Syria’s ‘western-backed’ rebels? Not in weapons

 'After the Geneva peace talks floundered this year, rebel leaders say Washington began training small groups of carefully vetted mainstream rebel groups in Qatar and supplying them with TOW anti-tank missiles, but these have done nothing to offset the regime’s air power.

 In the meantime, rebel groups have continued to all sorts of captured and homemade weapons, including something as crude as medieval-style catapults and trebuchets, to launch explosives at regime targets.'

 It has been said many times that those who identify themselves as anti-imperialists have nothing to say about the billions of dollars of weaponry the Assad régime has received from its backer Russia, with which it has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians, by contrast with the US airstrikes, which were never going to happen, and were a convenient way to salve Western liberal consciences with the idea that they were saving Syrians from war.