(This story was reported by a visiting journalist whose name has been withheld for security reasons)

DAMASCUS (Reuters) - One Syrian security official called it the "Starvation Until Submission Campaign", blocking food and medicine from entering and people from leaving besieged areas of Syria.

Forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have used partial sieges to root out rebel forces from residential areas during the civil war. But a recent tightening of blockades around areas near the capital is causing starvation and death, residents and medical staff say.

At an army checkpoint that separates government-held central Damascus from eastern suburban towns earlier this month, a thin, teenage boy on a bicycle circled a soldier and begged to be allowed to take a bag of pita bread, a staple food, into the eastern suburbs. The soldier refused but the boy kept begging for "just one loaf".

The soldier finally shouted: "I'm telling you, not a single morsel is allowed in there. I don't make the rules. There are those bigger than me and you who make the rules and they're watching us right now. So go back home." The soldier, visibly upset, exhaled quietly and deeply when the boy slipped out of sight.

The incident illustrates how blockades are being used as a weapon in a war that grew out of pro-democracy protests in the summer of 2011, increasing an already grave humanitarian crisis. Blockades are employed mostly by the government but also on a smaller scale by the armed opposition.

Food and medicine, which could be used by the warring parties, are rarely allowed to enter besieged areas and the movement of civilians in and out is restricted.

Over one million Syrians are trapped in areas where aid deliveries have stalled, the United Nations says.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a report last month that half of those people are in rural Damascus and around 310,000 people more trapped in Homs province in central Syria.

EID BLOCKADE

At a checkpoint in central Damascus, a state security official, known as Abu Haidar, was heard to say "we like to call it our Starvation Until Submission Campaign". It's a phrase used increasingly by Assad's supporters in the capital.

The Syrian government has not commented on accusations it is using hunger as a weapon of war. It says that residents have been taken "hostage by terrorists". Aid workers say they are denied access. Both sides use checkpoints to mark territory and prevent the movement of enemy fighters and supporters.

Rebel-held towns to the east, south and west of Damascus are under partial or total siege and Abu Haidar said that the army had begun to block off the towns of Qudsayya and Hameh, a 15 minute drive north from central Damascus onto the Qasioun mountain range.

Residents of these two towns said that earlier this month, on the first day of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, many were forbidden from leaving to visit family elsewhere.

Chances of success in getting past the checkpoints depend on your identity card - public sector workers and school children are sometimes allowed through. Parents are told to stay behind.

Some people were allowed to leave on foot and residents reported a small exodus of civilians who feared that artillery bombardment would follow the siege, as it has in other areas where rebels have positioned themselves.

The main checkpoint forbids most cars from entering or leaving the two towns, forcing people to get out of their vehicles, walk down the highway for 20 minutes and use public transport on the other side.

Soldiers conduct vehicle and body searches to prevent "smuggling" of bread, baby milk and medicine into the besieged area - jailing offences. The checks create long queues of residents trying to return home, sometimes forcing them to wait for hours.

All traffic is prevented from entering Hameh, a mostly Sunni Muslim town where many residents support the rebellion. There is some movement into Qudsayya, a more religiously mixed area that is home to tens of thousands of displaced Syrians from other parts of the country.

NO BREAD

During a two-day visit by this journalist last month to the eastern towns, resourceful locals made do with what they had.

They gathered fruit and vegetables from the few orchards they could still access without risking government sniper fire and shelling. Those with cash paid smugglers to bring in bags of flour and other foodstuffs or medicine.

But nowhere in town was pita bread available. Local doctors said they regularly treat patients for water-borne diseases and that aerial bombardment has damaged the infrastructure, contaminating the water with sewage.

Doctors said that they were observing symptoms of malnutrition such as dehydration, severe weight loss, diarrhea and bloated stomachs.

International have little access to areas hit by violence. Groups like Save the Children are warning of a potential crisis. The agency released a report last month saying that parts of Homs, Aleppo, Idlib and Damascus have been encircled by violence or deliberately besieged.

In a separate development, the World Health Organisation confirmed an outbreak of polio among young children in northeast Syria on Tuesday - a consequence of falling vaccination rates in wartime.

The situation is acute for people living in Mouadamiya, on the southwestern outskirts of the capital Damascus, which has been under siege for a year and suffered from chemical weapons strikes and continuous bombardment.

Unlike East Ghouta, which also endured chemical attacks but is sometimes accessible, Mouadamiya is completely surrounded by the military.

The opposition says 12,000 people face starvation and death in Mouadamiya. About 90 percent of Mouadamiya has been destroyed and few doctors remain, it says.

This month, according to residents who live there reached by Skype, government aerial bombardment hit one of two remaining mains pipelines that deliver drinking water throughout Mouadamiya, further contaminating the local water supply.

Residents say that smugglers used to be able to throw bags packed with baby milk and medicine from moving cars into the town while driving along a nearby highway. But in July, the road became an active frontline between the army and rebels.

"No one can smuggle anything to us anymore," said resident and activist Qusai Zakarya. He said that many smugglers along the highway have been killed by government snipers. "Now, only shelling and bullets enter Mouadamiya, and only the souls of the departed can leave."

DYING OF HUNGER

For months, international pressure has been mounting on Syrian authorities to open humanitarian corridors to deliver aid to the besieged civilians.

Under international law, siege is not specifically prohibited. However deliberate starvationin a conflict is widely held to be a war crime and the law of armed conflict requires all sides to allow free access of humanitarian relief for civilians in need.

Although Syria is not party to the International Criminal Court - which can prosecute war crimes - the United Nations Security Council has the power to refer cases.

Three Security Council resolutions condemning Assad have been vetoed by permanent member Russia, one of his strongest allies, and China, making a referral unlikely.

Earlier this month, 3,000 women and children were evacuated from Mouadamiya, the United Nations said. But their suffering and starvation may continue as many have sought shelter in an abandoned school on the outskirts of Qudsayya, where the siege is starting.

On Tuesday, 1,800 residents were evacuated from the town, a source from the Ministry for Social Affairs said. State media said they were fired on by "terrorists."

Hunger has become so endemic that locals say they eat leaves and grass.

Fatima, who fled Mouadamiya just before the siege last year along with her husband and their five children to central Damascus, said one of her relatives died in Mouadamiya in August from starvation. He was three years old.

Local doctors sent Reuters videos showing six cases of death from malnutrition. Most of the victims were children.

Activist Zakarya said that this month alone, he knows of 11 women and children who died of starvation, including 7-year-old Dua al Sheikh, who was her parents' only daughter.

He said that after months of eating the rice, barley and bulgur wheat in stock, families are now down to little more than olives and olive oil for three meals a day.

"We sometimes roll a bunch of grape leaves together and sprinkle it with salt and pepper and eat it pretending it's yabraa," said Zakarya, referring to a popular Syrian dish of grape leaves stuffed with rice and ground lamb or beef.

Civilians in besieged areas say farmers are targeted as they try to harvest their crop in an open field. They tell also of government shelling that purposely sets entire crop fields ablaze, around Damascus and in Homs province.

In Mouadamiya, people have been planting rocket plants in small patches of earth between buildings so as to avoid any open fields.

And Zakarya says "we use grass sometimes as a salad, with olives and olive oil."

(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes; editing by Janet McBride)

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This video from LiveLeak is reportedly from Jobar, Syria, one of the most fiercely embattled suburban districts right outside of Damascus.

There were even reports of chemical weapons use in Jobar, preceding the attack that killed an estimated 1,400 people.

Fighting around that area, as evidenced by use of chemical weapons, is nothing short of the most intense in the war. The district that holds Jobar — Ghoutta — has seen starvation, shelling, and now polio outbreaks.

The rebels may have been filming a propaganda video, but seem to have ditched the camera. As you can see, the tank, presumably Syrian army, obviously knew there were rebels there.

Were:

Now in slow motion:

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U.S. officials have confirmed that Israel struck Syrian coastal missile site late Wednesday, reports CNN.

The site allegedly contained Russian-made surface-to-air missile systems said to be slated for delivery to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The strikes took out SA-8 anti-aircraft missiles, The Times of Israel reports. The SA-8 system is a truck-mounted, and highly mobile, but with low-altitude and short range capabilities.

The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post, citing satellite images obtained by Channel 2, reports that Russian-made Neva S-125 surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles and SA-3 missile battery — which also includes a command center with radar and antennas to track the missiles and their targets — were seen in the Latakia area.

S-125 missiles have an operational range of up to 9 miles and are equipped to take out small aircraft at a low to medium altitude. They were a favorite of Egyptians in the Yom Kipper War, and of Iraqis during the first Gulf War, The Times notes.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported a loud explosion in a Syrian army base and a Syrian security official confirmed there was a strike.

The Times of Israel cited Twitter users who said the blast occurred near Snobar Jableh, just south of Latakia.

The pro-regime Syrian news outlet Dam Press reported that the site was heavily damaged but there were no injuries.

Syrian, Lebanese, and Israeli news sources speculated that Israel carried out the strike from the Mediterranean. The subreddit r/syriancivilwar has a rundown of all of the reports.

Arutz Sheva sources in Syria and Lebanon blamed Israel for the strike.  

The Lebanese government news agency reported that six Israeli aircraft flew through Lebanese airspace along the coast north of Beirut on Wednesday.

The Twitter user @RamiAlLolah first reported that a strike had occurred, saying a missile from the sea was seen hitting the facility and noting Israeli jets had entered Lebanese airspace earlier in the day.

"During the night, we noticed much aircraft activity," an eyewitness told a Lebanese Al-Mustaqbal news outlet. "At a certain point, we were woken up by the sound of blasts and we saw a large fire and many explosions at the agricultural institute. Military and security forces arrived at the scene, put out the flames, and closed off the entire area for kilometers."

Israel has been suspected of bombing missile shipments suspected of reaching the Iranian proxy group Hezbollah in Lebanon at least five times since January.

Here's a map of the entire region. The (A) indicates the port of Tartous, which is the site of Russia's only remaining international military base outside of the former Soviet Union.

The strikes come after the bottom fell out of a deal for Russia to upgrade Syria to S300 surface-to-air missiles, a long-range, high-altitude version capable of taking out a civilian airliner.

SEE ALSO: Satellite Images Show The Utter Precision Of Israel's Airstrike On Damascus International Airport

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Israel is incensed that the Obama administration confirmed a recent Israeli airstrike on Syria's coast, The Times of Israel reports.

Late Wednesday night a Syrian base in the coastal area of Latakia — which held Russian-made surface-to-air missile systems — was destroyed.

The immediate speculation was that Israel was involved, but that wasn't certain until an unnamed White House official confirmed it to CNN.

On Friday Israeli officials told Israel’s Channel 10 TV that the American leak was “scandalous” and “unthinkable,” The Times notes.

Unnamed U.S. officials also confirmed Israeli strikes in January and July.

Israeli military analyst Roni Daniel said on Israel's Channel 2 that the leaks remove Israel's plausible deniability and “are pushing Assad closer to the point where he can’t swallow these attacks, and will respond."

Israel is publicly neutral in the Syrian war — it asserts the airstrikes target weapons shipments headed for Iranian proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon — but strikes like the one that hit Assad's mountain fortress on May 5 indicate that it is very much invested in what's happening in its neighborhood.

SEE ALSO: The Madness Of The Syria Proxy War In One Chart

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AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The international body tasked with eliminating Syria's chemical weapons has raised only enough money so far to fund its mission through this month, and more cash will have to be found soon to pay for the destruction of poison gas stocks next year.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which won the Nobel Peace Prize last month, is overseeing the destruction of Syria's nerve agent stocks under a U.S.-Russian agreement reached in September.

It has so far raised about 10 million euros ($13.5 million) for the task.

"It is the assessment of the Secretariat that its existing personnel resources are sufficient for operations to be conducted in October and November 2013," said an October 25 OPCW document seen by Reuters. At the time, its account held just 4 million euros.

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad says the total cost could be $1 billion, although experts say it is likely to be lower, running into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, depending on where and how the chemical arms are destroyed.

The United States has been the biggest contributor so far to the OPCW's fund for the Syria mission, with Britain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland also contributing.

Washington has contributed $6 million in equipment, training and cash, split between funds with the OPCW and the United Nations, the OPCW document said.

Under the joint Russian-American proposal, Syria agreed in September to destroy its entire chemical weapons program by mid-2014. The move averted missile strikes threatened by Washington following an August 21 sarin gas attack in the outskirts of Damascus that killed hundreds of people.

RISING COSTS

Until September, Syria was one of a handful of countries that were not party to a global treaty outlawing the stockpiling of chemical arms.

Damascus's joining of the Chemical Weapons Convention creates the unique problem of safely destroying huge stockpiles of poisons in the middle of a civil war that has killed 100,000 people and driven up to a third of Syrians from their homes.

Personnel costs will be largely covered by the OPCW's regular budget, less than an annual $100 million, but the Hague-based organisation will need substantial additional resources.

By the end of next week, the OPCW and Syria must agree to a detailed plan of destruction, explaining in detail how and where to destroy the poisons, including mustard gas, sarin and possibly VX.

The OPCW said last week its teams had inspected 21 out of 23 chemical weapons sites across the country, meeting a key November 1 deadline. Two other sites were too dangerous to reach for inspection, but critical equipment had already been moved to other sites that experts had visited, it said.

Syria declared to the OPCW 30 production, filling and storage facilities, eight mobile filling units and three chemical weapons-related facilities.

They contained approximately 1,000 metric tons of chemical weapons, mostly in the form of raw precursors, 290 metric tons of loaded munitions and 1,230 unfilled munitions, OPCW documents showed.

Four other countries have pledged to contribute an additional 2.7 million euros to the OPCW fund, the document said. Germany, Italy and the Netherlands supplied air transport to fly OPCW team members to Syria, while other European countries and the United States provided armored vehicles that were shipped by Canada, the document said.

SHIP TO ALBANIA?

The United Kingdom has pledged to give $3 million, while Russia, France and China said they will donate experts and technical staff, who need to witness the entire, time-consuming destruction process.

A major cost still to come will be the likely shipping of raw chemicals out of Syria for safe destruction away from the war zone. Discussions are ongoing with countries willing to host the facilities to incinerate or chemically neutralize the poisons, including Albania, Belgium and an unspecified Scandinavian country, two sources said.

Companies in the United States, Germany and France are competing for the contract to provide destruction facilities, sources said.

Since being established under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, the OPCW has overseen the destruction of more than 50,000 tons of toxic munitions, or more than 80 percent of the world's declared stockpile.

The United States and Russia, the largest possessors of chemical weapons, are years behind schedule in destroying their arsenals.

($1 = 0.7402 euros)

(Additional reporting By Michelle Nichols in New York, Steve Gutterman in Moscow, John Irish in Paris; Editing by Sara Webb and Peter Graff)

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The Syrian war has torn the nation apart over the last two and a half years, and there is no end in sight.

The new normal involve the regime, rebels, and Kurds dominating in certain parts of the country while fighting rages on countless ever-shifting fronts.

Noria research notes that the rebels "control a majority of the territory, but the regime still rules over the majority of the population, as it keeps a hold over most of the large cities. The numerous contested areas show that the military situation remains dynamic." Analysts Charlies Lister and Phillip Smyth recently discussed the war's dynamics in Foreign Policy, detailing the players in the proxy war and concluding that "a complex multidimensional and perpetually fluctuating and evolving sub-state conflict is set to continue."

A closer look at the al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) shows the group's clear territorial strategy, which immediately pits it against the Kurds and more moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups.

The result has been an increasingly violent conflict with the  Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and an expanding al0-Qaeda reach.

From Noria:

Indeed, the movement, counting several thousand fighters, many of them foreigners, aims directly at taking over the border areas in the North and the most strategic points. To avoid an open confrontation with Turkey (and further the West), ISIL leaves the control of the border posts to the Free Syrian Army and Ahrar al-Sham brigades, but they take hold of the cities just few kilometers inside Syria.

Noria continues:

In addition, [ISIL] establish check-points in the cities where they have a degree of control and in the country side (of which only the most important could be represented on the map). They surround now the most important cities of the North and are controlling the desert road between Raqqah and As-Sukhnah, through which most of the oil is convoyed to the North. Finally, ISIL spearheads the fight against the PKK (under the name of PYD in Syria) in the North. This open confrontation between two transnational armed groups is a direct contest over the control of the Turkish-Syrian border.

SEE ALSO: The Obama Administration's 'Worst Case Scenario' Is Happening In Syria

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Foreign Policy has adapted an excerpt from the new book "Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House," and it features some amazing quotes that inform how Russian President Vladimir Putin has confounded consecutive U.S. administrations.

We picked out a few that really capture the awkward tension during the Bush years:

• George W. Bush on Putin's domestic centralization of power: "He thinks he'll be around forever. He asked me why I didn't change the Constitution so I could run again."
• Vice President Dick Cheney privately told people that when he saw Putin, "I think KGB, KGB, KGB."
• Defense Secretary Robert Gates came back from his first meeting with Putin and told colleagues, "I looked in his eyes and I saw the same KGB killer I've seen my whole life."
• Bush on signing a nuclear reduction treaty because his Russian counterpart insisted: "Putin is at huge risk, and he needs to fight off his troglodytes."
• "It was not hostile. It was like junior high debating," Bush said after Putin told him not lecture him on press freedom. "Seriously, it was a whole series of these juvenile arguments. There was no breakthrough with this guy."

There are also two exchanges that really show how far apart Bush and Putin's starting positions were.

The first appears to be about poultry, but it indicates a deep-seated paranoia from Putin's end. From Foreign Policy:

During a trade dispute when Russia cut off imports of American chicken drumsticks (known colloquially within Russia as "Bush legs"), Putin in a private conversation with Bush asserted that Americans deliberately sent bad poultry to Russia.

"I know you have separate plants for chickens for America and chickens for Russia," Putin told Bush.

Bush was astonished. "Vladimir, you're wrong."

"My people have told me this is true," Putin insisted.

The other exchange occurred in August 2008, right after the Russian troops entered neighboring Georgia. From Foreign Policy:

"I've been warning you Saakashvili is hot-blooded," Bush told Putin.

"I'm hot-blooded, too," Putin countered.

"No, Vladimir," Bush responded. "You're cold-blooded."

Despite all of those moments, it seems Bush still had a soft spot for Putin. The excerpt in Foreign Policy is called "The Seduction of George W. Bush."Go check it out > or Buy the book >

Baker writes that "Obama's own dashed aspirations to build a new partnership with Moscow seem to echo his predecessor's experience," noting that "it is to misjudge Moscow's intentions by superimposing American ideas of what Russian interests should be rather than understanding how Putin and his circle of KGB veterans and zero-sum-gamers actually see those interests."

SEE ALSO: How Vladimir Putin Hijacked The White House's Response To Syria

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LONDON (Reuters) - The chaotic fallout of the "Arab Spring" is fuelling a surge in the smuggling of drugs, weapons and people across the Mediterranean, and cash-strapped regional powers are struggling to respond.

Last month, European leaders in Brussels turned down calls from southern European states already hard hit by the euro-zone crisis for additional support to tackle record numbers of migrants attempting to cross to the continent in frequently perilous journeys arranged by people smugglers.

More than 32,000 migrants from Africa and the Middle East have arrived in Italy and Malta so far this year, the United Nations says. More than 550 died in October alone, as autumn storms made a difficult crossing in small, poorly maintained boats even more dangerous.

At the same time, Syria's civil war and chaos in Libya are producing massive arms smuggling, while drug runners use similar routes to ship North African hashish and Latin American cocaine.

"You have a perfect storm of money, conflict, instability and illicit supply and demand," says Masood Karimipour,United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) representative for North Africa and the Middle East. "The migrant issue is the one that is grabbing the headlines, but it's only a symptom of a much wider regional problem."

Foreign powers are facing increasing calls to step in, just as the international community was forced to send warships to the Indian Ocean for counter-piracy patrols.

Italy and Malta, the two European countries closest to Libya, have borne the brunt of the migrant crisis and say other European countries should provide much more assistance, perhaps through the European border agency Frontex. The need, they say, is urgent.

After more than 400 migrants died in two separate sinkings south of the island of Lampedusa last month, Italy said it was deploying additional patrol craft, aircraft and drones to track and if necessary rescue approaching migrants.

U.S. forces have responded to several calls for help. In October the U.S. Navy said its assault ship USS San Antonio rescued 121 migrants near Malta after a request from the Maltese government, while the destroyer USS Gravely assisted another migrant vessel in trouble between Greek and Italian waters.

Such arrangements, however, remain almost entirely ad hoc. International cooperation remains limited, and even within countries, the issues of drugs, migrants, arms and counter-terrorism are often handled separately.

"In theory, everyone is in favour of information sharing, but in reality it is not always that easy," said one Western official on condition of anonymity, contrasting it with the more tightly co-ordinate U.S.-led efforts to stem smuggling in the Caribbean. "The Mediterranean is a lot more complicated."

SMALL BOATS, SECLUDED INLETS

While the migrant crisis is relatively well documented, reliable data on other smuggling and crime is patchy.

Those who watch the Syrian conflict closely, however - including the growing number of online videos showing weaponry - say smuggling from Libya to Syria has become perhaps the most significant source of rebel arms in the last year. While the Syrian coast remains largely in government hands, weaponry is believed to be slipping in through coastal regions of Lebanon and Turkey.

Using small merchant ships, avoiding major ports and loading and unloading at secluded landing sites sometimes used by smugglers for centuries, such shipments are believed to have been often funded by wealthy Arab individuals.

Heavy machine guns and Russian-built anti-tank aircraft rockets are seen particularly in demand.

"Libya is a largely open market; no arms export licensing, no real customs, coastline effectively out of what passes for government control," says Hugh Griffiths, illicit trafficking researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. "There are plenty of places along the coastline between Turkey and Lebanon where ships can be unloaded."

SIPRI's marine trafficking database also shows five major seizures of small Tanzania, Sierra Leone and Comoros-registered cargo ships by France, Spain and Italy in the last six months. Each carried an estimated 20-40 million euros worth of Moroccan hashish.

Such seizures, Griffiths said, were probably the tip of the iceberg.

With Bashar al-Assad's government preoccupied with its battle for survival, UN coordinator Karimipour said Syriaitself had become a major corridor of drugs into the rest of the Middle East. Cocaine shipments, he said, often originated in Latin America before passing through West Africa.

Egyptian authorities have also increased seizures of smuggled weaponry believed to be heading to militants in the Sinai Peninsula, the UNODC says.

"The problems are obviously overlapping," said UN official Karimipour. "There has been a complete collapse of the security sector in Libya and Syria, and we are seeing both emerging as a major supply routes for drugs and arms to the rest of the Middle East."

So far, European law enforcement authorities say there is little sign such instability is increasing drug shipments into Europe itself - indeed, Spain has recorded a fall, most likely because of international success against West African smugglers.

But that could change. And some security experts warn that a rise of Somali-type piracy is not impossible.

ONSHORE SOLUTIONS, OFFSHORE COORDINATION

Ultimately, officials say tackling onshore lawlessness will require a concerted effort from both European and North African states, particularly in the most seriously affected countries.

In Libya, the UNODC says it is already working with local authorities to crack down on the criminal networks running smuggling boats, helping build international contacts and tighten local laws.

Western governments are also training local Libyan security forces. In the short term, however, most experts say the prospects for a significant change on the ground in Libya or Syria in particular remain distant.

That may make offshore action more important than ever.

Considerable naval forces already exist in the area. France, Spain and Italy all have large and sophisticated navies with aircraft carriers, submarines, multiple small patrol craft as well as long-range aircraft. The U.S. Sixth Fleet also maintains a constant presence of small and medium-sized warships - as well as the carrier USS Nimitz for much of the last month.

NATO already has its own operation monitoring shipping in the Mediterranean, "Active Endeavour", formed after the September 11, 2001, attacks to prevent militants from using the sea to mount attacks on Europe. It has boarded 155 ships in 12 years.

The alliance asks all Mediterranean commercial shipping to register with NATO Maritime HQ at Northwood, England, though it says only a fraction do.

Earlier this year, UNODC says a tip-off from Western forces helped Egypt intercept two major drugs shipments. Formally, however, NATO says its mandate does not include liaising with local powers on anything other than terrorism.

That means any NATO unit that wishes to report anything else must do so through its own government rather than NATO channels.

"With Somali piracy, it took several years for the international community to get its act together," says Eric Thompson, head of strategic studies at The Centre for Naval Analyses, a U.S.-funded body that advises the military. "The same may well turn out to be the case here."

(Editing by Will Waterman)

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Do you remember the Yasir drone, a modified copy of the Boeing ScanEagle (captured by the Iranians in 2012) that was unveiled on Sept. 28?

It was filmed today, Nov. 9, over the Damascus suburb Hujaira AlBalad, in Syria.

Although the quality of the footage is poor, you can clearly identify the Yasir and its distinctive shape: the modified ScanEagle features a twin-tailboom empennage and an inverted v-tail elerudder similar to that of the RQ-7 Shadow.

The Yasir can be disassembled and carried in a suitcase.

Funny how fast the “new” UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) was delivered to Assad’s forces.

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Footage from the Syrian Air War, showing a Syrian Mi-8 helicopter hit by a surface-to-air missile, was turned into a commercial by a Ukrainian company.

In order to showcase the resilience of their products, Motor Sich, a large aircraft and helicopter engine manufacturer, has created a controversial advertising campaign based on the scene of a Hip helicopter (one of those aircraft equipped with their engines) surviving the direct hit of an IR guided missile in Syria.

Not all Assad’s choppers were so lucky.

The slogan at the end of the commercial is related to the Syrian war: the “Motorsich Akbar” (with Akbar meaning Great in Arabic) hits off the “Allahu Akbar” that can be heard repeated endlessly by the rebels in most, if not all, war videos coming from Syria.

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The Free Syrian Army has provided Reuters with breathtaking images of the devastation in Syria that they say were captured off of a government drone, according to NBC News' photo blog.

The images show destruction in the city of Homs, which has been a major battleground in the civil war now in its 33rd month.

Even the most conservatives estimates of the conflict place the death toll at more than 115,000.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says that number includes more than 41,000 civilians — including 6,000 children and 4,000 women.

More than 2 million have registered as refugees from the Syrian crisis, according to the United Nations' refugee agency.

The situation is incredibly complex, with dozens of international and sectarian actors invested in the war. 

As for these images, they apparently came from a GoPro camera mounted on to a remote-controlled helicopter.

SEE ALSO: The Extremely Complex Syrian War In Two Maps

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This is the third story in a three-part series, Assets of the Ayatollah:

(Reuters) - Two months before his death in 1989, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini tried to solve a problem unleashed by the revolution he led a decade earlier.

Land and other assets were being seized en masse from purported enemies of the young theocratic state. Khomeini issued a two-paragraph order asking two trusted aides to ensure that much of the proceeds from the sale of the properties would go to charity.

The result was a new organization - known as Setad, or "The Headquarters" - that reported to Iran's supreme leader. As one of the aides later recounted, Setad was intended to oversee the confiscations and then wind down after two years.

Twenty-four years later, Setad is an economic giant. Khomeini's successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has used it to amass assets worth tens of billions of dollars, rivaling the holdings of the late shah.Setad's portfolio includes banks, farms, cement companies, a licensed contraceptives maker, apartments seized from Iranians living abroad and much more.

Reuters found no evidence that Khamenei puts these assets to personal use. Instead, Setad's holdings underpin his power over Iran.

To make Setad's asset acquisitions possible, governments under Khamenei's watch systematically legitimized the practice of confiscation and gave the organization control over much of the seized wealth, a Reuters investigation has found. The supreme leader, judges and parliament over the years have issued a series of bureaucratic edicts, constitutional interpretations and judicial decisions bolstering Setad. The most recent of these declarations came in June, just after the election of Iran's new president, Hassan Rouhani.

The thinking behind this painstaking legal effort is unclear. The Iranian president's office and the foreign ministry didn't respond to requests for comment. Iran's embassy in the United Arab Emirates issued a statement calling Reuters' findings "scattered and disparate" and said "none has any basis." It didn't elaborate.

Setad's director general of public relations, Hamid Vaezi, said in an email that the Reuters series is "far from realities and is not correct" but didn't go into specifics. He said Setad plans to challenge sanctions imposed on it earlier this year by the U.S. Treasury Department.

But the legal machinations served several purposes. The decrees enabled Setad to beat back rival institutions seeking to take property in the name of the supreme leader. A ruling on the constitutionality of privatizations smoothed Setad's expansion beyond real estate and into owning and investing in companies.

The attention to legal procedure also allows Setad and Khamenei to justify a practice that Khomeini had cited as a reason for overthrowing the shah in 1979: property confiscations. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the former king, inherited his fortune from his father, who enriched himself in the first half of the 20th century by expropriating vast amounts of land from his subjects. In October 2010, Khamenei invoked that memory in a speech.

"Our people were living under the pressure of corrupt, tyrannical and greedy governments for many years," Khamenei told officials in the clerical city of Qom, according to an English-language transcript on his official website. The shah's father "grabbed the ownership of any developed piece of land in all parts of the country…. They accumulated wealth. They accumulated property. They accumulated jewelry for themselves."

The Islamic Revolution promised Iranians a new era of justice, governed strictly in accordance with sharia, Islamic law. Khomeini outlined a "Velayat-e Faqih," or Guardianship of the Jurist - a government ruled by a cleric who spurns personal wealth, values the law above all else and rigorously submits himself to it.

"Islamic government … is not a tyranny, where the head of state can deal arbitrarily with the property and lives of the people, making use of them as he wills," Khomeini wrote in a 1970 book.

Iranian attorneys who have battled Setad say the governments under Khamenei's watch have not lived up to those ideals. Instead, they allege, the government makes aggressive use of the law to take property from citizens - in particular, Article 49 of the Iranian constitution, which provides for seizing illicit assets from criminals.

"It is a very powerful tool," said Mohammad Nayyeri, a Britain-based lawyer who worked on several property confiscation cases involving Setad before leaving Iran in 2010. "It opens the door to corruption. There is no limitation. The private ownership and private life of people are not respected."

Setad has emerged as a mainstay for Khamenei. It provides an independent source of revenue to finance his rule even as years of sanctions imposed by the West have squeezed Iran's economy hard. The story of how he used the law to build up Setad is central to understanding how he has managed in some ways to gain even more power than his predecessor.

A ONE-ROOM HOUSE

The supreme leader, now 74 years old, comes from a modest background. He grew up in the holy city of Mashhadin Iran's northeast. His father, Ayatollah Javad Husseini Khamenei, was a religious scholar of ethnic Azeri descent and a prayer leader at a local mosque.

"The house only had one room and a gloomy basement. Whenever a guest came to see my father ... we had to go to the basement until they left," Khamenei is quoted as saying in a biography posted on his official website.

The young Ali Khamenei was known as Seyyed Ali, a title used by families who claim descent from the Prophet Mohammad. While he chose the same calling as his father, Khamenei embraced radically different views.

The elder Khamenei was a traditionalist opposed to mixing religion and politics. The son took up with the growing Islamist revolutionary cause. One relative says the young cleric appeared as interested in the movement's political dimension as its spiritual side.

"He came across as a modernist or progressive cleric," said Mahmoud Moradkhani, a nephew who opposes Khamenei's rule and lives in exile in Paris. "He was not a part of the fundamentalists ... and only followed the revolutionary movement."

In the early 1960s Khamenei studied under Khomeini in Qom. The young cleric began agitating against the shah's pro-Western regime. In 1963, Khamenei served his first of many terms in prison when, at the age of 24, he was detained by security forces for his political activities. Later that year he was imprisoned for ten days in his home city of Mashhad, where he was put under "severe torture," according to his official biography.

People who knew Khamenei in his formative years describe a complex man. He was an uncompromising revolutionary and Islamist ideologue, but he also had a sociable side, with a sense of humor.

"He has maybe two different personalities," said Houshang Asadi, a dissident journalist who spent months sharing a prison cell with Khamenei in 1974. Asadi recalled one occasion when Khamenei "stood under the window in the little cell, talking to God and crying." On other occasions, "he was a simple man like me. We had different opinions about many things, but we argued, we talked, we laughed, we were joking."

Five years later came the revolution. The shah fled, Khomeini returned in triumph from exile, the clerics emerged pre-eminent. According to historians, Khamenei, then 40, helped found the Islamic Republic Party and went on to serve in increasingly powerful posts.

In 1979, months after taking power, Khomeini pushed through a new constitution that enshrined his concept of the Guardianship of the Jurist, a republic ruled by a leader who is the foremost expert in Islamic law. Among the charter's 175 articles were two that would prove instrumental for Setad. One, Article 45, which deals with public property, gave the government the right to use "abandoned" land and "property of undetermined ownership."

Even more important in the end was Article 49, which allows for the confiscation of wealth acquired through criminal activities. It prescribed broad safeguards against arbitrary confiscations. In practice, this law rarely was followed.

"Article 49 is so broadly written that it allows confiscation and expropriation on the flimsiest of excuses," said Shaul Bakhash, an Iran historian at George Mason University in Virginia. He says property of his own was confiscated by court order in 1992.

Wholesale expropriation of wealth became a hallmark of the early republic. It was a chaotic time. Iraq invaded Iran in 1980. Years of brutal trench warfare followed. There were shortages of rice, milk, meat and fuel. The new regime faced internal threats, carrying out tit-for-tat killings as it consolidated power. And the new state began seizing assets from the deposed royal family and other perceived enemies.

"Bonyads," or foundations, were among the first beneficiaries of this transfer of wealth. One of the biggest was Bonyad Mostazafan, or the Foundation of the Oppressed, which took over many of the royal family's assets. It remains in business. A Mostazafan official did not respond to a request for an interview.

"This situation in reality created a struggle and a sort of competition between the revolutionary units and institutions … for each to find the best properties and introduce them to the court as candidates for confiscation," said Hossein Raeesi, a human-rights attorney who practiced in Iran for 20 years and handled some property confiscation cases.

According to a study published in 1989 in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, in 1982 Bonyad Mostazafan held 2,786 real-estate properties it obtained by court-sanctioned confiscation. Its real estate included a building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan built in the 1970s by the shah's charity, the Pahlavi Foundation.

The revolutionaries also began turning on some of their own. In 1981, Khamenei helped lead a successful effort to impeach Abolhassan Banisadr, who in 1980 had become the republic's first elected president. Khamenei, then in parliament, introduced a 14-point list of reasons to drive out Banisadr. Less than 17 months after taking office, Banisadr was declared an enemy of the state and fled to Paris, where he now lives.

Later that year, Khamenei survived a bomb attack by a leftist insurgent group that disabled his right arm. The explosives were placed in a tape recorder in the Abuzar mosque in Tehran where he was giving a speech. Two months later, Banisadr's successor as president was assassinated by the same group. In October 1981, Khamenei was elected overwhelmingly as the republic's third president.

"IN THE NAME OF THE REVOLUTION"

In 1982, with factions and organizations feuding over properties, Khomeini tried to control the chaos, issuing a decree that banned confiscations without a judge's order. "It is unacceptable and intolerable that in the name of the revolution and being revolutionary-minded, God forbid, an injustice should be done to someone," Khomeini declared in the order.

Two years later, in 1984, parliament created a special class of property confiscation courts - dubbed "Article 49 courts" - in each of Iran's provinces. They were a branch of the Revolutionary Courts, which had been established to dispense justice to purported enemies of the republic.

The Article 49 courts continue to operate today, but they failed to end the free-for-all. "In practice, the establishment of the Article 49 courts systematized and continued the expropriations, and even today the confiscations continue," Raeesi said.

The war with Iraq ended in 1988. It left hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers and civilians dead. That meant many mouths to feed.

In April 1989, Khomeini issued his brief order that marked the genesis of Setad, whose full name in Persian is "Setad Ejraiye Farmane Hazrate Emam" - the Headquarters for Executing the Order of the Imam.

He directed two senior officials to take over all "sales, servicing and managing" of properties "of unknown ownership and without owners." The revenues were to be spent on sharia issues "and as much as possible" to help seven bonyads and charities he named. The officials were to use the money to support "the families of the martyrs, veterans, the missing, prisoners of war and the downtrodden."

At this point, though he had been president for more than seven years, Khamenei wasn't counted among Iran's first rank of power brokers. The presidency had been stripped of key powers during Banisadr's short rule, because he was viewed as a threat to Iran's new clerical elite.

After Khomeini's death in June 1989, Iran's Assembly of Experts selected Khamenei as his successor. Some senior clerics regarded him as unqualified for the job of supreme leader. He hadn't achieved the required rank among Shi'ite clerics that the constitution stipulated. But key supporters backed a constitutional amendment that sealed his elevation, and Khamenei took office in July.

One of his early acts was to order a cleric to follow up on the creation of Setad. The new organization's decisions, he said in an edict that September, "should be just and based on sharia and without negligence."

The new supreme leader quickly set about cultivating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite military group that had emerged from the war as one of Iran's most powerful institutions.

Droves of its soldiers had returned in 1988 from the battlefield and were seeking opportunity. He began securing their support by helping them receive lucrative reconstruction contracts.

According to Mohsen Sazegara, a co-founder of the Revolutionary Guards who is now in exile in the United States, Khamenei allowed the Guards to enter the construction business. That opening eventually enabled an engineering division of the Guards to evolve into a major conglomerate.

In time the Guards became a pillar of Khamenei's power. So too did Setad.

By the early 1990s, courts were seizing assets and turning them over to Setad, according to documents reviewed by Reuters. The organization began keeping funds from property sales, rather than redistributing all the proceeds. It isn't clear when Setad began retaining funds or what percentage of the revenue it keeps.

Khamenei, meanwhile, took pains to show Iranians that he was above exploiting his high office. On a visit to his boyhood home in Mashhad in August 1995, he told the story of how while he was president, a next-door neighbor erected a tall building overlooking his yard.

"As a result, my mother could no longer step in the yard without wearing a chador," a long garment worn by devout women in Iran. He asked the neighbor to reconsider, according to an account by Khamenei on his official website, but the owner wouldn't listen.

Khamenei dropped the matter. "Such events bear testimony to the fact that worldly positions and financial means never cause individuals to regard themselves as distinct from the general public, or that they are entitled to live in greater comfort," Khamenei said.

In 1997, the reformist Mohammad Khatami was elected president. Iran's judiciary soon moved to shield Setadfrom scrutiny. The General Inspection Office is an anti-corruption body that monitors many Iranian institutions and reports to the head of the judiciary, who is appointed by Khamenei. That year, a government legal commission declared that the GIO had no right to inspect Setad unless the supreme leader requested it to do so.

Setad still faced competitors. Among its main rivals for seized assets, according to attorney Mohammad Nayyeri, was another organization: Sazemane Jamavari va Forooshe Amvale Tamliki, or Department for the Collection and Sale of Acquired Property, which is controlled by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Finance. In 2000, the judiciary adopted a bylaw granting Setad exclusive authority over property taken in the name of the supreme leader.

AN EXPEDIENT RULING

Setad began expanding into corporate investments, taking advantage of another legal initiative by Khamenei.

In 2004, Khamenei ordered a review of Article 44 of the constitution, which mandates state ownership of critical industries. The Expediency Council, a state advisory body appointed by the supreme leader, issued a new interpretation of Article 44 allowing the privatization of major industries.

"What was the goal?" he asked in a 2011 speech. "The goal was to create a competitive economy with the presence of the private sector and its investments in the economy of the country."

In 2006, with the country facing a ballooning budget deficit under its new hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Khamenei issued an executive order to privatize 80 percent of the shares of some state-owned companies. The targets included banks, insurers and oil-and-gas firms. The step, he said, would change the "government's role from direct ownership and management of companies to policymaking, guidance and monitoring."

In 2009, Setad emerged as a victor in Iran's biggest state asset sale, the privatization of Telecommunication Co of Iran (TCI).

Through a subsidiary, Setad held a 38 percent stake in a consortium that was awarded majority control of the telecommunications provider, Iran's largest, according to Setad documents seen by Reuters. The other big winner was the Revolutionary Guards, which controlled most of the winning consortium.

Even before then, Setad had been drawing attention from the reformist wing of the establishment. During Khatami's second term, moderate members of parliament sought to investigate Setad, according to Nayyeri. TheGuardian Council, a body of conservative clerics and jurists who are directly or indirectly appointed by Khamenei, issued a declaration that Setad was beyond parliament's authority, Nayyeri said.

Elections in 2008 brought a strongly conservative parliament deeply loyal to Khamenei. In one of its first steps, parliament amended its bylaws to limit its own power to audit institutions under the supreme leader's supervision, except with his permission.

"This is the reason why no one knows what is going on inside these organizations," says Sazegara, the Guards co-founder.

In 2009, hundreds of thousands of Iranians in the so-called Green Movement protested the re-election of President Ahmadinejad. Amid the unrest, one of the two men who established Setad spoke out against the organization.

That man, Mehdi Karoubi, had emerged as a major reformist politician, serving as speaker of parliament and making unsuccessful bids for the presidency in 2005 and 2009. After the 2009 vote, he wrote a letter to a longtime rival of Khamenei in which he reported that Khomeini had intended Setad to last just two years.

Karoubi went on to accuse Setad and Khamenei's other major power base, the Revolutionary Guards, of corruption. In an apparent reference to the TCI privatization, he wrote that they "put the shares of a government ministry in their own name within half an hour. And in the name of privatization they create another saga that continues and completes the recent saga of the presidential elections?"

Karoubi has been under house arrest in Iran since 2011 and couldn't be reached for comment.

Khamenei is sensitive to suggestions that he and his appointees receive special treatment under the law. "No one is above supervision," he has said in a speech, according to a page on his website titled "The Supreme Leader's View of Supervision.""Even the leader is not above supervision, let alone the organizations linked to the leader," he said. "Therefore, everyone should receive supervision, including those who govern the country. Government by its very nature entails accumulation of power and wealth. That is to say, national wealth and social and political power are entrusted to a few government officials. As a result, they must be supervised."

Driving home the point, he added: "I welcome supervision, and I am strongly opposed to evading it. Personally, the more supervision I receive, the happier I will be."

Today, Khamenei's power in some respects exceeds that of his predecessor. He lacks the religious authority of Khomeini but has far greater resources at his disposal.

Khomeini operated from a modest house in northern Tehran with a small staff.

Khamenei lives in a large compound in Tehran. The grounds contain a variety of buildings, including a large hall where Khamenei gives speeches. Setad helps to finance his administrative offices, which are known as Beite Rahbar, the Leader's House, according to a former senior Setad employee and other people familiar with its operations. It employs about 500 people, many recruited from the Guards and security services.

Setad itself remains veiled from the public eye. It is led today by Mohammad Mokhber, a Khamenei loyalist who is also the chairman of Iran's Sina Bank, according to its website. The European Union sanctioned him in 2010 but lifted the sanctions last year, without any explanation.

Setad reveals little about its income, expenditures or staffing. Its headquarters is in a large gray concrete building with small windows in the heart of Tehran's commercial district.

"You won't even notice it even if you are walking by," a former employee said.

In June, Supreme Leader Khamenei congratulated Rouhani upon his election as president. That same month, the chief justice, a Khamenei appointee, issued a fresh declaration of support for Setad. According to the Iranian Students' News Agency, Justice Sadeq Larijani told lower courts that Setad's old rival, the Department for the Collection and Sale of Acquired Property, had no authority to take property in the supreme leader's name.

Setad, the justice reminded the courts, "is the only authorized organization in the issue of property related to the supreme leader."

(Edited by Michael Williams and Simon Robinson)

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BEIRUT (Reuters) - More than two and a half years into the civil war devastating Syria, the United States and Russia are pushing the combatants to the negotiating table in Geneva, but on terms that mark a shift in favor of Bashar al-Assad against the increasingly fragmented rebels seeking to oust him.

Since the August 21 nerve gas attacks on rebel suburbs ringing Damascus, which brought the U.S. to the brink of a missile assault on Assad's forces, the diplomatic tide has turned against the opposition, which briefly believed external intervention would enable its forces to launch a final offensive.

Instead, the combination of hesitation by President Barack Obama's administration and an 11th hour deal brokered by Russia, a key Assad ally, to decommission Syria's chemical arsenal, has wrong-footed the rebels, now under intense U.S. and European pressure to attend talks in Geneva with a vague agenda.

Syrian opposition advisers and independent analysts fear this could channel the Syrian conflict - like other intractable regional problems such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - into a lengthy and fruitless process.

The only diplomatic landmark in this conflict, last June's U.N.-brokered statement known as Geneva I, was vague enough.

It called for a transitional government in a way that many assumed precluded any role for the Assad family, which has ruled Syria with an iron fist since President Assad's late father, Hafez, seized absolute power in 1970.

There has been barely a flicker of agreement within Syria about its future since the country erupted in initially peaceful protests in March 2011.

A source close to the internationally recognized political opposition, the National Coalition, says it fears the U.S.-Russia deal to dismantle Syria's chemical arsenal has restored the Assad administration's legitimacy, even as it uses tactics such as the starvation of rebel areas to try to regain control.

TOPPLING ASSAD NOT A PRIORITY

Regional analysts and diplomats closely involved also agree that Western concerns have moved on from toppling Assad to how to stop jihadist groups linked to al Qaeda gaining further traction in a conflict where mainstream rebel groups with limited Western backing are losing ground.

The U.S. position is that "the opposition must negotiate with the regime and agree on a roadmap", said Fawaz Gerges, Middle East expert at the London School of Economics.

"The Americans and the Europeans want to lock Assad into Geneva; it is a process without peace."

The opposition source, who did not want to be identified, said the West was switching "from an Arab Spring narrative to a counter-terrorism narrative" and bullying the opposition to attend Geneva II or lose its support.

For the West, Syria has now become "a source of terrorist recruits that will come back to Europe and America", he said. "But that doesn't answer the fundamental problem of how to stop it; that terrorism will get worse and the longer the war goes on, the more fragmented and radicalized the opposition becomes."

"The regime's military advances will continue. It is difficult to imagine that Assad's position will be weaker in six months. This is not a dead man walking," said Ayham Kamel, a Syria expert at the Eurasia consultancy group.

"Al Qaeda is here to stay. This is a new reality. It is hard to imagine how the threat will disappear in the future."

Even Saudi Arabia, the opposition's biggest supporter, is in two minds.

Diplomats and officials in the kingdom say it regards the Syrian war as battle for regional power with Iran and its Arab Shi'ite Muslim allies such as Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese paramilitary movement that this summer threw its weight behind Assad.

The Saudis have been unusually strident and public in criticizing the United Nations and the United States since the Syrian chemical weapons deal appeared to be leading to a rapprochement with Iran, despite the failure to reach a breakthrough on Tehran's nuclear program in high-level talks in Geneva last weekend.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi spy chief, went as far as to declare a "major shift" away from Washington.

But diplomats in the Gulf say his cousin Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the influential interior minister, is much more concerned about al Qaeda, and the terrorist "blowback" implications of supporting the rebels, than the fate of Assad.

FUTILE EXERCISE

With friends like this in such policy ambiguity, the Syrian opposition may well wonder what its real options are.

"The international consensus in support of the opposition and militarization of the conflict is no longer there," said Kamel of Eurasia. "There is no longer a belief that a military victory for the opposition is possible."

Diplomatic sources say there is a recognition by Russia and the West of Assad's ability to remain, even if Syria has already been carved up into enclaves - Sunni rebels in the north and east, secessionist Kurds in the northeast and Alawites and others in the capital and northwestern coastal area.

According to these sources, U.S. and Russian officials have privately been discussing what organs of the Syrian state would remain and at what level - who would have to go and who would have to stay - indicating the possibility of compromise.

Yet critics say talks in Geneva are becoming a substitute for real policy, with no concerted plan to stop the war. Some analysts compare this to the 1992-95 Bosnia war, where meandering prolonged talks failed to stop fighting until NATO air strikes against Serb forces in the late summer of 1995.

Close watchers of Syria and the opposition, which has agreed in principle to attend the long-delayed talks, believe Geneva II will be futile because the West has no strategy to force a stop to a war which has so far cost 100,000 lives, displaced more than 4 million people and created 2.2 million refugees.

"Even if Geneva II takes place, don't expect an imminent solution. There might be more Genevas and the war will continue," Lebanese columnist Sarkis Naoum told Reuters.

"We had a war that went on for 15 years, envoys would meet but nothing would happen," Naoum said, referring to Lebanon's own 1975-1990 civil war.

Even if the parties agree in Geneva, analysts say, they would need to convince rebel armed groups on the ground, who have said nothing less than a commitment to end Assad's rule would persuade them to stop fighting.

"I don't see how Geneva II will be remotely successful if the regime is not prepared to make the slightest indication that they are ready for a transition. Assad is saying the opposite, he is giving interview after interview saying that he will not hand over power," one source close to the opposition said.

PROTRACTED WAR

Western nations hope Russia will follow up on the deal to rid Syria of chemical weapons by putting pressure on Assad. But with the deal in place and government forces making gains, there is little incentive for Russia to change its position.

If the Geneva talks go ahead and succeed, Russia will be able to cast itself as a peacemaker. If not, it will continue to blame rebels, the West and Gulf Arab states, saying that Assad's government was ready to attend without preconditions while the United States and others failed to get the rebels to do so.

Militarily, Assad's forces, backed by Iran and Hezbollah, are flushing out rebels from around Damascus and other areas.

Within rebel ranks, Sunni jihadists and other groups linked to al Qaeda have become the dominant current among the opposition while other, moderate, groups, backed by the West and armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are in disarray.

And while international players deliberate about Geneva, the Syrian battleground continues to draw in foreign radical Shi'ite fighters - backing Assad's Alawite minority rule - and Sunnis seeking to topple Assad and install an Islamist caliphate.

"The U.S. is pursuing a very dangerous strategy which is to say they pursue talk almost for the sake of talks," the source close to the opposition said. "The only way this war will end is if the regime goes," the rebel source said.

"If there is not going to be military intervention against the regime then there needs to be a much more aggressive and deliberate approach to force the regime to step down through harsh pressure, and that means forcing Russia and Iran to make it happen."

Few believe that Geneva will alleviate the sufferings of Syrians in the near future.

"The logic in the U.S. is that the only way for the opposition to snatch a political victory out of the jaws of military defeat is through Geneva II," Gerges said. "The chances of Geneva II producing a breakthrough probably are less that 20 percent.

"It is a grim situation ... it is a prolonged war, a war of attrition, and in the meantime the humanitarian crisis will intensify and turn into a world tragedy of great proportion."

(Additional reporting by Angus McDowall and Steve Gutterman; Editing by Dominic Evans and Peter Graff)

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Over the last two years, as Syria’s civil war has metastasized into a multi-sided fratricidal nightmare, the role of foreign fighters has grown increasingly troubling.

Throughout the history of what Westerners loosely term al-Qaida, foreigners who “join the caravan” and seek war (and often martyrdom) in jihads far from their homes have formed a consistent theme, and selling point, among Salafi extremists.

In Afghanistan in the 1980s, as in Bosnia and Chechnya in the 1990s — and in every subsequent major jihad — foreigners have played a role more important than their mere numbers would suggest.

Syria since 2011 has emerged as the greatest of all jihad contests for foreign fighters. Given its proximity to Europe, large numbers of Westerners have gone to fight in Syria, via Turkish “ratlines,” raising concerns among European security services about what these violent young men might do when they return home. Significant numbers of angry young mujahidin from Europe have joined the fight in Syria, on a scale never before seen in counterterrorism circles, leading to something approaching panic among Western intelligence agencies.

The Balkans have offered hundreds of volunteers for Syria, mainly from Bosnia and the Albanian lands. Recent reports have indicated that some 150 Albanians from Kosovo have gone to fight in Syria. This is particularly worrisome as, until recently, that overwhelmingly Muslim former Serbian province that was liberated by NATO in 1999 from Belgrade’s rule has been widely hailed as an oasis of moderation where extremism allegedly could find no purchase.

As ever, the truth is more complicated, and in recent years, as Kosovo has become mired in all-too-predictable crime, corruption, and poverty, Salafi preachers and rabble-rousers have done their usual work, and now Kosovo, too, has its share of fanatics bent on murder and mayhem. Many of them have decamped for Syria, and some are now returning home to bring the jihad to Europe.

This became clear last week when Kosovo authorities arrested six men on terrorism charges. Four of the six men were picked up by undercover police in the capital, Prishtina, when they sought to purchase illegal weapons, and two of them are veterans of the Syrian jihad. A seventh man remains on the loose, pursued by police. The seven men, identified as Genc Selimi, Nuredin Sylejmani, Valon Shala, Adrian Mehmeti, Musli Hyseni, Bekim Mulalli, and Fidan Demolli, are suspected by prosecutors of “preparing a terrorist act against the safety and constitutional order” in Kosovo.

According to Kosovo media, Genc Selimi, known in extremist circles as Abu Hafs al-Albani, is the ringleader and a veteran of the Syrian war, who had been monitored by Kosovo security officials since his recent return from the jihad against the Assad regime. The police were watching Selimi and his conspirators develop their terrorist plans in a secret operation the authorities termed HURRICANE. As the police reported after Selimi’s arrest, ”The operation was conducted through the implementation of covert investigative measures and resulted in the arrest of six suspects,” two from Prishtina and four from the nearby town of Gjilan.

The amount of weaponry and gear brought in by Operation HURRICANE was impressive, including a sniper rifle, one carbine, one semi-automatic rifle, two handguns, a modified handgun, some 1,200 AK-47 rounds, 1,900 Euros, three cars (two BMWs and a Mercedes), plus C4 explosives. How the suspects paid for this equipment is not yet clear, though Kosovo authorities have explained some of them were affiliated with Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, and were plotting terrorism in Kosovo on someone’s dime. Two of the men are also wanted in connection with the recent beating of two U.S. citizens in Prishtina, both female Mormon (LDS) missionaries, on 3 November; it seems that the assault on the American women partly triggered the wider police action against the jihadist network.

This is hardly Kosovo’s first involvement with jihadist terrorism that has effected the United States. Four of the six terrorists behind the 2007 Fort Dix plot were Albanians from Kosovo or neighboring Macedonia, while the Kosovar Albanian Sami Osmakac was arrested in early 2012 for plotting bombings in the Tampa area, and Arid Uka, the murderer of two U.S. Air Force personnel at Frankfurt airport in 2011, hailed from Kosovo too.

On the positive side, it should be noted that Kosovo’s police and security forces seem to have done a commendable job of keeping would-be jihadists under surveillance and arresting them before anything truly awful happened. Additionally, Islamic authorities in Kosovo have responded to the arrests by condemning terrorism and urging local young men now fighting in Syria to come home at once and abandon extremism.

Although Kosovo authorities have been forced to acknowledge that extremism and terrorism are problems in the country, following years of low-balling and simply denying the problem, it seems that Prishtina’s official line that “Extremist groups in Kosovo do not act in such an organized way and, as such, they pose a low risk of terrorist attacks,” may be unduly optimistic in light of last week’s arrests.

Of the some 150 young men from Kosovo who are reported to have joined the Syrian jihad, to date only three have been identified as killed in action, which means that large numbers will be returning home before long to continue their jihad in Europe. Once that happens, the terrorism threat in Southeastern Europe will not remain low for long.

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We already knew that Iran had troops on the ground in Syria last summer and the Islamic Republic  is calling the shots, but new footage recorded by a cameraman attached to the elite Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards details just how much Iran is invested in the civil war.

"If Assad falls, Iran's foreign policy objectives would be constrained. So it's doing everything it can to keep Assad in power, " Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies told BBC, which did an investigation based on the footage.

The BBC's report details how, over the last year, Iran has not only sent money and military equipment to support the regime of Bashar al-Assad, but also IRGC soldiers to attack Syrian rebels, conduct reconnaissance, train Syrian militias, direct Hezbollah guerrilla fighters and Iraqi militiamen, and run commands centers inside Syria.

Check it out: 

SEE ALSO: Iran Is Increasingly Calling The Shots For Assad In Syria

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BEIRUT (Reuters) - Islamist rebels led by al Qaeda-linked fighters seized Syria's largest oilfield on Saturday, cutting off President Bashar al-Assad's access to almost all local crude reserves, activists said.

There was no immediate comment from the government and it was not possible to verify the reports of the capture independently.

But the loss of the al-Omar oil field in the eastern Deir al-Zor province, if confirmed, could leave Assad's forces almost completely reliant on imported oil in their highly mechanized military campaign to put down a 2-1/2-year uprising.

"Now, nearly all of Syria's usable oil reserves are in the hands of the Nusra Front and other Islamist units ... The regime's neck is now in Nusra's hands," said Rami Abdelrahman, head of the pro-opposition Syrian Observatoryfor Human Rights.

Assad's forces have gained momentum against the rebels in recent months, partially due to support from the Lebanese Shi'ite Muslim milita Hezbollah and its regional ally Iran.

In the northern province of Aleppo on Saturday, army air strikes killed at least 40 people and wounded dozens, most of them civilians, the Observatory said.

But opposition fighters, particularly powerful Islamist factions, still hold large swathes of territory in northern andeastern Syria.

Foreign powers are trying to bring together the warring parties at an international peace conference, dubbed 'Geneva 2', planned for mid-December. Both the Syrians and their international partners are at odds over terms for the talks.

Syria's peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi discussed the conference on Saturday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva. He is expected to meet U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry later.

FUEL FROM IRAN

The civil war in Syria has killed more than 100,000 people, according to the United Nations. The conflict is also destabilizing Syria's neighbors, exacerbating sectarian and ethnic tensions that transcend borders and fuelling Sunni-Shi'ite tensions in particular.

The rebels are led by the Sunni Muslim majority in Syria and have drawn support from radical Sunni groups such as al Qaeda and other foreign militants.

Shi'ite countries and militias have thrown their weight behind Assad, who is from Syria's minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam.

Until the reported insurgent capture of the field, a pipeline transporting the crude to central Syria for refinement had still been working despite the civil war.

Most oil reserves are now in the hands of rebels, local tribes or Kurdish militias, some of whom may be willing to sell oil to Assad.

Assad is also believed to be getting fuel from Shi'ite Muslim giant Iran, his main regional ally.

A video posted on the internet showed rebels in camouflage and black scarves driving a tank under a sign that read "Euphrates Oil Company - al-Omar field". The speaker in the video said the field was overrun at dawn on Saturday, but the authenticity of the footage could not be independently verified.

Syria is not a significant oil producer and has not exported any oil since late 2011, when international sanctions took effect to raise pressure on Assad. Prior to the sanctions, the country exported 370,000 barrels per day, mainly to Europe.

The conflict began in March 2011 as peaceful protests against four decades of Assad family rule but has degenerated into a civil war were more than 100 people are killed each day.

REBEL OFFENSIVE NEAR CAPITAL

Despite international efforts to launch peace talks, neither the rebels or Assad's forces appear ready to lay down arms.

Activists near Damascus said a heavy battle was raging in the eastern suburbs outside the capital between thearmy and pro-government militias and rebel units, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), an al Qaeda affiliate.

Rebels are trying to retake the town of Oteiba in order to break a heavy blockade on the opposition-held suburbs in the east that ring the capital. For months Assad's forces have choked off the areas from both food, supplies and weapons.

The fighting caused dozens of deaths on both sides, a fighter in the area said.

In Switzerland, diplomatic wrangling continued as the international supporters of different sides of the conflict discussed a framework for talks.

Moscow, Assad's main arms supplier, wants Iran to participate in the peace conference, which is opposed by both the United States and Saudi Arabia, a regional rival of Tehran and major backer of the rebels.

Brahimi is to hold "trilateral" talks with Russian deputy foreign ministers Mikhail Bogdanov and Gennady Gatilov, as well as U.S. Under Secretary Wendy Sherman, in Geneva on Monday.

(Additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

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LONDON (Reuters) - More than 11,000 children have been killed in Syria since the conflict there began over two and a half years ago, many of them summarily executed or targeted by snipers, a UK-based think tank said in a report published on Sunday.             

The Oxford Research Group study, which called on all sides in the conflict to stop targeting children, said seven out of 10 of the children killed in the war had lost their lives in shell fire, by aerial bombardment or by improvised explosive devices.             

One in four children had been killed by small arms fire, with almost 800 executed and almost 400 targeted by snipers. Over 100, including some of infant age, were reported to have been tortured.             

The United Nations puts the overall death toll in Syria at more than 100,000 dead.             

"One of the most disturbing things about this is that the evidence shows that children being killed by bullets are being deliberately killed," said Hamit Dardagan, one of the report's co-authors. "They are not being killed in cross-fire."             

The report is the first of its kind to break down headline fatality statistics to build up a picture of how children have died in the conflict between forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and the opposition.             

It was released as fierce fighting to the east of Damascus was reported to have killed more than 160 people in the past two days as rebels struggle to break a months-long blockade.             

Dardagan said the report's findings showed how pervasive the war had become and how innocents were getting caught up in it.             

"The headline figure of over 11,000 deaths will change but the pattern of killing won't," he said.             

'Stolen Futures: The hidden toll of child casualties in Syria', can be found here: http://ref.ec/sf             

(Reporting By Andrew Osborn; Editing by Patrick Graham)

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BEIRUT (Reuters) - When he was agitating for revolution, urging fellow Syrians to rise up against President Bashar al-Assad, Abdullah dreaded the midnight knock at the door from the secret police.

Now that the uprising has succeeded in his home town near Aleppo, pro-democracy activists are living in fear again - and this time those who brand them "traitor" don't bother to knock.

Two years ago, after Abdullah broke off his studies to run social media campaigns against Assad, he was held and tortured by security men. This summer, it happened again - only now it was Islamist gunmen loyal to al Qaeda who smashed into his family's house, broke everything in their way and took him off to a cell where, once more, he was blindfolded and beaten.

"The sad thing is that those who were doing this were not Assad's police," Abdullah told Reuters from Turkey, where he managed to flee after his latest ordeal. "They were fighters who were supposed to be fighting for freedom, our freedom.

"Back then they called me 'traitor' for demanding freedom. These armed men also tortured me for calling for freedom."

His story is increasingly familiar across northern Syria, where Assad's government has ceded territory to a bewildering array of rival militias. The rising power is militant Islam and men who see democracy as the work of the devil, or the West, a system contrary to their hopes for a state ruled by religion.

Abdullah's experience also highlights the fragmentation of Syria's opposition, which greatly complicates new international efforts to end a civil war that has killed over 100,000.

Reuters spoke to 19 Syrians who describe themselves as activists for democracy. All gave similar accounts of violence and intimidation by militant Islamists in northern areas no longer controlled by Assad's "mukhabarat" security services.

Most were students when Syria's Arab Spring protests began in March 2011. All got involved in publicizing demonstrations - and documenting Assad's crackdown on them - using social media. They went on, as self-taught journalists, to provide images and reports for Syrians and international media as the war spread.

Some, like Abdullah, have now had to flee for their lives.

They, and those still inside Syria, say Islamist militants have begun a campaign to silence them and free speech in general. Last month, two media activists were shot dead in broad daylight in Aleppo, Syria's biggest city. Some have been seized and are being held. Others have simply disappeared.

AL QAEDA FEAR

In particular, those who spoke recounted the fear spread by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The al Qaeda-linked group, dominated by foreigners blooded in other wars, from Libya to Iraq and Afghanistan, does not tolerate critics.

"It is impossible for me to go to Syria now. I am wanted by the regime and by al Qaeda," said Rami Jarrah, who ran a radio station in the city of Raqqa until early October, when ISIL gunmen shut it down and took away one of his colleagues.

Now living in Turkey, from where Radio ANA continues to broadcast into Syria, Jarrah won early fame among "media activists" in 2011, employing the English of his British education to forge an international reputation blogging from Damascus, where foreign news organizations had little access.

When a pen-name - "Alexander Page" - failed to shield his identity, he fled the country but returned later to "liberated" northern Syria, where he helped set up broadcasting in Raqqa.

The station's mistake, he said, was to open its airwaves to phone-in callers venting grievances against the Islamists:

"People were calling in and saying ISIL did this and did that. 'They closed my shop' or 'attacked my wife and forced the hijab on her'," Jarrah said. The militants, online themselves, accused him of "atheism" and put a price on his head.

Journalists have long faced suspicion and harassment from rebels, gunmen forcing them to stop filming, sometimes seizing equipment or raiding apartments and cafes where they have set up "media centers" to share and distribute videos and reports.

But in recent months, events have taken a more sinister turn. Several of those working in Aleppo have gone missing. In some cases, their bodies have been found - tortured, shot and left on the street. Friends and relatives of others have been told by militants that the activists have been arrested.

Hazem Dakel, from Idlib, described what that could mean.

Now also living in Turkey, his ordeal began when two men on a motorbike forced his car to a halt after he had been filming in an area run by ISIL. Held in a house, they accused him of "opposing Islam". He was lucky, and escaped through a window.

If he had any doubt what would have happened had he stayed, a call from one of his captors to an acquaintance still in Syria has since removed it: "They were planning to execute me on the night I escaped," Dakel said. "They were going to take me to a notorious abandoned factory where they execute people."

UNDER SURVEILLANCE

The militant Islamists have won respect among Syrians in the north, partly by their fighting mettle, party by imposing order where feuding among rival rebel warlords had broken out, partly by ensuring supplies of food and medicines. But for democratic activists, that does not excuse other failings.

"Our problem with them is ideological," said Jarrah. "They want to force their ideology without asking our opinion.

"The regime deprived us of freedom of expression and they are doing the same," he added. "Anyone liberal - or not Islamic enough according to their standards - is getting arrested. They want all local radios to broadcast from a centre they control."

Jarrah said he knows of at least 60 activists who have been detained by al Qaeda gunmen or have simply gone missing.

One man still living in rebel-controlled territory near the central city of Hama described the fear that still forces him to conceal his identity - as he did when Assad held the area.

"I live in a liberated country area near Hama and I walk around looking over my shoulder all the time," he said. "It is like we are back to the old days when we were running from the mukhabarat. But now we are running from our Islamist brothers."

Though he himself favors an Islamic state, the activist said that his online condemnations of sectarian killings of civilians who belonged to Assad's Alawite minority prompted warnings from Islamist militants that he should keep quiet.

Like the government's security service, Islamist groups keep a close eye on what activists are saying on the Web.

"They know everything," an activist from Deir al-Zor said. "One word can get you killed or make you disappear ... They look for our names, what we said to this newspaper or to that magazine. They watch us like hawks. And then they act."

Rami Jarrah and others were publicly condemned in an online post under the headline: "Western agents in Raqqa, or democracy activists? In religious terms, is there much difference?"

In the middle of a civil war that shows little sign of abating despite international plans for a peace conference in January, Syrians have limited means to oppose the armed groups.

Jarrah said those who campaigned for free speech must bear some blame for their predicament: "We used to say 'It's OK, they believe in God and fight on the frontlines'," he said.

"So we ignored their atrocities."

Abdullah, the activist who fled Aleppo province, argued that the experience of standing up to the Assad family after four decades of submission would mean Syrians may more quickly break the new "barrier of fear" to speak up against al Qaeda.

There have been signs of anti-Islamist demonstrations.

Some people filmed themselves marching this month outside a building in Aleppo where they believed ISIL was holding fellow activists. A video on YouTube shows about 30 of them chanting: "Shame! Shame! Kidnapped in free, rebel territory!"

But, just as Assad accuses his opponents of playing stooges to foreign powers, militant Islamists in Syria say they will not heed complaints from activists they also view as traitors.

One Syrian blogger who is close to another al Qaeda-linked group, al-Nusra Front, dismissed accounts of oppression and intimidation from democratic activists as exaggerated and intended to "please the West" by slandering Islamists.

"Those who accuse Islamists of violations," he said, "Are following a Western agenda."

(Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

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The Free Syrian Army began as a simple group of fighters battling Assad. But Ruth Sherlock, in Antakya, finds their mission is now making millions from bribery and extortion

The Free Syrian Army commander leant against the door of his four-wheel drive BMW X5 with tinted windows and watched as his men waded through the river on the Syrian border moving the barrels of smuggled petroleum to Turkey.

Feeling the smooth wedge of American bank notes he had just been given in exchange, he was suddenly proud of everything he had become.

In three short years he had risen from peasant to war lord: from a seller of cigarettes on the street of a provincial village to the ruler of a province, with a rebel group to man his checkpoints and control these lucrative smuggling routes.

The FSA, a collection of tenuously coordinated, moderately Islamic, rebel groups was long the focus of the West’s hopes for ousting President Bashar al-Assad.

But in northern Syria, the FSA has now become a largely criminal enterprise, with commanders more concerned about profits from corruption, kidnapping and theft than fighting the regime, according to a series of interviews with The Sunday Telegraph.

“There are many leaders in the revolution that don’t want to make the regime fall because they are loving the conflict,” said Ahmad al-Knaitry, commander of the moderate Omar Mokhtar brigade in the Jebel az-Zawiya area, south-west of Idlib city. “They have become princes of war; they spend millions of dollars, live in castles and have fancy cars.”

At the beginning of the Syrian war, cafés in Antakya, the dusty Turkish town on the border with Syria, was alive with talk of revolution.

Rebel commanders were often seen poring over maps discussing the next government target. Almost three years later the fight against Bashar al-Assad is long forgotten. Discussion now surrounds fears of the growing power of al-Qaeda’s Syrian outfit, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and the criminality and corruption that grips rebel-held areas.

Syria’s north has been divided into a series of fiefdoms run by rival warlords.

With no overarching rule of law, every city, town and village comes under the control of a different commander. A myriad of checkpoints are dotted across the provinces: there are approximately 34 on the short road from the Turkish border to Aleppo alone. It is a dog-eat-dog existence, where men vie for control of territory, money, weapons and smuggling routes; it is, disgruntled civilians say, a competition for the spoils of war.

“I used to feel safe travelling around Aleppo and in [the neighbouring] Idlib province,” said one Aleppo resident who works with a local charity to distribute food to civilians in the area. “Now I am afraid to leave the street outside my home. Every time you move you risk being robbed, kidnapped, or beaten. It all depends on how the men on the checkpoints you are crossing feel that day.”

Fuel smuggling has burgeoned into a massive business, where smugglers and fighters take oil from the country’s rebel-held fields in the north, crudely refine it and pass it through illegal routes along the porous border with Turkey. Some rebel brigades have given up the fight against the regime entirely to run the operations that line their own pockets; others are using it to fund their military actions, locals explained.

Some fighting groups manage the transfer of crude oil from the field to the refinery and then to the border, others have simply set up checkpoints that impose levies on smuggler gangs.

“Three years ago the rebels really wanted to fight the regime,” said Ahmed, an opposition activist living in Raqqa, close to the country’s oil repositories.

“But then the FSA started to control the borders and the fuel. After that it changed from a revolution to a battle for oil. I know rebel groups from Aleppo and Deir Ezzor, and even from Homs in the south of the country, that come here to get a share of the spoils.”

The West has long viewed the FSA as its best ally in the melee of fighting groups in Syria. Western diplomats have worked hard to promote the idea of a command and control structure in which a “Supreme Military Council” provides supplies and orders to outfits on the ground.

The CIA was part of an “operations room” designed to ensure the weapons supplied by Gulf sponsors and channelled through Turkey went to Western-friendly, FSA-affiliated fighters. The United States has even offered limited non-lethal military support in the form of thousands of food packs.

But competition between the main proxy backers of the FSA, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the lack of a real military commitment from Western powers and chronic infighting from the outset sent the FSA into decline before it had been even been properly formed. Lacking financial and military support, or a clear strategy, groups in the north began to fragment. Men and weapons seeped away to the better organised, better funded Islamist groups, allowing al-Qaeda to strengthen its foothold in Syria.

Mahmoud, a rebel fighter from Jisr al-Shugour in Idlib, detailed the painful decline of his fighting unit. It is a story oft repeated across northern Syria. “We joined the revolution when men only had hunting shotguns to defend their villages. In the first months we liberated our town, took terrain and we were happy, we had a case to fight the regime. We were bringing freedom to our people,” he said.

He recalled how his comrades had planted home-made roadside bombs at the entrances to their town to block the regime’s tanks. “Back then we were a group of brothers, not officers with soldiers, leaders with their men. We were friends,” he said.

In April this year, the mood started to turn. “People arrived who were not with the revolution, they were only interested in selling guns,” he said. “They called themselves FSA, but they had no interest in fighting Assad. They seized areas that were already free of the regime and set up checkpoints on roads there and started charging people for access.

“Some of the men in my brigade started working with them.”

One officer, Ahmed Hamis, had been a representative in the Supreme Military Council for the Jisr al-Shugour area in Idlib province and had fought honestly against the regime, Mahmoud said. “Then a foreign sponsor started supporting him with money and weapons. He broke away to form a small gang.

“He has a lot of weapons but he hasn’t run one battle against the regime. He has no time for that because he has his own business, smuggling diesel and setting up checkpoints to levy taxes,” he said. “He also deals in kidnappings. If they catch a government soldier they’ll sell him back to his family.”

With little practical support coming from the Supreme Military Council, Mahmoud’s group started to falter. “Because we were not thieving, we had no money to operate. Many of our men had to leave to find jobs. We were weak and eventually we had to disband,” he said.

“My commander had been one of the first people to defect from the Syrian army. But now we don’t have any mission, and we don’t have any soldiers for fighting. My commander keeps asking his fighters to come back. He is desperate.”

At least 85 per cent of the fighting groups he used to know have started smuggling oil and cars, he said. Many had also turned to exploiting the finances of sponsors funding the war against Assad. Rebel groups film their military operations and post the videos on YouTube for foreign donors to peruse. Each outfit has a unit of “journalists”, men who follow them into battle armed with a video camera.

Back in the office they edit the footage, often putting it to music and stamping it with the group’s logo, before posting it online or sending it to their sponsor as evidence that the military operation they paid for had been carried out.

“Often our sponsors will give us money for a specific operation, so when we do it, we film it as proof that we have used their money well,” said a media officer with the Farouk brigade, one of the best-known rebel outfits in Syria, in their office in Reyhanli.

But FSA commanders are increasingly using this to line their own pockets, focusing more on getting the sponsor’s funds than on the military operations, civilians and rebel commanders have said.

Rebels across the region expressed anger at the battle of Wadi Deif, a six-month siege of a huge military base which ended with the government retaining control of it.

That siege was led by Jamal Maarouf, a former handyman and one of the most powerful rebel commanders in Idlib province, but many other rebel outfits participated. Men who were in the battle told The Sunday Telegraph that their commanders had not wanted to end the battle because it was too profitable.

“Funds poured in from the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia,” said one fighter who asked not to be named. “And the siege itself made money: commanders were taking bribes from the Syrian regime to allow the regime to send food supplies to its men inside.”

For several months, foreign backers sent money and weapons to help finish the battle at Wadi Deif. It became, as one rebel put it, “like a like a chicken producing golden eggs”.

Mr Knaitry said: “We try not to talk about it about it because we don’t want our people to lose hope. But they became merchants with the martyr’s blood.”

Suddenly many of the fighters bought new homes, and started flashing more money. One man said of Jamaal Marouf: “He had nothing before the revolution, now he drives around in his personal bullet proof car.”

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Though numbers are small, US officials concerned about Americans fighting in Syrian civil war

RALEIGH, North Carolina (AP) — Federal officials say Americans are joining the bloody civil war in Syria, raising the chances they could become radicalized by al-Qaida-linked militant groups and return to the U.S. as battle-hardened security risks.

The State Department says it has no estimates of how many Americans have taken up weapons to fight military units loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad in the conflict that has killed more than 100,000 people over 2 ½ years. Other estimates — from an arm of the British defense consultant IHS Jane's and from experts at a nonprofit think tank in London — put the number of Americans at a couple of dozen. The IHS group says al-Qaida-linked fighters number about 15,000, with total anti-Assad forces at 100,000 or more.

This year, at least three Americans have been charged with planning to fight beside Jabhat al-Nusrah — a radical Islamic organization that the U.S. considers a foreign terrorist group — against Assad. The most recent case involves a Pakistani-born North Carolina man arrested on his way to Lebanon.

At a Senate homeland security committee hearing this month, Sen. Thomas Carper said: "We know that American citizens as well as Canadian and European nationals have taken up arms in Syria, in Yemen and in Somalia. The threat that these individuals could return home to carry out attacks is real and troubling."

The hearing came about two weeks after the FBI and other officers arrested Basit Sheikh, 29, at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport on charges he was on his way to join Jabhat al-Nusrah. Sheikh, a legal resident of the United States, had lived quietly, without a criminal record, in a Raleigh suburb for five years before his Nov. 2 arrest. A similar arrest came in April in Chicago. And in September, authorities in Virginia released an Army veteran accused of fighting alongside the group after a secret plea deal.

In August, outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller told ABC News that he was concerned about Americans fighting in Syria, specifically "the associations they will make and, secondly, the expertise they will develop, and whether or not they will utilize those associations, utilize that expertise, to undertake an attack on the homeland."

Current FBI Director James Comey said this month that he worried about Syria becoming a repeat of Afghanistan in the 1980s, after the Soviet invasion, with foreign fighters attracted there to train. The FBI refused to say whether it's directed agents to increase efforts to stop Americans bound for Syria.

In the case of Sheikh, his North Carolina home isn't considered a breeding ground for terrorist activity. But Aaron Zelin, who works for both the London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, notes that Sheikh lived about three hours from the hometown of Samir Khan, the editor of an English-language al-Qaida magazine who was killed in a drone attack in Yemen.

Sheikh is charged with planning to assist a group the State Department has declared a terrorist organization. It's not illegal for Americans who also hold citizenship in another country to fight in that country's military. But American citizenship can be lost for voluntarily serving in foreign armed forces hostile to the U.S.

For five months this year, Sheikh didn't know he was being monitored as he posted messages and videos on Facebook expressing support for jihadi militants fighting Assad's forces, according to a Nov. 2 sworn affidavit by FBI Special Agent Jason Maslow in support of the warrant to arrest Sheikh.

In August, Sheikh commented to an undercover FBI employee's posts on a Facebook page promoting Islamic extremism. The two struck up an online relationship, the affidavit said. Sheikh told the informant he planned to trek to Syria to join "a brigade in logistics, managing medical supplies." Days later, Sheikh said he'd bought a one-way ticket to travel to Turkey in hopes of making contact with people who would get him to Syria.

Sheikh said he backed out because "he could not muster the strength to leave his parents," the affidavit said. Sheikh said he had traveled to Turkey last year hoping to join the fight in Syria, but became dispirited by his experience with people who claimed to be part of the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army. After Sheikh expressed online support for Jabhat al-Nusrah and interest in traveling to the war zone, the FBI employee suggested Sheikh contact a person with the group — another FBI informant.

Sheikh made contract, describing Jabhat al-Nusrah as the most disciplined group of anti-Assad fighters, the affidavit said. "I'm not scared," Sheikh wrote, according to the affidavit. "I'm ready."

Two federal public defenders appointed to represent Sheikh are barred by local court practice from discussing their cases, spokeswoman Elizabeth Luck said. Sheikh's father, Javed Sheikh, said his son was falsely accused but that he trusts U.S. courts to find the truth.

A federal magistrate ruled that Sheikh should be detained until his trial because there was clear evidence that he wouldn't appear if released on bond and that there was a "serious risk" to the community if he were freed.

Basit Sheikh's arraignment is scheduled for January. He could face up to 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted.

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Emery Dalesio can be reached at http://twitter.com/emerydalesio

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