Three weeks after the US and other powers promised "urgent, practical steps" to help Syrian rebel forces tilt the balance on the ground against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, the top rebel commander says there hasn't been any progress and his fighters are in "a critical and dangerous" situation.
"We are really in a very critical situation, and we don't understand why our friends delay and delay and delay and hesitate to support us," General Salim Idriss, the commander of the Western-backed Supreme Military Council, told MCT.
He said rebel forces were receiving between a tenth and a twentieth of the arms and ammunition they needed to take on forces loyal to Assad. "Our friends are not acting, just thinking," he said. "At the end of the day we are not getting any kind of military support. We told them repeatedly what we need. But it is just hopeless."
The latest blow to the rebels was the decision on Monday by British Prime Minister David Cameron to abandon his plan to send arms after members of his Conservative Party in parliament expressed deep doubts about the wisdom of that course.
The Obama administration, after determining that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons against rebel forces, announced on June 13 that it would send small arms, ammunition and other military equipment to rebel forces. But the initiative, which is to utilise the CIA to deliver the weapons, is stalled in congress, where some leading lawmakers say the administration has no clear strategy for Syria.
Idriss said the rebels were more than holding their own in eastern Syria and recently had made progress in taking control of Aleppo, the country's biggest city. But the situation around the capital of Damascus was "very critical".
The most serious crisis was in Homs, Syria's third largest city, where government forces are pressing to dislodge rebels that have occupied the historic centre. Idriss said rebels there and an unknown number of civilians who remain in the area were facing daily bombardment with artillery and surface-to-surface midrange missiles, as well as attacks by government troops and fighters from the Lebanese Hezbollah movement.
"The fighters there are trying to defend the town with traditional Kalashnikovs and machine guns," he said, referring to AK-47 assault rifles. "Even a regular army could not face this kind of power."
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