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July 14th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda 
Meeting in Turkey focuses on basics of waging war against Assad
Abu Moayed, a commander in an armed Syrian opposition brigade, stood and waved his arms emphatically at the fellow rebel commanders who filled the sweltering room.
His fighters, he said, needed money and weapons. But they were not getting the support promised from the donors and opposition leaders outside Syria.
“We are borrowing money to feed our wounded!” Mr. Moayed shouted. “There is no distribution of the weapons,” he added. “All of our weapons, we are paying for them ourselves.”
The meeting of the rebel commanders, held after Friday Prayer in this Turkish city near Syria’s northern border, said much about the priorities of the Syrian opposition fighting groups at this stage of the conflict, now 17 months old. There was limited discussion of the mass killings in the village of Tremseh the day before – even though the commanders had heard about it and at least one had lost relatives. There was no talk about United Nations cease-fire monitors, the peace envoy Kofi Annan, or endless Security Council debates to halt the conflict. These commanders were focused on the basics of waging war against President Bashar al-Assad.
Mr. Moayed, from Idlib, was one of dozens of commanders who converged on the meeting, called by the Idlib Revolutionary Command Council. Held high above the street in a pair of large rooms in an apartment building, the gathering framed both a degree of expanding coordination among anti-Assad fighting groups inside Syria and their frustrations with the opposition’s political leadership outside.
One complaint throughout was that the Syrian National Council, the coalition of exile opposition groups based in Istanbul, was disconnected from the battles fought on the ground. Another was contained in the field commanders’ suspicion that unnamed members of the Syrian political opposition in Turkey were either diverting funds or playing favorites in funneling weapons and money across the border.
“Yesterday we were supposed to receive mortars and cartridges,” said another commander, Issam Afara, addressing his peers. “But we didn’t receive them. I called and demanded: Where are they? Where?”
Since late this spring, the war in parts of Syria has entered a bloody stalemate punctuated by days of intense violence, like the [alleged] mass killing on Thursday in Tremseh, the Sunni village in western Syria where by some opposition groups’ estimates more than 200 people were killed by Syrian armed forces and pro-Assad militia members using tanks, artillery and helicopters.
International outrage over those killings, which the Syrian government said were carried out by rebels, has injected new urgency into diplomatic efforts to settle the Syria conflict at the Security Council. There, diplomats were negotiating privately on Friday over a new resolution to force the antagonists to honor a cease-fire and peace plan engineered by Mr. Annan, the special envoy from the United Nations and the Arab League. A vote on that resolution is likely next Wednesday.
The diplomacy seemed a world away, and possibly too late, when viewed through the prism of the anti-Assad fighters, who have driven much of the Syrian military forces from certain rural zones in the northern mountains, carving out small but mostly stable areas now under their de facto control, though these areas still face shelling and attack from the air by Mr. Assad’s military.
As they have realized tactical success, the anti-Assad fighting groups, once underground, now face a problem common to armed uprisings.
At least 80 different fighting groups operate in Idlib alone, the fighters said, most of which began as small personal networks or groups of army defectors, and have since grown.
The groups sometimes share names and often operate in the same areas. And as they have added members and sought more weapons and external support, some of them have found themselves competing for resources and frustrated with Syrians who claim leadership positions in the opposition and do not fight, but disburse funds that many fighting groups say they do not receive.
Mr. Afara, for example, said money funneled through the Muslim Brotherhood was not shared with fighting groups seen as secular, which angered fighters who had turned back the Assad military at great cost, and now are told they do not match a foreign donor’s ideal.
“We tell them, ‘We are not brothers?’ ” said Mr. Afara, who leads a unit in a larger group called the Idlib Martyrs’ Brigade. “How? We are Muslims, and we want a full popular revolution, with Muslims and Christians and Druze.”
Another commander, Abdul Ghafour, echoed the fighters’ anger. “Don’t think we are blind, as we have 600 martyrs,” he said, referring to those who have died. The Syrian National Council, he said, “does not represent us. The revolution is the people who are here, who fought from slavery.”
Mr. Ghafour said soliciting funds or weapons risked becoming as frustrating as dealing with private aid groups and nongovernment organizations, which sometimes offer assistance in exchange for sharing their point of view. “The whole revolution could be transferred into an N.G.O. project,” he said. “This is what I object to.”
A spokesman for the Syrian National Council, Mohamed Sarmeeni, disputed the complaints of financial favoritism from the commanders. “There is no discrimination,” the spokesman said in a telephone interview from Istanbul. The council, Mr. Sarmeeni said, had also started to devote more attention to financing the opposition fighters and “we are about to pay salaries for all officers.”
Small-arms prices have climbed sharply during the war, with machine guns costing several thousand dollars each, and assault rifles costing as much as $2,000 each when new, the commanders said.
To underwrite their weapons purchases to date, the fighters and commanders present said, they raised money themselves. Sometimes they gathered donations from their villages and neighborhoods. Other times, they said, they sold their cars and their land. One young commander, who called himself Captain Bilal and had a partly healed bullet wound to his lower right leg, said he needed weapons so badly a few months ago that he asked his fiancée to return the jewelry he had given her.
“She said ‘No,’ ” he said. “So I broke up with her and took it back and bought the weapons I needed.”
The weapons, the commanders said, were obtained through corrupt Syrian officials or through what they called a “Turkish and Russian mafia” in Turkey.
At times the meeting of the commanders descended into shouting. At one point, several commanders vented their fury at a commander who said he had in fact been given arms. But as the hours passed, the mood calmed, and the commanders said they intended to work together and called for the meeting to make things better.
One commander, who uses the name Abu Hamza, said though it did not look “correct” to see commanders argue so intensely, it was ordinary to a revolution as its ranks and prospects grow. The meeting, he said, showed a willingness by many groups to become more coordinated and for the rank and file, which is suffering and risking the most, to gain a greater voice in the politics of the war.
Mr. Moayed agreed, as the meeting gave way to a shared meal. “We want to be like one hand,” he said, “one front.”
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