Rebel Army Chief: We’ll Skip Peace Conference and Keep Working to Topple Al-Assad

Not unexpectedly, the head of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) said on Tuesday that the umbrella organization of groups fighting Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad will skip the international conference set for Geneva in January and continue to work at toppling Assad. General Salim Idriss said that the fact that the FSA will not attend makes “conditions…not suitable for running the Geneva 2 talks.” Speaking to Al-Jazeera, Idriss was adamant that the fighting will not abate in respect to the parley. Idriss’s group has lost a significant amount of power to the Islamist groups that are also fighting Assad, but are frequently fighting the FSA as well. The French foreign minister said on Tuesday that the purpose of the Geneva talks is to “have mutual agreements by regime representatives and to form an interim government.” To do so, he said, it’s necessary to hold the event without Assad himself or the terrorist groups present. On Tuesday, the Al-Nusra Front, a group aligned with Al-Qa’ida, published a notice on its website with photos showing the bodies of two Assad soldiers and three men called “collaborators” whom the group executed. They were accused of having “assassinated fighters and other Muslims, and to have provided information to enable the regime to bombard them.”