Rebels pressure U.S. for weapons to fight Assad
Syrian rebels have held meetings with senior U.S. government officials in Washington as pressure mounts on the United States to authorize a shipment of heavy weapons, including surfaceto-air missiles to combat the Assad regime, The Telegraph newspaper in London has learned.
A senior representative of the Free Syrian Army met Robert Ford, the U.S. ambassador to Syria, and Frederick Hoff, special co-ordinator for the Middle East, in the past week at the U.S. State Department, sources have confirmed.
The rebel emissaries, armed with an iPad showing detailed plans on Google Earth identifying rebel positions and regime targets, have also met senior members of the National Security Council, which advises President Barack Obama on national security policy.
The rebels have compiled a “targeted list” of heavy weaponry, including anti-tank missiles and heavy machine guns that they plan to present to U.S. government officials in the coming weeks.
The consultations come before next week’s G20 meeting in Los Cabos, Mexico, where British and U.S. officials are expected to make a lastditch attempt to get Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, to intervene in the Syria crisis. Privately, western diplomats admit they now harbour scant hopes of forcing a change of heart on Russia, which has steadfastly refused to bow to U.S. and British pressure to do more to arrest Syria’s slide into sectarian civil war.
While there remains little appetite for direct western military intervention, advanced contingency plans are already in place to supply arms to the rebels, including sophisticated anti-tank weapons and surface toair-missiles.
The move toward what was described as a “Libya lite” intervention in Syria is expected to gather force following the expected failure of the Annan peace plan and the meeting of the Syria Contact Group scheduled for June 30 in Geneva.
Senior Middle Eastern diplomatic sources said that Libyan-supplied weapons, paid for by Saudi Arabia and Qatari government funds and private donations, had already been stockpiled in expected of the “inevitable” intervention needed to end the Assad regime.