Syrian Rebel Leader Deals With Ties to Other Side

GEN. SALIM IDRIS, convinced that the last stand http://www.nikefacebook.com of the Syrian Army in the cheap jordans on sale long, grisly fight to control Aleppo will take place soon at the Academy of Military Engineering, dreads the moment.It is not just the 2,000 or so well armed soldiers holed up there, inside the square kilometer campus on Aleppo’s eastern outskirts. Nor is it the reinforced concrete bunkers built under every building to withstand an Israeli air raid.The toughest part for him is his fondness for both the officers in charge and the campus itself. When he defected in July 2012, General Idris, now chief of staff of the rebel forces, was a brigadier in the Syrian Army and dean of the academy after teaching there for 20 years.”I cannot imagine that we will attack the academy,” General Idris said in a wide ranging interview in a hotel cafe. „All the officers inside the academy are my colleagues. cheap jordans shoes I don’t want to fight against them; I don’t want to see them killed or injured. I hope they leave before we attack.”"We cannot do anything about it if they don’t,” he said with a shrug.Much of Syria’s future rests on General Idris’s success on the battlefield. Critics say the newly unified command structure he presides over lacks both the ground presence and the heavy weapons that are so desperately needed. Without both, they say, it will be impossible for him to forge a cohesive force from the thousands of fractious, fiercely independent rebel brigades arrayed against the still formidable military of President Bashar al Assad.UNDER intense pressure from Western and Arab backers, hundreds of Free Syrian Army commanders gathered in Turkey cheap jordans china last December to select a 30 member Supreme Military Council, cheap jordans for sale which in turn chose General Idris as chief of staff.They unified, grudgingly, because they were promised heavy weapons, they said, in particular antiaircraft and antitank weapons, cheap air force and other, nonlethal aid.Some has materialized, although not nearly enough to transform the rebel effort, General Idris said. Secretary of State John Kerry this week pledged cheap jordans sale $60 million in additional nonlethal aid and training. The general stressed that cheap jordan sneakers the rebels need weapons and ammunition to fight the government, but would take anything they could get.”The fighter also needs food and medical aid and care and cotton and bandages and sterilizers the fighters need to live,” he said in a brief phone interview from northern Syria. „I was just visiting one of the military field hospitals. I swear that the cheap jordans in china situation there would make your heart bleed. The hospitals are so basic with very limited resources.”Previous American aid seemed to amount to a trickle of small, odd lots. The Americans gave him nine cheap jordans online ordinary black and gray Toyota pickup trucks, for example. General Idris kept three to move around with his staff and turned over the rest to field commanders. The communications equipment provided is too weak to reach across the country, he said, so he uses Skype. There were enough fatigues from the United States for 10,000 soldiers, which were nowhere near enough, given the roughly 300,000 rebel fighters, he said.In addition to planned training efforts by the Americans, General Idris is urging Washington to train handpicked commando teams to help secure Syria’s suspected stock of chemical weapons if the government teeters. As for financial support, General Idris said very little had been forthcoming.”We were promised a lot,” he said, „but when the moment of truth arrives they think a lot and give very little.”General Idris and various aides say that some 70 percent to 80 percent of cheap Air max shoes the field commanders are loyal to the joint military command, but other opposition leaders and rebel commanders say the number shrinks continuously because of the credibility gap created by the lack of a reliable weapons supply.”He is excellent, well respected and well liked he has a clean past,” said Emad ad Din al Rashid, an opposition leader in Istanbul. „But the problem is that cheap jordans china the Supreme Military Council is not a good representative of the battalions on the ground.”There is also no shortage of field commanders who say the council leaders are too identified with the Assad government and have too little battlefield experience. „He is a professor, not a soldier, ” said Abu Abdelrahman al Suri, the pseudonym of a commander of Ahrar al Sham, a jihadi fighting movement.Newsletter Sign UpContinue reading the main storyGeneral Idris and his officers bristle at such criticism, rattling off their years of military training and pointing out that they defected at great personal risk.Like many Syrian officers, General Idris joined the military to escape poverty. He was one of nine children raised by a farmer who grew grain in a hamlet called al Mubarakiyah, near Qattinah Lake just south of Homs. in wireless communications. At the academy, he taught digital electronic design. He married and had five children, but planned to retire to his village.An attack in May 2012 on al Mubarakiyah pushed him to defect. He called the generals he knew in the area, hoping to ward off the assault. None called back. The army killed three people and arrested 70, including his wife’s only brother. He has never been released.When news of the attack reached Aleppo, General Idris pretended to his fellow officers that nothing was amiss. „I could not tell them that the army came and destroyed the village they would have arrested me, accused me of being a traitor who supported the revolution.”He had just poured his savings into building his dream retirement house. It was destroyed, too. „I had not sat in my house for even an hour,” he said wistfully.General Idris, soft spoken and humble compared with many military men, said he received hundreds of telephone cheap air jordan calls daily, some angry, from commanders across Syria.He dispatches what he can. But he described a mysterious system whereby unknown donors pay money to arms dealers within Syria. When he requisitions supplies, cheap yeezys the black marketers fill the orders if the accounts are full. He can usually get the Kalashnikov bullets, rocket propelled grenades and small mortars cheap jordans from china that he needs. But if the accounts are empty, he gets nothing.Many rebel battalion commanders were civilians before the uprising. Having organized a brigade from men in their villages, they balk at taking orders and refuse to coordinate attacks.”They want everything from the chief of staff weapons, ammunition, money,” General Idris said. „But if you ask them what did you do with the ammunition and weapons, and how did you spend the money, well, they don’t like any commander to ask them what cheap nike shoes they are doing. But we cannot work in this way.”.

cheap jordans in china

cheap jordans online

cheap adidas

cheap jordans china

Cheap jordans

cheap jordans shoes

cheap jordans from china

cheap jordans free shipping

cheap air force

cheap air jordan

cheap cheap jordans free shipping jordans on sale

cheap Air max shoes

cheap yeezys

cheap jordans sale

cheap jordans for sale

cheap jordan sneakers

cheap nike shoes.