CIA gives fighters intel

WASHINGTON: The US Central Intelligence Agency has been feeding information to select rebel fighters in Syria to try to make them more effective against government troops, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.
Citing unnamed current and former US officials, the newspaper said the new CIA effort reflected a change in the administration’s approach that aims to strengthen secular rebel fighters.
The CIA has sent officers to Turkey to help vet rebels who receive arms shipments from Gulf allies, the report said. But administration officials cited concerns about some weapons going to radicals, the paper noted.
In Iraq, the CIA has been directed by the White House to work with elite counterterrorism units to help the Iraqis counter the flow of Al-Qaeda-linked fighters across the border with Syria, The Journal said.
According to the report, the West favors fighters aligned with the Free Syrian Army, which supports the Syrian Opposition Coalition political group.
Syrian opposition commanders said the CIA had been working with British, French and Jordanian intelligence services to train rebels in the use of various kinds of weapons, the paper said. The new aid to rebels doesn’t change the US decision against taking direct military action, the paper noted.
Meanwhile, Syrian opposition leaders are to address an annual summit of the Arab League for the first time in Qatar on Tuesday, but the bloc’s members remain divided over whether to give them Damascus’s vacant seat.
The Qatari hosts are vocal champions of the opposition fighting President Bashar Assad’s regime and said leaders of the armed opposition would definitely be joining Arab heads of state in Doha.
But they did not specify whether the Syrian National Coalition would be given Syria’s seat which has been vacant since its suspension from the 22-member bloc in November 2011. “Arab foreign ministers will decide on the issue of the seat” during a preparatory meeting in Doha on Sunday, an Arab League official told AFP.
The opposition alliance has begun steps to form an executive body to administer rebel-held territory inside Syria, electing Ghassan Hitto as interim premier at a meeting in Turkey on Tuesday.
But a League official said the National Coalition needed to go further. Hitto’s election “is important but is not enough,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We are still waiting for the formation of the interim government.”
Hitto will be among the opposition delegates addressing the Doha summit, National Coalition member Ahmed Ramadan said.
“For the first time ever, the delegation should be addressing the Arab summit.”
Hitto’s election highlighted deep divisions within the opposition bloc, with at least 12 of its 49 members announcing the following day that they were suspending their membership in protest. The dissidents included the Coalition’s deputy head Soheir Atassi and spokesman Walid Al-Bunni.