Syria’s main armed opposition group, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), is losing fighters and capabilities to Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist organisation with links to al-Qaida that is emerging as the best-equipped, financed and motivated force fighting Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Evidence of the growing strength of al-Nusra, gathered from Guardian interviews with FSA commanders across Syria, underlines the dilemma for the US, Britain and other governments as they ponder the question of arming anti-Assad rebels.
John Kerry, the US secretary of state, said that if negotiations went ahead between the Syrian government and the opposition – as the US and Russia proposed on Tuesday – “then hopefully [arming the Syrian rebels] would not be necessary”.
He was given two options: to either take the office of prime minister or be killed. He had a third option in mind: to plan his own defection in order to direct a blow to the regime from within, and today, he is declaring his defection.A spokesman for Riyad Hijab, who defected today from his post as Syrian Prime Minister • Hijab, a former agricultural secretary, was named Prime Minister in June, but according to his spokesman, he’d planned his defection since before then. One thing to keep in mind: While it’s impossible to know for sure, many of these high-level Syrian defections are likely as much a result of pragmatism—that is, the recognition that the al-Assad regime will soon fall—as they are the result of moral objections to the regime’s actions. source (via • follow)
People are still in shock that this is happening — they thought it would be limited to one neighborhood, but it is growing in size to other neighborhoods. They are scared of chaos and lawlessness more than anything else.Syrian academic Fadi Salem • Discussing the fighting taking place in the city of Aleppo, one of the two main holdouts in the Syrian conflict, which has heated up in recent days. Pockets of the loosely-organized Free Syrian Army launched the attacks on both Aleppo and Damascus in in an effort to gain control over two of the oldest cities in the world — and the country’s two key power centers. Even if the rebel armies have to double back once the Syrian army comes in, they’ve made the point that no part of the country is safe.
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