NEAR TURKISH-SYRIAN BORDER – Ammar al-Wawi, a one-time Syrian officer now second-in-command of the rebel Free Syrian Army, has categorically denied the charges levelled by the Syrian authorities that there are elements among the FSA’s ranks of Al-Qaeda, or mujahedeen from Afghanistan and Pakistan fighting against Syrian army.
“All of us who make up the Free Syrian Army are Syrian; we were all soldiers in the regular army.” And despite the fact that the FSA, “armed only with Kalashnikovs and pistols,” is at an overwhelming disadvantage against the tanks and artillery of Bashar al-Assad’s army, Wawi says he is convinced the president will fall. But when is another question.
Wawi is determined that it will be Syrians who overthrow a dictatorship that has lasted nearly 50 years. “Assad has killed so many people that he deserves a fate worse than Gaddafi’s,” said Ammar al-Wawi.
Civil unrest is increasing the risk of hunger for 1.4m  people in Syria, which must raise cereal imports by a third to offset a loss in output, the United Nations’ food agency said Thursday.
France is opposed to calls for foreign powers to arm the opposition groups fighting Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, fearing a descent into civil war, Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said.
An Iranian aircraft carrying 40 tonnes of “medical aid” arrived in Syria on Thursday, the first of four such shipments destined for Tehran’s regional ally, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Meanwhile, 23 mutilated corpses were found on Thursday near a Syrian protest city seized by regime forces, monitors said, as the regime’s bloody crackdown entered its second year to a rising world outcry. Human rights monitors said the victims had been blindfolded and handcuffed before being shot dead and their bodies dumped outside the northwestern city of Idlib, in an apparent repeat of a similar “massacre” in the flashpoint city of Homs last weekend.
As the Syrian regime and the opposition continued to trade blame for the earlier killings, both sides organised mass demonstrations to mark the first anniversary of the eruption of anti-government protests in the city of Daraa, south of the capital, which was again the scene of deadly violence on Wednesday.
“Twenty-three bodies with marks of extreme torture were found near Mazraat Wadi Khaled, west of the city of Idlib,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights in a statement.
It also said at least five others were killed in raids by security forces across the province of Idlib on Thursday and that violent clashes broke out overnight as rebels attacked army posts in the eastern region of Deir Ezzor.
Human Rights Watch demanded an end to the “scorched earth methods” being deployed by President Bashar al-Assad and that China and Russia stop blocking UN efforts to take tough action.
“City after city, town after town, Syria’s security forces are using their scorched earth methods while the (UN) Security Council’s hands remain tied by Russia and China,” HRW’s Sarah Leah Whitson.