From band of brothers to princes of war http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10485970/Syria-dispatch-from-band-of-brothers-to-princes-of-war.html the [[[[[FSA commander leant against the door of his four-wheel drive BMW X5 ]]]]] with tinted windows and watched as his men waded through the river on the Syrian border moving the barrels of smuggled petroleum to Turkey. Feeling the smooth wedge of US banknotes he had just been given in exchange, he was suddenly proud of everything he had become.[[[ In three short years he had risen from peasant to war lord:]]]]
[[[[[from a seller of cigarettes on the street of a provincial village to the ruler of a province, with a rebel group to man his checkpoints and control these lucrative smuggling routes The FSA, a collection of tenuously coordinated, moderately Islamic, rebel groups was long the focus of the West’s hopes for ousting Pres Assad. But in northern Syria, the FSA has now become a largely criminal enterprise, with commanders more concerned about profits from corruption, kidnapping and theft than fighting the regime, according to a series of interviews with The Sunday Telegraph.Ahmad al-Knaitry, commander of the moderate Omar Mokhtar brigade in the Jebel az-Zawiya area, south-west of Idlib city, said:[[[[[[''There are many leaders in the revolution that don’t want to make the regime fall because they are loving the conflict. They have become princes of war. They spend millions of dollars, live in castles and have fancy cars.'']]]]]]]]]]]