Syrian rebels still hopeful as government regains initiative in Damascus By Austin Tice and Liz Sly, Washington Post, July 23,2012
Col. Malik Kurdi, spokesman for the Free Syrian Army command, said the rebels had no choice but to pull out of the Damascus neighborhoods they seized last week, because they lack the weapons to confront the better-equipped regular army.
“The Free Syrian Army is carrying out a war of harassing the regime army until it is exhausted, using guerrilla tactics,” he said, speaking by telephone from the military refugee camp in southern Turkey where the rebel leadership is based. “We can’t keep control of an area, so this is a circular operation, moving from one place to another, one city to another, to tire the regime out.”
Stymied at U.N., U.S. Refines Plan to Remove Assad New York Times, July 21, 2012
Administration officials insist they will not provide arms to the rebel forces. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are already financing those efforts. But American officials said that the United States would provide more communications training and equipment to help improve the combat effectiveness of disparate opposition forces in their widening, sustained fight against Syrian Army troops. It’s also possible the rebels would receive some intelligence support, the officials said.
Covering Syria: The information war By Aisling Byrne, Asia Times Online, July 11, 2012
There is clear duplicity in the deliberate unwillingness of the Western mainstream media to acknowledge the nature of those who are the West's allies in the regime-change project - particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar - and the danger they pose in the region through their arming and firing up of jihadist Salafist groups in Syria and across the region. Rare are articles in the mainstream Western press that highlight this hypocrisy.
A critical piece in the British press by Peter Oborne, The Daily Telegraph's chief political correspondent, was an exception: "Washington never ceases to complain about the connection between the Pakistani intelligence services and the Taliban. But we never hear a whisper of concern about the connection between Saudi intelligence and Salafi movements across the Middle East, of which al-Qaeda is the best-known offshoot."
German intelligence: al-Qaeda all over Syria By John Rosenthal, Asia Times Online, July 23, 2012
German intelligence estimates that "around 90" terror attacks that "can be attributed to organizations that are close to al-Qaeda or jihadist groups" were carried out in Syria between the end of December and the beginning of July, as reported by the German daily Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). This was revealed by the German government in a response to a parliamentary question.