Saudi Arabia, Qatar arming terrorists in Syria

Saudi Arabia and Qatar are among the countries providing terrorists with weapons to fight Syrian government forces, a spokeswoman for the so-called Syrian National Council (SNC) says.

SNC spokeswoman Bassma Kodmani told France’s Europe 1 radio on Monday that there are certain countries that are providing “light and conventional weapons.”

“It is Qatar, Saudi Arabia, it is maybe a little bit Libya with what it has left over from its own battle,” she said.

The spokeswoman said the insurgents are desperately looking for arms, adding that some states were also providing them with money to buy weapons on the black market.

Kodmani said that insurgents are looking for more advanced weapons to confront the Syrian Air Force.

Since March last year, Syria has seized huge caches of weaponry, including rockets and anti-tank missiles, smuggled into the country from Lebanon and Turkey.

Meanwhile, the UN has pulled out its observers from the largest Syrian city of Aleppo due to the worsening situation in the city.

Josephine Guerrero, a UN peacekeeping spokeswoman, said some twenty unarmed monitors were returned to the mission’s headquarters in the capital Damascus at the weekend.

The Syrian government forces have pounded the insurgents’ major positions in several districts of Aleppo, including the Salahuddin neighborhood.

Syria has been the scene of unrest since March 2011. Because the presence of armed groups who are supported, financed and armed by Washington, Tel Aviv, Ankara, London, Paris, Berlin and certain Arab regimes.
The US has not objected to its allies aiding rebel groups, and is rather facilitating the arms flow on the Turkey-Syria border, according to a Washington Post report in May.
The CIA’s ability to operate inside Syria was hampered severely by the decision to close the US embassy in Damascus earlier this year, officials said.
The US administration is exploring ways to expand non-lethal support to Syrian opposition groups, officials told the Washington Post.