SARAQIB, Syria — The workers arrive by darkness, taking their stations at the vise and the lathe. Soon metal filings and sparks fly, and the stack of their creations grows at their feet: makeshift mortar shells to be fired through barrels salvaged from disabled Syrian Army tanks.
Across northern Syria, rebel workshops like these are part of a clandestine network of primitive arms-making plants, a signature element of a militarily lopsided war.
Their products — machine-gun mounts, hand grenades, rockets, mortar shells, roadside bombs and the locally brewed explosives that are packed inside — help form the arsenal of a guerrilla force that has suffered serious setbacks this year in its effort to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.
“Everybody knows we do not have the weapons we need to defend ourselves,” said Abu Trad, a commander of the Saraqib Rebels Front, shortly before he allowed visitors into this mortar-round plant. “But we have the will, and we have humble means, and we have tools.”
The value of workshop-grade weapons, while once crucial to the rebels’ success in claiming territory in northern Syria, may have substantially declined.
Last spring, when Mr. Assad was struggling to confront the armed opposition that his crackdown had fueled, shops like these forced Syria’s military to change tactics. The roads became so laced with their output of hidden bombs that the army stopped roaming areas where the rebels were strongest, and pulled back to defensive positions. The shops were a marker of the rebels’ budding organization and lethal skill.
But the government has spent a year refitting its troops, Hezbollah has sent in reinforcements, and Iran and Russia have kept Mr. Assad’s forces resupplied.
These days the government’s forces are less likely to venture out on patrols or expose themselves in small checkpoints, reducing their vulnerability to the rebels’ makeshift bombs. And most of the shops’ other weapons systems lack the accuracy, range or explosive punch to drive the army from the positions where it is entrenched and from where soldiers can fire back with barrages of more powerful and precise weapons.
Moreover, some of the locally made weapons are prone to malfunction, which can kill those who use them.
And yet the arms plants remain a prominent feature of the opposition’s logistics, as arms flows from the Arab world fail to keep up with demand. Though the European Union lifted its embargo on arms transfers to the opposition last month, many rebels said they see the decision as a diplomatic tactic intended to pressure the Syrian government, and unlikely to lead to shipments from Western governments soon.
“They promise things all the time,” said Maj. Mohammad Ali, who commands the fighters in northern Syria for the Grandsons of the Prophet, a large rebel formation. “We are now in the third year, and so far we have had so many decisions from the West and nothing was acted on.”
Abu Trad and other rebels said the workshops have been as essential as the fighters on the front lines, and the laborers are part of a revolution’s foundation. “The mother who cooks for the fighters is a revolutionary, the medic who helps the wounded is a revolutionary, and the man who makes the mortar and the shell is a revolutionary, too,” he said.
On several trips into Syria, journalists for The New York Times visited four active arms workshops in Idlib and Aleppo Provinces, interviewed other bomb- or weapons-makers who agreed to discuss their work but not to allow access to their plants, and examined other workshops’ products on rebel bases and front lines.
The plant in Saraqib is one part of a larger and more complicated supply chain. On this night, it had received a batch of freshly cast shell bodies from a rebel foundry elsewhere. (Its workers declined to discuss its location, beyond saying that it was “underground.”)
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