Konflikten i Syrien

Hans uttalande är faktiskt ett hot, och ingen emotionell reaktion. Shejk Yusuf al-Qaradawi åtnjuter stor respekt i sunniternas kretsar. Han är en andlig ledare för terroristorganisationen ”Muslimska brödraskapet” i Egypten, Syrien, Libyen och andra muslimska länder.

The official position is that the US has refused to allow heavy weapons into Syria.
But there's growing evidence that U.S. agents—particularly murdered ambassador Chris Stevens—were at least aware of heavy weapons moving from Libya to jihadist Syrian rebels.

This list of jihadi and other Islamist groups should not be taken as a portrait of the insurgent movement as a whole. Several important non-Islamist factions have been excluded, such as the FSA's Omari Brigade in Deraa Province. Even so, the Syrian revolution's gradual descent into sectarian warfare is now empowering the most extreme factions within what is already effectively an all-Sunni insurgency. If the conflict continues down its current path, the "Islamization" of the rebel movement is likely to engulf even the most pro-Western factions of the FSA. In such a situation, jihadi factions will grow in influence very rapidly.

The Iraq War offers a sobering portrait of what this might look like. The Iraqi resistance was originally spawned from a secular albeit Sunni-dominated regime, but in little more than a year the sectarian conflict had transformed it into a jihadi insurgency spearheaded by al-Qaida. For Syria, a similar development would be catastrophic -- and the Middle East would likely feel its broader effects for years to come.

Analysts said Syria’s fleet of Mi-25 Hind-D attack helicopters, which numbered 36 at the start of the conflict, is insufficient to hold back rebels as the number of fronts, from Aleppo and Idlib in the north to the suburbs of Damascus in the south and Hama and Homs in the center of the country, continues to proliferate.

Mr. Holliday, the former American intelligence officer, put the estimate of working Hind-Ds even lower. “Assessing a max of 15 operational,” he wrote by e-mail.

As backup attack gunships, Syria possesses a similarly sized fleet of Gazelle helicopters, a platform more suited for attacking armor than foot-mobile guerrillas, and a much larger fleet of Mi-8 and Mi-17 utility helicopters, another Russian-made design.

Open-source estimates indicate Syria began its crackdown with 100 Mi-8s or Mi-17s, along with more than 30 Gazelles.

Robert Hewson, a specialist in air-launched weapons at IHS Jane’s, noted that the pylons on the Mi-8 and Mi-17 helicopters can be fitted with many of the same Russian-made weapons carried by the Mi-25, including one of the most powerful pieces of ordnance that have been verified thus far in the conflict: 550-pound OFAB free-fall bombs.

Taken together, Syria’s helicopters have been used in attacks with high-explosive rockets fired from pods, in the release of unguided bombs like the OFAB and possibly in at least one cluster-munitions strike. These are weapons commonly associated, in the public’s mind, with fixed-wing attack aircraft, including Syria’s MIG 23s.

But the Mi-8 and Mi-17 helicopters have many other missions. By early summer, rebel commanders and Western analysts said, many Syrian units were largely confined to their garrisons. Some, as in Azaz, had been principally resupplied by these utility helicopters — a mission that demanded many flight hours and diverted aircraft from ground-attack roles.

Mr. Holliday said that perhaps 60 of those helicopters were still in full-time service.

“This army is going to start breaking,” said Jeffrey White, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst now studying Syria for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Not the whole thing at once, but pieces of it will break.”

Mr. White said that by his estimates the Syrian military suffered nearly 1,100 soldiers killed in July, and is losing more soldiers and officers to defections. The loyalties of many commanders and units are suspect, he added, and months of sustained combat are no doubt taking a heavy toll on tanks and aircraft in a military that he said “was never known for maintenance.”

Defections of government troops and seizures of armaments are also a growing problem. Rebels in Aleppo claim to have control of a total of 14 T-72 and T-55 tanks and many indirect-fire weapons, including artillery pieces as well as mortars.

“The tanks are driven by our members, and their specialty is driving tanks, that’s what they did before they defected,” said Bashir al-Haji, a Free Syrian Army commander in Aleppo. “The tanks and artillery are important in our fight because they enable us to shell the regime from a distance.”

More potent arms for the rebels and the strain on helicopters may help explain why the Syrian military recently began using L-39 trainer jets in and around Aleppo, Syria’s most heavily populated city.

Another explanation for the appearance of jets “is that the Syrian military is fighting for Aleppo without enough artillery tubes,” said Joseph Holliday, a former American intelligence officer who covers the war for the Institute for the Study of War, in Washington.