BY JKAMAL and NEBI QEN The Associated Press Two significant defeats at the hands of Syrian government troops have exposed the limitations of the country's rebel forces: They are low on cash, running out of weapons and facing a fiercely loyal military that will fight to the death. Insisting that their drive to oust President Bashar Assad by force remains strong, the Free Syrian Army says the arms shortage is the main obstacle. “Send us money, we're desperate. Send us weapons,” Ahmad Kassem, who coordinates military operations for the FSA, said in an interview. “We don't need fighters. We have excess men who can fight, but we need weapons to protect our land and honor.” In the past year, the rebels briefly seized small amounts of territory, most recently in the Baba Amr district of Homs and the city of Idlib in northern Syria. After nearly four weeks of relentless shelling, the government reclaimed Baba Amr on March 1 following an assault that killed hundreds of people and transformed the neighborhood into a symbol of the uprising. The humanitarian situation in Baba Amr, part of the third-largest city in Syria, remains catastrophic for civilians. Government forces next turned their guns on Idlib, another bastion of opposition support. On Tuesday, government forces took control of the city in a three-day operation — significantly shorter but still bloody. The Free Syrian Army has emerged as the most potent armed force fighting Assad. It is highly decentralized, with its leaders in the relative safety of neighboring countries. The rebels have not come close to carving out a zone akin to Benghazi in eastern Libya, the center of the successful uprising against Muammar Gaddafi last year. “If we had a safe haven to operate out of inside Syria, we would've won the battle against Bashar a long time ago,” said Muneef Al-Zaeem, an FSA spokesman based in Jordan. The defeats have sapped some of the rebels' momentum, but the fighters say they are using the opportunity to regroup. “We absolutely do not feel defeated, not at all,” said Fayez Amru, a FSA member who defected from the military about a month ago and is now based in Turkey. But he lashed out at the international community, saying even the most blistering criticism of Assad will not help those facing down the regime's tanks. He appealed for weapons. “I wonder about this international community, which has not offered the Syrian people a single gun,” he said, bitterly. “People in the so-called free, civilized world should be ashamed of themselves.” Syria has a complex web of allegiances in the region that extend to Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, raising fears of wider violence. Analysts see reason to be concerned, given that criminals could try to exploit burgeoning rebel force. Some observers already see trouble brewing. “The recruits into this ‘army' range from fathers defending their families to bereaved young men to defectors fighting for their lives, but its ranks are not devoid of fundamentalist militants and unreconstructed villains,” according to a recent analysis of the Syrian conflict by the International Crisis Group. “To date, the latter elements have not been predominant, although they are all that the regime, its supporters and its allies want to see.” In recent months, interviews with more than a dozen FSA members indicate that the group's weapons come from Iraq and Lebanon, as well as from army defectors who kept their weapons when they abandoned their posts. One FSA fighter, who is based in Turkey, said it was easiest to smuggle in arms from Iraq, but the quality of the weapons was bad. “Our RPGs are Russian-made and mostly come in from Iraq, but four out of five rounds are a dud,” he said.. __
