northeastern Beqaa Valley, at the source of the Orontes River, and devised plans to capture or kill Yusuf. Their first target was Tripoli, the principal source of Yusuf's wealth and strength, against which Ali dispatched his paternal first cousin Dervish ibn Habib, who captured the city. Although Dervish seized the valuables stockpiled in the inner citadel of Tripoli's castle, Ali strictly forbade the city's plunder in a bid to demonstrate to its inhabitants that his rule would be mild and generous. The minor emirs and sheikhs of Tripoli and its hinterland joined Ali, whose forces swelled to about 60,000 fighters. Yusuf had escaped to Damascus where he raised an army out of its imperial garrisons. On their pursuit of Yusuf, Ali and Fakhr al-Din captured Baalbek, the headquarters of a locally powerful Shia Muslim chief and old ally of Yusuf, Musa al-Harfush. They cautiously kept Musa on side, sending him to lobby military factions in Damascus to abandon Yusuf, but forced him to step down from his chieftainship in favor of his kinsman Yunus al-Harfush. They proceeded south through the Beqaa Valley and recruited a certain Ahmad of the Shihab clan based in Wadi al-Taym. Fakhr al-Din maintained his control of the Mediterranean ports of Acre, Haifa and Caesarea. With northern and central Syria under his control, Ali demanded from the beylerbey of Damascus, Seyyed Mehmed Pasha, control of certain areas of Seyyid Mehmed's eyalet under Ali and his allies: he sought the Hauran for Amr al-Badawi, chief of the Bedouin Mafarija tribe of Jabal Ajlun, the southern Beqaa Valley to the Bedouin chief Mansur ibn Bakri Furaykh, and the restoration of Kiwan ibn Abdullah to his Janissary post–all of Ali's requests were rejected, though he demonstrated to his allies among the southern Syrian emirs and chieftains the benefits of his rule. Meanwhile, Ali issued excuses for his failure to remit taxes and continued to publicly assert his allegiance to the Ottoman sultan, whose government, unable at the time to rein in Ali's power, sent an envoy named Mehmed Agha with a pardon for Ali. The Kurdish chief may have interpreted the pardon as an imperial pass to continue his rebellion in Syria. Although control of Damascus would seal his paramountcy in the Syrian region, Ali was mindful of the city's distance from his Aleppine power base and its importance to the Porte as the Empire's main marshaling point for