20% of Syrian Rebels: From the West

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Israeli intelligence believes that about 20 percent of the 10,000 foreign Islamic terrorist rebels in Syria are from the West and that this percentage is increasing.

According to the Strategy Page report Britain has responded by revoking the citizenship of 20 dual-citizenship British citizens among the 240 British Moslems known to be fighting in Syria. This caused protests from British Moslems but the government pointed out that British citizenship is a privilege not a right, especially for those legally holding passports from two countries.

Israel also believes that as many as 15,000 Hezbollah men have fought in Syria in the last year, most of them serving only a few months at a time because Hezbollah taking sides in Syria is not popular with most Lebanese and many Hezbollah supporters as well. Israel admits that it has been coordinating its Syrian intel efforts with Western and (more discreetly) Arab countries. This effort shows the rebels losing ground to government forces, largely because of lack of unity among the rebels and increasing fighting between rebel groups.

For weeks now the government has been bombing and shelling pro-rebel neighborhoods in Aleppo and Damascus, causing over several thousand casualties and killing about a thousand people. Most of the casualties have been civilians, because these attacks are deliberately directed at civilians to force them to flee or reduce their support for armed rebels.

iHLS – Israel Homeland Security

Particularly deadly have been the improvised barrel bombs rolled out of helicopters. Syrian helicopters are not equipped to drop aerial bombs and for most of December have been seen dropping barrels filled with flammable liquids and explosives, rigged to explode when they hit the ground.

This sort of thing is not unique to Syria and has been seen for years in Sudan, where the government uses “barrel bombs” rolled out of transports and helicopters. These are not precision weapons, but if the target is a village or other residential area, they are accurate enough. The Syrian barrel bombs have been used frequently against civilian targets like markets, mosques, hospitals, schools and apartment buildings.