BBC News reports: The deepening crisis in Syria threatens to have a destabilising effect on all of its neighbours but Israel has a particular set of concerns.

Technically, the two countries have been in a state of war since 1948. Israel also continues to occupy the Golan Heights, Syrian territory which it captured in 1967 and later annexed, in a move that is not internationally recognised.

Yet under President Bashar al-Assad, there has been a long-standing truce and for the past 40 years the border between the two countries has been relatively calm.

Now Israeli leaders are revising their strategic assessments. There are worries that fleeing Syrian refugees could try to enter the Golan Heights and that Mr Assad’s missiles and chemical weapons arsenal could fall into the wrong hands. [Continue reading…]

The Jerusalem Post reports that the IDF today shot an unarmed Syrian man who was attempting to cross the border into Israel.

As has been widely reported, a Reuters blog was hacked yesterday and bogus articles were posted claiming that rebel forces had withdrawn from Aleppo.

What observations can we make about the hacking?

Firstly, the hackers have no sympathies with the Free Syrian Army since the reporting clearly had the potential (even if not the actual effect) of sowing confusion among the scattered units of fighters operating inside Aleppo who might have heard rumors that a withdrawal was underway.

Secondly, even if an isolated report which conflicted with most of the other coverage would have been received with due skepticism by most observers, a few suckers would be quick to swallow the bait. Enter, Moon of Alabama.

After reading that rebel forces “have fallen” in key districts of Aleppo, Bernhard at MoA said with apparent satisfaction, “This is very much what I had expected.”

If the hacking incident is instructive in revealing security weaknesses in the Reuters site, it also says a lot about the media illiteracy of both the hackers and those who got duped.

Bernhard noted the name of the Reuters reporter — Jeffrey Goldfarb — and said that some of Goldfarb’s post “is really explosive.” What Bernhard appears to have failed to do was to glance to the right side of the page and read Goldfarb’s bio which begins: “Jeffrey Goldfarb writes about investment banking and the financial sector.”

So, the source of this explosive stuff is a financial reporter who covers revolutions in the Middle East during his lunch breaks? No, not surprisingly, Goldfarb’s real blog posts focus exclusively on business issue.

Bernhard’s explanation about how he got duped was that in being directed to the story he was relying on tweeters whose accounts he has been following for several weeks.

Sorry, but, I trusted those tweets, is a bit of a lame excuse.

That said, none of us is invulnerable to getting caught by false leads. Recently, I posted a report from the Times of Israel that falsely claimed that Iran’s president had made a speech in which he gloated over the recent coach bombing killing Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. However, the fact that I got duped had nothing to do with wishful thinking on my part. I was relieved that Nima Shirazi was quick to expose the lies in the original report.

To get a sense of how deep a hole Bernhard jumped into eagerly, here’s a snippet:

Reuters' Jeffrey Goldfarb has more and some of it is really explosive:

The chief leader of Syrian Free Army (FSA) has stated on Friday that the Syrian Free Army has tactically withdrawn from Aleppo province after severe clashes took place yesterday between the regular army and FSA.

[Riad] Al-Asaad confirmed on a phone call to Reuters that the regular army killed 1000 soldiers of Free Syrian Army and arrest around 1500.

That is quite a huge loss of the insurgencies personal.

He added that Syrian regular army carried out several airdrops on Friday early morning.

Those airdrops, probably parachuters by helicopter, will not have been in the city. I guess they have been between Aleppo and the Turkish border 30 miles north to cut of the supply and retreat route for the fighters in Aleppo.

Riad Al-Asaad said that the Syrian Free Army will withdraw from all Syrian cities due to the huge losses caused upon the soldiers, as well, the betrayals made by rebels, due to in-fighting amongst them, for money and positions. They are expected to re-coordinate in Turkish territory where they have set up secret bases under the close supervision with the Turkish government and the Israeli intelligence service.

One wonders how Turkey will now handle these insurgents. Will it try to build them up for another attack or will it finally stop supporting them? And to admit that Israeli(!) intelligence plays a key role here, some David Ignatius of the Washington Post had mentioned earlier, is quite a blow for the insurgents and their supporters moral.

To their credit, many of Moon of Alabama‘s commenters were quick to suspect that Reuters had been hacked, but even once this had been established, Bernhard seemed to think there might be some truth embedded in the hoax:

What did the hackers achieve?

The most interesting is the Scenario they put up. Not so much the insurgents loosing but the negotiations between Syrian, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. It smells like there is a whiff of truth in that.

And then one “Walter Wit Man” presents himself as either the most resolute conspiracy theorist or does a good job of posing as one:

It smells like a fake hack to me. b asked what it achieved.

Here’s what the fake hack achieved for the U.S./NATO/Israel:

1. Make the “regime” look bad for hacking the news. This adds to the other recent allegation of Syrian media fakery where the BBC and the Guardian had the story of the Syrian defector/former employee who is now a whistle blower. According to a RT story, the ‘whistle blower’ never actually worked there and only applied for a job 1 1/2 years ago and was turned down.

2. Mix up some true facts with the disinformation to confuse. Like the negotiations b hints at being true.

More than anything, what the Reuters hacking reveals is a ravenous appetite among those who reject the “mainstream media narrative” (neo-imperial, neo-liberal agenda, or whatever you want to call it) and will gobble up any piece of information, however far-fetched, if it appears to “expose” Western lies. It is a form of skepticism and gullibility whose two sides perfectly interlock.

C.J. Chivers reports: With diplomatic efforts dead and the future of Syria playing out on the battlefield, many of the Syrian government’s most powerful weapons, including helicopter gunships, fighter jets and tanks, are looking less potent and in some cases like a liability for the military of President Bashar al-Assad.

Rebels have turned part of Mr. Assad’s formidable arsenal on his own troops. Anti-Assad fighters on Wednesday shelled a military airport in the contested city of Aleppo with captured weapons. On Tuesday, rebels used commandeered Syrian Army tanks in a skirmish with Mr. Assad’s troops.

Perhaps even more worrying to Mr. Assad, his military has come to rely more heavily on equipment designed for a major battle with a foreign enemy, namely Israel, rather than a protracted civil conflict with his own people. Close observers of his military say Syria is having trouble keeping its sophisticated and maintenance-intensive weapons functioning.

The strain is likely to grow more acute as the government depends on helicopter gunships to extend its reach to parts of the country rendered impassable to logistics convoys and even armored vehicles by the rebels’ improvised bombs.

Analysts said Syria’s fleet of Mi-25 Hind-D attack helicopters, which numbered 36 at the start of the conflict, is insufficient to hold back rebels as the number of fronts, from Aleppo and Idlib in the north to the suburbs of Damascus in the south and Hama and Homs in the center of the country, continues to proliferate.

Maintenance technicians are struggling to keep the machines aloft in an intense campaign and in the searing heat and sand associated with summer desert war. Estimates are that only half his fleet can be used at a given time, with some helicopters cannibalized for spare parts and Mr. Assad dependent on supplies from Russia.

“This army is going to start breaking,” said Jeffrey White, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst now studying Syria for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Not the whole thing at once, but pieces of it will break.” [Continue reading…]

VOA reports: White House officials on Thursday dismissed reports that President Barack Obama signed an order to send U.S. aid to Syrian anti-government forces. The administration announced it is sending more humanitarian aid to Syria and neighboring countries.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney did not deny that the United States is helping the Syrian rebels. But he told reporters that the administration’s policy of providing non-lethal assistance to the opposition has not changed.

“We do not believe that adding to the number of weapons in Syria is what is needed to help bring about a peaceful transition,” Carney said.

The Reuters news agency reported on Wednesday that Obama signed a secret order earlier this year, authorizing U.S. support for the Syrian rebels. The story said the order allows the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the opposition depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Syrian human rights activist Ammar Abdulhamid, with the Washington-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, says his contacts in Syria tell him there is no evidence of a surge in aid to the rebels.

“I do not really see any intensification of these efforts. I see a lot of leaks, it seems to me, that were sort of primed to show that something is being done. But the reality is, so far on the ground, we have not detected any real involvement by the U.S. in the ongoing military operations in the country,” Abdulhamid said.

The State Department said Wednesday that the United States has allocated $25 million for non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition, much of it for communications equipment.

In an analysis for Reuters, Samia Nakhoul writes: Regional powers are pouring in money and guns, jihadists are joining rebels battling to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, while his own well-armed but hard-pressed forces are fighting back ruthlessly with combat aircraft and artillery.

Gruesome scenes of slaughtered civilians or executed rebel fighters provide daily snapshots of the worsening conflict in Syria. Video apparently showing rebels gunning down Assad militiamen in cold blood suggests the insurgents are capable of brutality to match their enemies.

After almost 17 months of revolt against the Assad dictatorship, Syria’s conflict is turning into a regional proxy war between Sunni and Shi’ite Islam that could splinter the country along sectarian lines unless a unified rebel leadership emerges as a credible opposition to the beleaguered government.

Few observers of Syria see any sign of an opposition ready to run the country if or when Assad and his clan, whose power base lies in the esoteric Shi’ite sect of Syria’s Alawite minority, lose overall control.

Some fear a Lebanon-style free-for-all, in which armed groups from different sectarian and ideological backgrounds fight for supremacy over territory, turning Syria into a patchwork that condemns its state to failure.

With the Shi’ite Islamic Republic of Iran behind Assad, and Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Muslim states backing the rebels, Syria could become the arena in which the regional Sunni-Shi’ite cold war becomes an open-ended civil war with the potential to destabilize its neighbors – Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan.

“We most definitely have a proxy war in Syria,” says Ayham Kamel of the Eurasia Group political risk consultancy. “At this point of the conflict it is difficult not to say that the international dimension of the Syrian conflict precedes the domestic one.”

“Syria is an open field now. The day after Assad falls you (will) have all of these different groups with different agendas, with different allegiances, with different states supporting them yet unable to form a coherent leadership.”

What started on March 15, 2011 as an internal uprising against the Assads’ repressive 40-year rule, emulating the revolts that toppled leaders in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, has now been transformed into an arena for foreign meddling.

Tony Karon writes: News reports typically characterize the Syrian rebellion as being 16 or 17 months old. It is one of those descriptions delivered en passant while relating the news of the day: the battle for Aleppo grinds on into its sixth day threatening a massive humanitarian crisis; new video shows rebels executing unarmed prisoners; President Bashar Assad urges his troops on through written messages but declines to make public appearances, and so on. But the International Crisis Group (ICG), a respected organization of analysts, mediators and former diplomats, on Wednesday issued a report urging opponents of the Assad regime, both Syrian and international, to pay closer attention to the implications of that 17-month time span.

Not only has the Assad regime survived an unprecedented assault, the ICG argues, but it also is no longer the Assad regime of February 2011 — and the rebellion challenging it also may have morphed into something quite different from the uprising that began last year. As a result, stakeholders looking to end the crisis are in urgent need of some thinking that goes beyond speculating whether Assad will go the way of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, or any other autocrat felled during the past year’s Arab rebellion. Syria’s trajectory will be very different. Says the ICG report:

Perhaps the most significant and least appreciated is what, over time, has become of the regime. The one that existed at the outset of the conflict almost certainly could not have survived the spectacular killing of top officials in the heart of its traditional stronghold; street combat in Damascus, Aleppo and a string of other towns; the loss of important border crossings with Turkey and Iraq; all amid near-total economic devastation and diplomatic opprobrium. That, a year and a half later, its new incarnation not only withstood those blows but vigorously counterpunched sends a message worthy of reflection.

Assad’s regime, it warns, is morphing into something less like a government and more akin to factional militia locked into an increasingly brutal fight for its collective survival, relying on an Alawite community that sees a rebel triumph as nothing less than a mortal threat. [Continue reading…]

With reports of jihadists crossing into Syria in increasing numbers, summary executions being carried out by units of the Free Syrian Army, and al Qaeda lending their bomb-making expertise in support of the revolution, some observers in the West — especially those who already see the Assad government as the target of an anti-Iranian campaign hell-bent on toppling Tehran’s closest ally — view the diverse range of elements lumped together under the label of “rebels” as an indication that the revolution in Syria lacks legitimacy. But here’s the thing to keep in mind:

The legitimacy of an insurgency is defined by the illegitimacy of its opponent.

In other words, the identities of the Assad regime’s opponents is utterly secondary to the nature of the regime. This is not like the Olympics where all contestants must comply with stringent regulations or risk getting barred from the competition. The revolution is the bitter fruit of five decades of autocratic rule.

What happens after the regime collapses will no doubt be complicated by the heterogeneous nature of the rebellion, but that’s no reason to suggest that no one has a right be fighting.

The intrepid Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports on al Qaeda’s evolving role in the conflict:

As they stood outside the commandeered government building in the town of Mohassen, it was hard to distinguish Abu Khuder’s men from any other brigade in the Syrian civil war, in their combat fatigues, T-shirts and beards.

But these were not average members of the Free Syrian Army. Abu Khuder and his men fight for al-Qaida. They call themselves the ghuraba’a, or “strangers”, after a famous jihadi poem celebrating Osama bin Laden’s time with his followers in the Afghan mountains, and they are one of a number of jihadi organisations establishing a foothold in the east of the country now that the conflict in Syria has stretched well into its second bloody year.

They try to hide their presence. “Some people are worried about carrying the [black] flags,” said Abu Khuder. “They fear America will come and fight us. So we fight in secret. Why give Bashar and the west a pretext?” But their existence is common knowledge in Mohassen. Even passers-by joke with the men about car bombs and IEDs.

According to Abu Khuder, his men are working closely with the military council that commands the Free Syrian Army brigades in the region. “We meet almost every day,” he said. “We have clear instructions from our [al-Qaida] leadership that if the FSA need our help we should give it. We help them with IEDs and car bombs. Our main talent is in the bombing operations.” Abu Khuder’s men had a lot of experience in bomb-making from Iraq and elsewhere, he added.

Abu Khuder spoke later at length. He reclined on a pile of cushions in a house in Mohassen, resting his left arm which had been hit by a sniper’s bullet and was wrapped in plaster and bandages. Four teenage boys kneeled in a tight crescent in front of him, craning their necks and listening with awe. Other villagers in the room looked uneasy.

Abu Khuder had been an officer in a mechanised Syrian border force called the Camel Corps when he took up arms against the regime. He fought the security forces with a pistol and a light hunting rifle, gaining a reputation as one of the bravest and most ruthless men in Deir el-Zour province and helped to form one of the first FSA battalions.

He soon became disillusioned with what he saw as the rebel army’s disorganisation and inability to strike at the regime, however. He illustrated this by describing an attempt to attack the government garrison in Mohassen. Fortified in a former textile factory behind concrete walls, sand bags, machine-gun turrets and armoured vehicles, the garrison was immune to the rebels’ puny attempt at assault.

“When we attacked the base with the FSA we tried everything and failed,” said Abu Khuder. “Even with around 200 men attacking from multiple fronts they couldn’t injure a single government soldier and instead wasted 1.5m Syrian pounds [£14,500] on firing ammunition at the walls.”

Then a group of devout and disciplined Islamist fighters in the nearby village offered to help. They summoned an expert from Damascus and after two days of work handed Abu Khuder their token of friendship: a truck rigged with two tonnes of explosives.

Two men drove the truck close to the gate of the base and detonated it remotely. The explosion was so large, Abu Khuder said, that windows and metal shutters were blown hundreds of metres, trees were ripped up by their roots and a huge crater was left in the middle of the road.

The next day the army left and the town of Mohassen was free.

“The car bomb cost us 100,000 Syrian pounds and fewer than 10 people were involved [in the operation],” he said. “Within two days of the bomb expert arriving we had it ready. We didn’t waste a single bullet.

“Al-Qaida has experience in these military activities and it knows how to deal with it.”

After the bombing, Abu Khuder split with the FSA and pledged allegiance to al-Qaida’s organisation in Syria, the Jabhat al Nusra or Solidarity Front. He let his beard grow and adopted the religious rhetoric of a jihadi, becoming a commander of one their battalions.

“The Free Syrian Army has no rules and no military or religious order. Everything happens chaotically,” he said. “Al-Qaida has a law that no one, not even the emir, can break.

“The FSA lacks the ability to plan and lacks military experience. That is what [al-Qaida] can bring. They have an organisation that all countries have acknowledged.

“In the beginning there were very few. Now, mashallah, there are immigrants joining us and bringing their experience,” he told the gathered people. “Men from Yemen, Saudi, Iraq and Jordan. Yemenis are the best in their religion and discipline and the Iraqis are the worst in everything – even in religion.”

At this, one man in the room – an activist in his mid-30s who did not want to be named – said: “So what are you trying to do, Abu Khuder? Are you going to start cutting off hands and make us like Saudi? Is this why we are fighting a revolution?”

The report describes an al Qaeda leader who preaches jihad and says that the Syrians “were not only victims of the regime but also of the hypocrisy of the west, which refused to help them.”

An FSA brigade commander acknowledges that al Qaeda has good fighters, but he warns: “They are stealing the revolution from us and they are working for the day that comes after.”

Christian Science Monitor reports: For those challenging the rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the list of villains has always included the regime’s closest allies: Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.

But as the death toll rises and Syria marks 17 months and counting of revolt, many in the embattled city of Aleppo say they have added another, perhaps surprising, villain: the United States.

The US is an arch-foe of the Syrian regime. US officials have stated plainly and repeatedly that Assad “must” go. And President Barack Obama earlier this year signed a secret order authorizing clandestine aid to rebel forces, it was reported today.

IN PICTURES – Inside Aleppo

But in the rebel-held enclave of Salaheddin, guerrilla gunmen and ordinary Syrians alike wonder why the US has not acted to stop the killing by at least ending the Syrian Army’s artillery bombardment and imposing a no-fly zone on the helicopters and planes that menace them from the skies.

“We all believe the US and all Western countries want Assad to stay in power,” says the coordinator for the Revolutionary Council in Aleppo, who gave his name as Abu Thaier.

“I believe that Syrian intelligence up to this moment is cooperating with the CIA,” the wizened revolutionary told the Monitor. “The Westerners are afraid of the destiny of Israel; this is what stops them. Assad takes advantage of that, and says, ‘These terrorists [rebels] will go to Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan and we must crush them.’… Western countries gave up on the Syrian people because they believe most demonstrators are Islamists,” he says.
‘Petroleum is worth more than Syrian blood’

Syrians under fire from government troops often bring up Washington’s perceived neglect when they see an American journalist.

“We look on Americans as the most important people to look after democracy,” says Abu Thaier. “We consider the torch of freedom in New York a torch for all humanity, not just America. We hope that the Statue of Liberty did not yet lose its real meaning.”

He brings up Libya and the US-orchestrated NATO intervention last year that was instrumental in ensuring that rag-tag rebels were able to bring down Muammar Qaddafi. The only difference, he asserts, is that Libya has oil, and Syria does not.

“They think petroleum is worth more than Syrian blood,” asserts Abu Thaier. “Now if you are living in Western countries, if someone kills 50 or 100 [pet] animals, the response would be more than for Syrians.” [Continue reading…]

Rania Abouzeid writes: The three little girls crouched in their starting positions, each placing one leg in front of the other, ready to pounce on the count of three: “One, two, three!” their aunt said as the sisters, all under 10, raced some 20 meters to the top of their narrow lane, giggling, before turning around and sprinting back toward their aunt, seated outside their front door. It was a stiflingly warm night, near pitch black. The electricity was out and the family had moved outside, the pleasant breeze providing a little respite from the heat.

Two nights earlier, another family — the Breks — had done the same thing. They lived in another neighborhood in this town of some 40,000 in central Idlib province. The young children were playing outside. Their mother Sakina had just finished boiling tea and was bringing it outside when the rocket landed in their street. She was killed along with three other women from their family. Her young son, no more than eight or nine, was already dead when he reached the Hassan Hospital. His bright red t-shirt was stained a deeper shade by his blood. His baby sister Suheila, dressed in a blue t-shirt and white shorts, her pudgy toddler legs covered in patches of blood, no longer had a face. Her head was an indiscernible mashed up pink blob of flesh and blood.

The Brek family tragedy wasn’t lost on the aunt as she watched her young nieces playing, but faith and fatalism were like soothing balms. “They were sitting here just like us,” she said. “It’s frightening what we have gotten used to. Death will find us if it wants to, if God wills it, but we are changing, becoming harder as human beings.”

The once-peaceful 17-month Syrian conflict quickly morphed into a vastly asymmetrical war, fueled by the iron-fisted response of a regime that tolerates no dissent. War has its own cadence, its own logic. It’s a mix of the mundane, the everyday, experienced through heightened, sometimes supercharged emotions. It’s the thrill and fear of a fighter approaching the frontline, or a person heading out to demonstrate, the prayers of their family, the concerns of a mother, the tears of a child. “Normal” becomes relative. The daily rhythm of life goes on seemingly unaffected, but there is always an undercurrent of tension, the knowledge that a single, sudden event can upend everything. Even death and its rituals have changed. Mourning periods, usually weeks and even months long, are abbreviated — otherwise, as one woman said, the town and others like it would perpetually be in mourning.

Families have been physically divided. Some men have ferried their wives and children to Turkey and returned to fight or protect their homes from looting. In other cases, it’s the rebel fighters who have traversed the border, to organize supplies and support for their men.

“Why have you come back?” a fighter’s mother, a heavyset woman in a beige scarf asked her 40-year-old son as he knelt before her and kissed her cheeks. An FSA commander, the man had fled to Turkey two months ago after an assassination attempt, a hail of bullets that targeted his vehicle, wounding him and killing one of his best friends.

“Is that any way to greet your son?” he asked.

“I”m happy to see you, but I’m afraid for you,” his mother said. “You should leave.”

The commander, like so many other rebels, keeps a grenade with him at all times — even during dinner or when he’s playing with his children. It’s a last resort to avoid capture. “I’d rather die a thousand deaths,” he said, “than be captured by them.” It’s a phrase often repeated by other rebels, here and elsewhere. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Syrians hoping for a swift rebel victory in their homeland are growing impatient with top army defectors who are staying in Turkey even after fighters on the ground have gained territory across the border in northern Syria.

Turkey has emerged as a haven not only for tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, but for some of the most high-level defectors from President Bashar Assad’s regime. The Free Syrian Army, the loose umbrella group of rebel fighters, uses Turkey as a headquarters and staging ground, in part because the rebels have not been able to secure a safe haven inside the country.

But now rebel fighters have carved out some ground for themselves along the border inside Syria, and some rebels and refugees say it’s time for the most elite defectors – including dozens of officers and more than 25 generals – to go home and fight.

“Why does an officer defect? He defects in order to protect the nation,” Baraa, a Syrian refugee in Turkey, told The Associated Press. He asked that only his first name be published, fearing for the safety of his family in Syria. “They should go into Syria and let the revolution benefit from their long years of experience.”

Commanders of the FSA in Turkey say they are hardly sitting idle and have been directing the fight inside Syria – and that Turkey is a secure place to do it from. Unfair or not, the criticism reflects a tension over who has real credibility to claim the revolt’s leadership among the Syrian opposition, which includes multiple militias on the ground, politicians who live in exile and now defectors from some of the upper levels of Assad’s military. If the revolt ever succeeds in ousting Assad, those tensions could fuel a divisive power struggle among the winners.

Thousands of Syrian soldiers, most of them low-level conscripts, have deserted and joined the rebels since the uprising against Assad began in March 2011. The higher echelons of Assad’s military have stayed largely intact, which makes those generals and senior officers who did break away and are now in Turkey important sources of information and expertise for the rebellion.

Even if they are active in planning and direction, there is a perception among refugees and even some in the FSA that those who were in the military’s officer corps – and used to its perks – are happy to stay in Turkey, while the former conscripts and Syrian civilians who took up weapons and joined FSA-linked militias do the fighting. Most of those based in Turkey are mid-level officers ranging from lieutenants to colonels, staying in a camp separate from those housing the refugees.

Al Jazeera has an interactive chart tracking Syrian defections of senior military officials, members of parliament and diplomats who quit Assad’s regime

The Associated Press reports: Syrian President Bashar Assad urged his military Wednesday to boost its fight against rebels, but his written call to arms only deepened a mystery over his whereabouts two weeks after a bomb penetrated his inner circle.

Assad has not spoken publicly since the July 18 bombing killed four of his top security officials — including his brother-in-law — during a rebel assault on the capital, Damascus. The president’s low profile has raised questions about whether he fears for his personal safety as the civil war escalates dramatically.

The United States called the Syrian president a coward for marshaling his forces from the pages of the army’s official magazine.

“We think it’s cowardly, quite frankly, to have a man hiding out of sight, exhorting his armed forces to continue to slaughter the civilians of his own country,” said U.S. State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell.

Sausan Ghosheh, the spokeswoman for the U.N. mission in Syria, said Wednesday that international observers witnessed warplanes firing in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, where intense fighting has been raging for 12 days.

Speaking to reporters in Damascus, Ghosheh said the situation in Aleppo was dire.

“Yesterday, for the first time, our observers saw firing from a fighter aircraft. We also now have confirmation that the opposition is in a position of having heavy weapons, including tanks,” she said, adding that for civilians, there “is a shortage of food, fuel, water and gas.”

The U.N.’s World Food Program said it was sending enough emergency food aid for 28,000 people in the city of 3 million. The U.N. has estimated that some 200,000 residents have fled Aleppo.

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Reuters reports: Rebels fighting to depose Syrian president Bashar al Assad have for the first time acquired a small supply of surface-to-air missiles, according to a news report that a Western official did not dispute.

NBC News reported Tuesday night that the rebel Free Syrian Army had obtained nearly two dozen of the weapons, which were delivered to them via neighboring Turkey, whose moderate Islamist government has been demanding Assad’s departure with increasing vehemence.

Indications are that the U.S. government, which has said it opposes arming the rebels, is not responsible for the delivery of the missiles.

But some U.S. government sources have been saying for weeks that Arab governments seeking to oust Assad, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have been pressing for such missiles, also known as MANPADs, for man-portable air-defense systems, to be supplied to the rebels.

In recent days, air operations against the rebels by Syrian government forces appear to have been stepped up, particularly around the contested city of Aleppo, making the rebels’ need for MANPADs more urgent.

Precisely what kind of MANPADs have been delivered to Syrian rebels is unclear and NBC News did not provide details. Such weapons range from the primitive to highly sophisticated.

And even if the rebels do have the weapons, it is unclear whether they have the training to operate them effectively against Assad’s air forces in the immediate future.

Some conservative U.S. lawmakers, such as Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, have criticized the administration of President Barack Obama for moving too slowly to assist the rebels and have suggested the U.S. government become directly involved in arming Assad’s opponents.

The White House, at least until now, has taken a considerably more cautious approach.

As of last month, U.S. officials warned that if any Middle Eastern nation was “even considering giving arms to the Syrian opposition,” it ought to “take a measured approach and think twice about providing arms that could have unintended consequences.”

Nonetheless, even at that time, U.S. and allied officials acknowledged that officials of Saudi Arabia and Qatar were discussing whether surface-to-air missiles might help Syrian rebels bring down Russian-made helicopters and other aircraft the Syrian army was using to move troops between trouble spots.

Following the fall of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, some intelligence experts estimated that as many as 10,000-15,000 MANPADs sets were looted from Libyan government stockpiles. The whereabouts of most of these are unknown.

Many U.S. officials have been wary of the notion of arming Syrian rebels with MANPADs, noting that they could be easily turned on targets other than the Syrian government, including civilian airliners.

After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the CIA, with Saudi backing, provided sophisticated shoulder-fired Stinger missiles to Islamic militants seeking to oust Soviet troops.

The missiles proved deadly against Soviet helicopter gunships, but subsequently became a major headache for U.S. and western counter-terrorism agencies when anti-Soviet militants morphed into anti-Western militants.

Recent intelligence and news reporting has suggested a growing number of militants, including some affiliated with al Qaeda, have traveled to Syria to try to join anti-Assad forces. U.S. officials have said, however, that they do not believe the militants yet play a dominant role in the Syrian opposition.

While the Syrian army is not technically an army of occupation, it faces some of the same disadvantages that every occupation force faces:

• while its own soldiers are obedient to a government, its opponent’s are obedient to a cause — their drive comes from within rather than above;
• while it possesses a disproportionate amount of military strength, it lacks the flexibility of its opponent;
• most importantly, it can never thwart the ‘home team’ advantage — local civilian support and an intimate knowledge of the terrain.

An example of the kind of local knowledge being successfully employed by rebels in Idlib is their use of an ancient network of tunnels, reminiscent of the tunnels that helped the Viet Cong win the war against the United States.

Yaara Bou Melhem, reporting for Australia’s SBS Dateline, was given a tour of the tunnels and she also interviewed Free Syrian Army leader, Colonel Riad al-Asaad.

Ian Black reports: Syria’s opposition fighters are increasingly using Iraqi-style roadside bombs in their war against Bashar al-Assad, most recently blowing up tanks in a large convoy travelling to attack rebels inside Aleppo.

Free Syrian Army (FSA) commanders told the Guardian the use of improvised explosive devices has gone up in recent months, with fighters growing increasingly adept at bomb-making. Iraqi insurgents used roadside bombs extensively in their campaign against the US military.

FSA commanders said a secret network of informers inside the Syrian army and other parts of the regime passed on regular information on troop movements, allowing the rebels to strike at the army.

Syrian state TV said on Tuesday that government forces were inflicting heavy losses on “terrorist groups” in and around Aleppo.

FSA sources said they had captured several police stations in the city. The Local Co-ordination Committees, an activist network, reported shelling in several areas. The UN said thousands of people were trapped.

Government forces were also reported to have shelled targets in Damascus and the surrounding region as well as Deir el-Zour, Deraa, Homs, Idlib and Latakia.

Opposition leaders, meanwhile, have asked Haitham al-Maleh, a veteran dissident, to lead a government-in-exile that will replace Assad when he falls. The decision to set up a rebel-led administration reflects the end of hopes for a negotiated transition, part of Kofi Annan’s now moribund UN-backed peace plan.

The mood on the ground is increasingly that Syria’s future will be settled by war. Mohamad Baree, a commander in the northern town of Korkanaya, said his fighters ambushed a tank column at 5am on 29 July as it left Idlib. The 20 tanks and armoured vehicles had been sent to reinforce government positions in Aleppo, part-seized by the rebels nine days earlier.

“We used five or six self-made bombs and destroyed two of the tanks. The other 18 returned to Idlib,” he said. The bombs were set off remotely by rebels hidden behind rocks.

The operation, though a success, had tragic consequences: a retreating tank fired a shell into a fifth-storey flat in Idlib, killing five members of a family. “They [the regime soldiers] were afraid. They didn’t know what was happening. They wanted revenge,” Baree said.

The commander, a pharmacist who spent seven years living in Ukraine, said he personally lacked the skills to make bombs. But he said that a “professor of chemistry” was aiding the rebels, and that other members of his unit who had served in the Syrian military possessed bomb-making skills. “We also take bombs from army bases. They are better than ours,” he admitted.

His remarks are evidence that the FSA is becoming more professional. It began as a disparate group of volunteers, many of them with no military experience. But after 16 months of operations against the Damascus government it now resembles a formidable military force.

Reuters reports: Syrian rebels aim to push towards central Aleppo, capturing the country’s biggest city within days despite being outgunned by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, a local rebel commander said.

Colonel Abdel-Jabbar al-Oqaidi, who defected from the Syrian army six months ago, told Reuters government troops had tried for three days to capture the south-western Aleppo neighbourhood of Salaheddine, and Assad’s soldiers were increasingly demoralised.

The fight for Syria’s second city has become the focus of the 16-month-old rebellion against Assad, with rebel fighters confronting government forces backed by artillery and helicopter gunships.

“We don’t have goals for the coming months. We have goals for the coming days. Within days, God willing, Aleppo will be liberated,” said Oqaidi, dressed in green camouflage uniform at an Aleppo school which has been turned into a rebel base.

Describing the growing conflict which has engulfed Aleppo in the last few days as “street war”, he said the rebel aim was to capture districts one by one and establish control over them, before taking more territory from the army.

“We secure our areas and then move to other neighbourhoods, pushing towards the city centre,” he said, speaking in an interview late on Monday. “God willing, we will liberate Aleppo and its military and security sites.”

“The regime’s capabilities are also being weakened. They can shell us from afar with tanks and helicopters. But inside their morale is zero,” said Oqaidi, head of the Joint Military Council, one of several rebel groups in Aleppo.

An unidentified Syrian army officer told state television on Sunday that his forces had recaptured Salaheddine, which lies on the south-western entrance to Aleppo, and the rest of the city would be under government control within days.

But on Tuesday Syrian television said the army was still chasing what it called “armed terrorists” in Salaheddine.

“The regime has tried for three days to recapture Salaheddine but its attempts have failed and it has suffered heavy losses in human life, weapons and tanks. It has been forced to withdraw,” Oqaidi said.

AFP reports: Syrian rebels attacked key military targets and overran two police stations in Aleppo, killing 40 officers, a watchdog said, as the pivotal battle for the commercial capital raged on Tuesday.

Clashes between the rebels and loyalists of President Bashar al-Assad were also reported in the capital Damascus, the eastern city of Deir Ezzor and Daraa in the south, cradle of the more than 16-month uprising.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Aleppo was on Tuesday rocked by the fiercest fighting of a military offensive on rebels in the city, which came after the government had warned of a looming “mother of all battles.”

Rebels used rocket-propelled grenades in pre-dawn attacks on a military court, an air force intelligence headquarters and a branch of the ruling Baath Party in Aleppo, said the Observatory’s Rami Abdel Rahman.

Later, “hundreds of rebels attacked the police stations in Salhin and Bab al-Nayrab (neighbourhoods) and at least 40 policemen were killed during the fighting, which lasted for hours,” Abdel Rahman told AFP.

The police chief was among those killed at the Salhin station in the south of the city, while three vehicles were destroyed, he added.

The attacks came as the UN observer mission said government forces were using helicopters, tanks and artillery to fight the rebels, while appealing for both sides to protect civilians in the city of 2.7 million people.

Through the night, government troops had shelled the neighbourhoods of Salaheddin, Marjeh, Firdoss, Al-Mashhad, Sakhur, Al-Shaar and Ansari, before the army and rebels clashed at dawn in Al-Meesr and Al-Adaa.

A security official in Damascus told AFP on Monday that the army had regained some of Salaheddin but it was facing “a very strong resistance.” The rebels, however, denied that the army had advanced even “one metre” (yard).

“The fierce fighting in Aleppo shows how crucial this city is for a regime that does not want a Benghazi in Syria,” said Abdel Rahman, referring to the coastal city secured by Libyan rebels as a base in their fight to bring down strongman Moamer Kadhafi.