France Calls for End to Syrian Rebel Arms Embargo

Reporting from Beirut Anne Barnard has an end-of-the-week rundown on civil war news coming out of Syria. Hassan Nasrallah gave a televised speech yesterday saying that Hezbollah would acquire "unique weapons" from Syria that would be a "strategic response" to Israel's Sunday bombing of a military installation in a Damascus suburb. John Kerry, still in Rome, was quoted as saying that the United States "would prefer that Russia not supply assistance" to Syrian air defenses; he said there will soon be a date announced for peace talks. Subsequently, Lakhdar Brahimi, special UN and Arab League envoy for Syria, has agreed not to resign.

But the most interesting news is a change of heart underway in France on lifting the arms embargo on the Syrian rebels:

In Paris, the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said in an interview with Le Monde that France favored the diplomatic solution advanced by Mr. Kerry, but that it also wanted to rethink the European Union arms embargo in order to help the Syrian rebels. He also proposed that the United Nations should declare Syria’s Islamist Al Nusra Front a terrorist organization to separate it from other rebel groups. 

The United Nations Security Council has already looked informally at whether to impose sanctions on Al Nusra Front after it pledged allegiance last month to Al Qaeda. The State Department designated Nusra a terrorist organization in December, but the group has strengthened since then. It is considered one of the Syrian insurgency’s most effective fighting forces.

Senior French officials said that the French position toward the Syrian rebels had become noticeably more cautious in the last few weeks, especially since the resignation last month of Sheik Moaz al-Khatib, the leader of the main political opposition group, the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, amid political infighting. 

They said they would like to see the opposition’s main armed wing, the Free Syrian Army, become more centralized and come under the command of a civilian hierarchy before moving ahead with arms transfers.