"Very few countries admit to having a direct role although the veil of silence is slowly being lifted," he said. "The channels are Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the lead, with the Turkish government and the American government once-removed.
The covert nature of the trade - and the presence of Syrian government troops close to the border - limits the flow of weapons to rifles, pistols, and possibly a few rocket-propelled grenades, says former CIA intelligence analyst Bob Ayers.
"You wouldn't start from scratch. And the intelligence organizations themselves whether they be American, British, Israeli, whatever, they would not be providing weapons to the FSA," Ayers said. "They'd go through a middleman, they'd find someone who has been trading across the border, who has got relationships on either side of the border, and funnel the weapons, the supplies, the munitions, the communications devices, whatever, through the middleman.
Ayers says a big problem is that foreign powers don't know exactly who they're giving the weapons to.
"We don't really have a unified opposition to [Syrian President] Assad," he said. "And there's no way that you can deal with them as if they are a unified entity. They're fragmented, they are small groups, there's no centralized control although we'd like to see it and we behave like there is. There isn't.
The FSA's foreign supporters are attempting to tip the scales of the conflict towards the rebels in Syria while avoiding being caught red-handed, says analyst Eyal.
"It's a very difficult job to achieve especially since the involvement has to be once-removed," he said. "Let us not forget we do not have a U.N. Security Council mandate to do more than that, nor is any Western government proposing to become directly involved."
Eyal says current support for the FSA is having minimal impact on Syria's civil war - and the outcome will ultimately be decided by the loyalty of the Syrian military to President Bashar al-Assad.
[324WORDS]
[OBSTACLE]
Iliad
This article is about the epic poem by Homer. For other uses, see Iliad (disambiguation).
The Iliad (sometimes referred to as the Song of Ilion or Song of Ilium) is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy (Ilium) by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles.
Although the story covers only a few weeks in the final year of the war, the Iliad mentions or alludes to many of the Greek legends about the siege; the earlier events, such as the gathering of warriors for the siege, the cause of the war, and related concerns tend to appear near the beginning. Then the epic narrative takes up events prophesied for the future, such as Achilles' looming death and the sack of Troy, prefigured and alluded to more and more vividly, so that when it reaches an end, the poem has told a more or less complete tale of the Trojan War.
Along with the Odyssey, also attributed to Homer, the Iliad is among the oldest extant works of Western literature, and its written version is usually dated to around the eighth century BC. In the modern vulgate, the Iliad contains 15,693 lines; it is written in Homeric Greek, a literary amalgam of Ionic Greek and other dialects.
