Australian couple killed by Syrian rebels: family says

[Jesus Malverde]

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

An Australian man and his wife are being mourned by Sydney's Muslim community, as their reported deaths bring the number of Australians believed killed in the Syrian conflict to seven.

Yusuf Ali and his wife, Amira, of Queensland and formerly Granville were ''in their house in Syria and the FSA [Free Syrian Army] attacked and killed them'', Amira's sister Rose posted on Facebook on Saturday.

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According to the Australian Federal Police, up to 200 Australians had travelled to Syria since the fighting started in 2011. Up to 100 were believed to be fighting in the conflict and up to six had died ''while fighting with al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups'' in the conflict, including one in Lebanon''.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/australian-couple-killed-by-syrian-rebels-family-says-20140112-30os9.html

[Jesus Malverde]

1. Massacre in Syria as al-Qaeda fighters flee rebel backlash

The pictures look like those of victims of the regime's many massacres. Corpses lie huddled in the courtyard, hands tied behind their backs, bleeding from the head.

But the people responsible were themselves revolutionaries, so the survivors said. The revolution in Syria, already racked by division, has now created a civil war within a civil war, and the atrocities alleged to have been committed against their own supposed fellow revolutionaries by ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, now resemble those that began the war in the first place.

The backlash against ISIS, a branch of al-Qaeda whose work in Syria has even been disavowed by the international organisation's head, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been rumbling for some time before it blew up at the beginning of the month. Other revolutionary militias swept into towns controlled by ISIS last weekend, expelling the group from some of its strongholds.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10565789/Massacre-in-Syria-as-al-Qaeda-fighters-flee-rebel-backlash.html

Followup to the western warehouses being looted in Aleppo.

The attacks on ISIS have the hall-marks of a planned operation, and if not organised by the backers of the non-al-Qaeda rebels, principally now Saudi Arabia, will certainly win their support. The West, too, wants to see a non-al-Qaeda rebel movement that is in some way coherent in place across northern Syria before attending peace talks in Switzerland next week.