Via Lebanese website Naharnet:
Syrian rebels have recently received new weapons that could “change the course of the battle” against the Syrian regime, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army told Agence France Presse on Friday.”We’ve received quantities of new types of weapons, including some that we asked for and that we believe will change the course of the battle on the ground,” FSA political and media coordinator Louay Muqdad said.”We have begun distributing them on the front lines, they will be in the hands of professional officers and FSA fighters,” he said.He did not specify what weapons had been received or when they had arrived, but added that a new shipment was expecting in coming days and recalled that the rebels had asked for “deterrent weapons.”
This video uploaded today purports to show some of the new weapons (authenticity not verified, of course):
As does this one:
It’s not clear if this has anything to do with the very limited and tentative lifting of an arms embargo and Obama’s pronouncement that Syria had crossed the chemical weapons red line.
Via Michael Weiss at NOW Lebanon, The Awakening Sunni Giant:
Last Friday, King Abdullah cut short his summer vacation in Morocco and flew back to Riyadh not only to meet with his national security advisors but to coordinate a new strategy for winning the war in Syria, one that encompasses a unified regional bloc of Sunni-majority powers now ranged against Iran, Hezbollah, and the Assad regime. The Wahhabi kingdom has exhausted its patience with miscarried attempts to resolve the Syria crisis through diplomacy and it will not wait to see the coming battle in Aleppo play out before assuming control of the Syrian rebellion. State-backed regional efforts to bolster moderate Free Syrian Army elements will thus be joined with the fetid call to jihad emanating from clerical quarters in Cairo, Doha, Mecca, and beyond. The mullahs have only themselves to blame. “Nasrallah fucked up,” one well-connected Syrian source told me recently. “He awakened the Sunni giant. The Saudis took Hezbollah’s invasion of Qusayr personally.”
For those of you inclined to send me the Glenn Beck video, there are plenty of videos showing brutality by the pro-Syrian forces. As I said before, Bad or worse in Syria.
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