DOHA, Qatar – The newly elected leader of Syria's main opposition bloc said in an interview Saturday that the international community should support those trying to topple President Bashar Al-Assad's regime without any conditions and not link aid to an overhaul of the opposition leadership. George Sabra, head of the Syrian National Council, said he and other opposition figures are disappointed with foreign backers. “Unfortunately, we get nothing from them, except some statements, some encouragement” while Assad's allies “give the regime everything,” Sabra told The Associated Press on the sidelines of a weeklong SNC conference in Doha. He said the Syrian opposition needs hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and weapons to defeat regime forces. Sabra, 65, was heading an SNC delegation Saturday in talks with rival opposition groups on forging a new, broader opposition leadership group — an idea promoted by Western and Arab backers of those trying to oust Assad. The SNC has been reluctant to join such a group, fearing it would lose influence within a larger platform. Senior SNC figures suggested Saturday's meeting would be the start of several days of negotiations over the size and mission of such a group. They said they are willing to join a larger group, but that the details need to be worked out carefully. “We have started an open dialogue with our brothers and looked at their initiative,” Sabra told a news conference ahead of the resumption of talks in the Qatari capital with other factions. “But we have our own point of view and our own ideas that we plan to put forward,” he said. “The SNC is older than... any other initiative” on the table, said Sabra, adding that no opposition group should be forced under the banner of another. The 10-member transitional government would be elected by a new 60-member umbrella group drawn from civilian activists and rebel fighters inside Syria as well as the exiles who have dominated the SNC. “The SNC's requests for delays are a bad thing - they want to take over everything and the only thing that matters to them is who forms the leadership while our number one concern ought to be the bloodshed,” one dissident, Haytham Maleh, said. In the AP interview, Sabra acknowledged that some of the criticism of the SNC was justified, but said that this should not serve as an excuse to hold up international aid. “Don't hang (your) delay to provide Syrians what they need, what they want, on the neck of the opposition,” he said, in a message to the international community. “Let's say, we have our responsibility, no doubt about that, and we will carry this responsibility, but we need from the international community to carry their responsibility also,” he said. Sabra, a Christian and left-wing veteran dissident, spent eight years in Syrian jails in the 1980s and 1990s. He was jailed twice after the outbreak of the uprising against Assad in March 2011, and fled to Jordan on foot in the fall of 2011 to avoid further detention. – Agencies
