Three years and three months on, the "Friends of Syria" failed to bring the "regime" down. On the contrary, it has got the military upper hand, while the organizations which the U.S. and Saudi Arabia had listed as terrorists got the upper hand in the rebel-held areas.
Whatever military supplies the "moderate" rebels could get will only prolong the war, postpone any political settlement and perpetuate and exacerbate the worsening humanitarian crisis.
Civilian protesters, political opposition and "secular" armed rebels were hijacked, sidelined and finally dumped by the mainstream terrorists, whose backbone consists of "foreign fighters," thus dooming any political solution for a long time to come and vindicating Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's determination on last August 4 that, "No solution can be reached with terror except by striking it with an iron fist."
As early as March 2012 Sara Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, had warned that, --The Syrian government's brutal tactics cannot justify abuses by armed opposition groups."
Schools, universities, hospitals, health clinics, churches, mosques, religious monuments, power grids, railways, bridges, oil fields, historical sites, museum assets, police symbols of public safety and order and other infrastructure were targeted by the rebels with unprecedented level of destruction and civilian plight.
A survey, conducted by the Relief and Works Agency of UN's Microfinance Programs and released early last April, said it would take 30 years for the Syrian economy to recover to its 2010 level.
According to the SOHR, the infighting among rebels has claimed more than five thousand casualties in 2014. The infighting over border crossings and oil fields displaced more than one hundred thousand civilians in north eastern Syria during the past month.
As a strategy, the rebels since the very beginning have been using Syrian civilians en masse as a bargaining chip and as human shields, a fact which the "Friends of Syria" have been keen to blackout.
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