Syrian fighter jets strike Aleppo, Assad rides crest of disintegrating country

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was voicing the general consensus when he said Friday, Aug. 3, “The conflict in Syria is a test of everything this organization stands for.” He stopped short of giving the UN a failed mark. “World powers must overcome their rivalries to end the proxy war in Syria dividing the country into parts, in which different militias fight each other," he said,

Nonetheless, the resolution approved by the general assembly roundly condemned the Assad regime and rapped the Security Council – but had no teeth.
Ban was speaking of a future danger. debkafile reports it is already happening. Day by day, new militias spring up to fight the Assad regime – five in the last 48 hours. They fall into three main categories: they represent one Syrian ethnic minority or another, Islamists streaming in from across the Middle East, or rebels groups armed and backed by Arab and Muslim intelligence bodies.

Common to them all is contempt for the mainstream Free Syrian Army which insists it is the umbrella organization for the entire rebel movement.
The biggest new paramilitary group rising from Syria’s war-torn landscape is the Kurdish coalition formed by the Syrian Democratic Union Party and elements of the Turkish PKK, which continue to arrive from Iraq and are taking up position on the Syrian-Turkish border. Kurdish fighters are occupying one northern Syrian town and village after another, laying the foundation for an independent Syrian Kurdish state which plans to link up with the Kurdish Regional Government of Iraq.
The merger of Syrian and Turkish Kurdish militias with the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga would produce a Kurdish army of 225,000 fighting men.
Terrified that the separatism sweeping its brothers will infect the Turkish Kurdish minority – and suspecting Washington of surreptitiously supporting it – Turkish intelligence, the MIT, was instructed to establish and arm two Turkmen militias in the Syrian Kurdish region: Brigades of Mehmet the Conqueror and Brigades of Sultan Abdulhamid.   

In Aleppo, the FSA has been displaced at the head of the campaign against government troops by a militia established by the Muslim Brotherhood and a rival set up by radical affiliates of al Qaeda, which is a hodgepodge of jihadists from Libya, the Gaza Strip, and Egyptian Sinai. Saudi and Qatari intelligence services are competing for the favors of these militias by supplying them with arms.
American intelligence analysts keeping watch on Syria warned Saturday, Aug. 4, that if the proliferation of fighting militias taking part in the conflict goes on, Syria will soon have more than a hundred mini-armies, some of them Christian and Druze. In no time they will be fighting each other.
American and European military sources explain their reluctance to provide the Syrian rebel movement with heavy anti-tank and anti-air weapons capable of tipping the scales of the fighting in Aleppo by their uncertainty about whose hands they will end up in.
Saturday saw the state of battle in Aleppo undecided. In an attempt to break the tie, Assad sent MiG fighter-bombers to bomb rebel positions in the northern sector of the city. He hopes to recover control of Aleppo well before external powers reach a decision on supplying the rebels with heavy arms.

In Damascus, Syrian troops backed by dozens of tanks and armored vehicles Friday night stormed Damascus' southern district of Tadamon, the last rebel bastion in the capital. Activists reported that troop were conducting house to house raids and had executed at least 12 people.