France founding Syrian rebels in new push to oust Assad

France has emerged as the most prominent backer of Syria's armed opposition and is now directly funding rebel groups around Aleppo as part of a new push to oust the embattled Assad regime.

Large sums of cash have been delivered by French government proxies across the Turkish border to rebel commanders in the past month, diplomatic sources have confirmed. The money has been used to buy weapons inside Syria and to fund armed operations against loyalist forces.

Some of the French cash has reached Islamist groups who were desperately short of ammunition and who had increasingly turned for help towards al-Qaida aligned jihadist groups in and around Aleppo.
One such group, Liwa al-Tawhid, an 8,000-strong militia that fights under the Free Syria Army banner, said it had been able to buy ammunition for the first time since late in the summer, a development that would help it resume military operations without the support of implacable jihadi organisations, such as Jabhat al-Nusra, which is now playing a lead role in northern Syria.
A rebel siege of Damascus has now entered its second week. And although loyalist army divisions appear at no immediate risk of losing the capital, military units elsewhere in the country have lost influence over large swathes of land and are under increasing pressure over supply lines.

Rebels have been under pressure from the US, Britain, France andTurkey to fight under a joint command and control structure rather than as an assortment of militias, which often work at cross purposes.
At a meeting in Istanbul on Friday, commanders of the Free Syria Army – more of a brand than a fighting force throughout the civil war – agreed to establish a 30-member unified leadership.
Officials say the increased Nato presence in Turkey makes it likely that Turkish air space and military bases would be used in the event of a decision being made by the US to seize Syria's chemical weapons stockpiles.