[1] Saleh al-Ali was born in 1883 to a family of Alawi notables from Al-Shaykh Badr, in the Syrian Coastal Mountain Range in northwest.

When the French authorities heard of the meeting, they sent a force from Al-Qadmus to the town of Sheikh Badr in order to arrest Saleh al-Ali.

[2] Al-Ali also allied himself with the rebellion of Ibrahim Hananu in Aleppo, the uprising in Talkalakh by the Dandashi tribe and the revolt in Antioch by Subhi Barakat.

[2] The balance of power began to shift in favor of the French after they conquered Damascus, defeating a makeshift army at the Battle of Maysalun on 24 July 1920.

Around this time al-Ali began collaborating, through Ibrahim Hananu's meditation, with Turkish Kemalist forces fighting the French occupation in southern Anatolia.

A letter addressed directly to Mustafa Kemal in January 1921 asking for weapons for their common "jihad" against the French is preserved in the Turkish ATASE military archives in Ankara.