[1] The anthropologist Fabrice Balanche notes Kurdish tribesmen were settled in the area in a military capacity by the Mamluk sultan Baybars and his successors in the 13th century to secure the route between Aleppo and the Syrian coast.

[2] The 19th-century German traveler Martin Hartmann noted that Sunni Muslim residents in the Ottoman nahiyah (subdistrict) of Jabal al-Akrad claimed descent from Kurds who were forced to settle in the region in the 16th century but no longer spoke Kurdish.

Contributing factors for the close grouping of the rural settlements there include the abundance of hills and springs, but especially the close-knit social organization of the inhabitants.

A clear marker of the Sunni Muslim identity of the area are the plethora of mosques across the landscape, a distinction from the predomiantly Alawite countryside of the Jabal Ansariya.

In July 2012, they gained a foothold in Jabal Sahyun (the area around al-Haffah) but withdrew amid days of heavy fighting with government forces.