Islamic State training pilots to fly MiG fighter planes, says monitoring group

The answer to this is obviously to have a no-fly zone in Iraq, but not in Syria, in case it upsets Assad.

Syrian opposition report encircling foreign fightersWhen people talk about stopping foreign intervention in Syria, they should concentrate on those killing the Syrian people and arming those who do: the Iranians, Hezbollah and the Russians.

Britain's Syrian diaspora unites to build peace in their homeland

 "I see the conflict in Syria in the same context that Guernica came out of. Politically speaking and artistically speaking. I see the Spanish Civil War as similar to the Syrian Civil War now. When the Republicans got elected into government it was met with silence from the international community and basically the Spanish people were slaughtered, especially in Guernica. I think it was one of the first aerial bombardments in history."

US congressman Adam Kinzinger calls for Syria no-fly zone
'Mr Kinzinger said a no-fly zone would "equal the playing field" for the Free Syrian Army and stop the use of barrel bombs. "If they disappear, it's only going to be bad actors in Syria." '

#BBCtrending: Syria's nine-year-old YouTube storyteller

"My dream is to wake up in the morning
and water the plants on my balcony,
and look up at the sky,
and see only birds and pigeons."

Why ISIS Is Gaining Ground – and So Hard to Beat

'The Syrian opposition' here means the civilian population Assad is bombing, and so is at one with 'rebels' in needing to get rid of him.
"The rebels can’t divert resources from the fight against the regime to go fight ISIS. By doing so they would enable the regime to make additional gains, which in the case of Aleppo would be particularly devastating for the rebel militants and the Syrian opposition in general."

Now ISIS is under attack from guerrillas itself: Ultra-secret White Shroud group strike fear into terrorists by picking off fighters one by one
I remember the Free Syrian Army in Deir Ezzor appealing for help when they were under attack from ISIS, and nobody but the supporters of the Syrian revolution noticed.

In Jordan, Syrian and Iraqi exiles say they are key to crushing the Islamic State

' “There’s talk that support is on the way. We haven’t seen it,” said Assad Al Zuobi, a former brigadier general in the regular Syrian army who is a leader of the Free Syrian Army, or FSA, the loosely affiliated non-Islamist rebel factions. The Obama administration has said it will arm the moderate rebels; instead they have received non­lethal aid, such as night-vision goggles and communications equipment.
“Everything is much worse than it was 18 months ago, when the United States began promising to help,” he said.
FSA commanders here say plans being floated to take their fighters out of the battle and train them — not in Jordan or Syria, as the commanders would like, but in Saudi Arabia — is another delaying tactic.
“Our troops do not require training,” said Abulhadi Sari, a former brigadier general in the Syrian air force who is now an FSA commander. “What we require are weapons, weapons, weapons.” '

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
"VETO is a short film which sheds light on the current Syrian Revolution and the circumstances behind the transformation from peaceful movement to an armed revolution. VETO takes you through the last two years of this unbearable suffering with over 100,000 Syrian victims and more than 5 million displaced people, and a clueless world about how to stop this horrendous crime!"

John Rees joins Joe Biden's Blame Turkey Ignore Assad Coalition

John Rees joins Joe Biden's Blame Turkey Ignore Assad Coalition


Douchebag. Particularly hypocritical, given Rees' attacks on the Syrian opposition and silence about Assad for the last two years is this line, "One group of people are fighting for freedom and democracy and one group of people are trying to kill it."

Why the US will be forced to join the fight against Assad
"The Turkish reaction to an American policy that is clear that ISIL must go, but highly ambivalent about the future of Mr Al Assad, will be shared by most American allies in the region and all serious potential local forces that could emerge as the ground troop vanguard against ISIL in Syria.
Like it or not – and the Obama administration is not going to like it much – one way or another, and sooner rather than later, the United States is going to have to make the replacement of Mr Al Assad an explicit goal of its intervention in Syria. Otherwise, not only will Turkey stay out of the fight, no plausible local forces will sign up for the task either. And the entire enterprise will fail."

We Who Call Ourselves Internationalists Have Failed the Syrian People
"The Syrian opposition has not raised the red flag of socialism; they have not made strident attacks on US imperialism—their badly wounded limbs will not fit our ideologically perfect glass adornments. On the country, the Syrian revolution challenges the left to respond positively to the most basic revolutionary demands: the right to live free from state-terror, the right to live at all. If our ideological constructions cannot fit these demands then we cannot call ourselves revolutionaries."