serving a longer sentence.

Zahran would go on to form Liwa al-Islam, the predominant group in the larger JAI, which was formed on Sept. 29, 2013, from over 50 smaller groups active around Damascus. He had been released in June 2011 as part of an amnesty by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad that many consider a strategic attempt to enable extremists to take over what was initially a peaceful uprising.