Assad quickly recovered from the loss of his four top allies last Wednesday, July 18 and replaced them with a new command for fighting the rebels headed by his brother Gen. Maher Assad, debkafile reports exclusively. Gen. Ali Mamloukh is new General Security Service head; Gen. Hafez Makhlouf military commander of Damascus; and Gen. Ali Hassan chief of the Alawite Shabiha militia. Assad retaliated against Turkey by letting Kurdish PKK rebels fighting Turkey from Iraq set up bases in Syria, from which they launched their first attack.

Erdogan won an ultra-cool welcome in Tehran after he was discovered pumping anti-tank missiles to the Syrian rebels after Bashar Assad began helping Turkey’s PKK Kurdish faction. His Iranian hosts gave him the runaround before he was received by Khamenei to hand over Barack Obama’s message.

The Arab League was not first to make the Syrian crisis a regional concern. Big power rivalry got there first. The US and France, like the Sunni rulers, seek Bashar Assad's downfall, while Russia and China are propping him up as their firewall for the Islamic regime in Tehran.

Before leaving for the G20 summit in Toronto, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan came in for an exceptionally acerbic US rebuke: Top Obama official Philip Gordon accused him of alienating the US and the West and told him he needed to demonstrate Ankara's commitment to their (NATO) partnership.
At home, his generals and the public accuse him of sacrificing national security to his anti-Israel campaign, so causing military setbacks against the Kurdish PKK.