Konflikten i Syrien

The Secretary-General of the Syrian National Coalition, Yahya Maktabi, has submitted his resignation to the Political Committee of the Coalition after he was refused permission to return to Turkey several times, sources have revealed.
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The sources confirmed Maktabi’s resignation was submitted on Sunday, September 27, and is awaiting approval. If it is accepted, the Coalition will elect either Nasr al-Hariri or Haitham Rahmeh to replace Maktabi.

Haitham Rahmeh: Opposition Factions of FSA's Supreme Military Command to Meet in October
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The general-coordinator for the committee overseeing the formation of the Free Syrian Army’s new Supreme Military Command, Haitham Rahmeh, revealed in an interview with Madar al-Youm that a conference will be held in October gathering all military factions involved in the Command’s formation.

"We worked over the past months to reshape the military council, and after communicating with military factions in various Syrian provinces, we decided to hold a conference for those factions which will decide the shape and mechanisms of the Military Council, as well as the number of its members," Rahmeh said.

Rahmeh confirmed that factions sending delegates to attend the conference will agree on the number of council members and the size of representation. Rahmeh explained that the current idea is that every 1,000 fighters – for example – will be represented by a delegate in the new Military Council. The notion is problematic, he says, as there are large factions with over 3,000 fighters, while there are small factions that have only a few hundred fighters. Rahmeh said that it was suggested smaller factions could elect one representative to be their delegate to the Council.

“The committee initially tried to work on the formation of a national army – which will be the second step after the formation of the Military Council – but we were told that we must be committed to the establishment of the Military Council from the fighters on the ground," Rahmeh said.

"On this basis, we communicated with the troops on the ground, for example: the First Army and al-Yarmouk in the south of Syria, the Army of Islam and Ajnad ash-Sham in Damascus, the Corps of Homs and Jaish Tahrir Homs in Homs, and other formations in Hama and Idleb, as well as large and small Turkmen factions, and some Ismaili forces,” he added.

Rahmeh expressed his hope in communicating with the emerging Druze force, stressing that they do not currently have actual military forces, but there is a core to form such forces. "We have dissident Druze officers within the project," Rahmeh said.

Rahmeh stressed that the committee has tried to include all sects in its communication, including Alawites.
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Rahmeh said he believes the Ahrar al-Sham Movement is facing a big challenge in becoming accepted by the international community as a legitimate force. “The status of the Movement is unsettled; sometimes it is accepted, sometimes it is not, which puts the Movement under a lot of pressure. They are required to do their best,” he said.

Ekot avslöjade förra veckan att en imam knuten till Stockholmsmoskén ägnar sig åt omfattande vapensmuggling till Syrien. Nu får Sveriges Radio hård kritik från den muslimska människorättsaktivisten Yasir Al-Sayed Issa, som menar att vi i Sverige istället borde vara stolta över den kriminella imamen.
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Det var i torsdags som Ekot uppmärksammade att svensk polis vägrade utreda den svenska medborgaren och imamen Haytham Rahmeh, som bryter mot krigsmateriellagen genom att smuggla vapen till Syrien.

Smugglingen sker via hans organisation Commission for civilians protection, som står islamistiska Muslimska brödraskapet nära.

Rahmeh, som har varit anställd av Stockholmsmoskén, uppges dessutom ha grundat en egen miniarmé bestående av 2000 muslimska krigare som slåss mot den syriska regimen.

The Brotherhood formally decided to provide money and weapons directly to rebel groups on the ground in late March 2012. There is, however, lingering controversy as to when exactly its active support for armed rebels began. Some observers contend that a September 2011 decision by the General Committee to Protect Civilians, a group headed by former Muslim Brotherhood member Haytham Rahmeh, to send weapons and money to fighters in Homs was the Brotherhood’s first cautious, low-profile step in such a direction. Groups thought to have received generous Muslim Brotherhood support in Syria include, among others, the al-Farouk Battalion in Homs, the Tawhid Brigade in Aleppo, the Suqur al-Sham in Jabal Zawiya, and the Ahrar al-Sham in Idlib.

Putting its hypocritical and biased nature on full display once again, the alleged human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, was recently caught in an attempt to fabricate “evidence” of Assad’s use of barrel bombs in civilian areas for the purposes of further demonizing the secular Syrian government.

There was only one problem with HRW’s tweet – the photograph the organization provided was not Aleppo.
In fact, the damage that had been wrought upon the civilian area in the photograph was not committed by the Syrian military but by the United States.

Militant Islamist rebels in Syria linked to al-Qaeda have asked for "understanding and forgiveness" for cutting off and putting on display the wrong man's head.
In a public appearance filmed and posted online, members of Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, one brandishing a knife, held up a bearded head before a crowd in Aleppo. They triumphantly described the execution of what they said was a member of an Iraqi Shia militia fighting for President Bashar al-Assad.
But the head was recognised from the video as originally belonging to a member of Ahrar al-Sham, a Sunni Islamist rebel group that often fights alongside ISIS though it does not share its al-Qaeda ideology.