Finding the money is of keen interest to the modern-day treasure hunters who specialize in recovering the wealth of fallen dictators. Sometimes called financial intelligence or forensic accounting, the industry comprises lawyers, accountants, ex-spies, former law enforcement investigators and even some retired journalists, all of whom look at the unrest in Syria as a business opportunity. Some firms charge several thousands of dollars per hour for the sleuth work of a team of six to eight investigators. Others get paid a “success fee,” a small percentage of the overall haul.

“I’m hunting myself and I want to be first in the queue for my clients,” says Steven Perles, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who represents the families of victims of terrorism. Specifically, Perles is gunning for $413 million for the families of two U.S. contractors who were beheaded by al Qaeda in Iraq in 2004. In 2011, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals awarded the judgment against Syria after it found Assad’s regime provided material support to the terror group. Perles said he has hired researchers to track down the assets.

The video has since become a flashpoint in a murky chain of events that has heightened long-standing concerns that the Syrian conflict will spill out across its borders—and that new groups from outside the country could be drawn into the mayhem.

On Wednesday, more than 20 Syrians were taken hostage inside Lebanon, where refugees, along with opposition fighters and activists, have been flocking as Syria’s conflict rages. In an interview with Lebanese television, members of the Mokdad family said they had abducted Syrians “affiliated with the Free Syrian Army” and would release them only in exchange “for our son Hassan al-Mokdad.” according to Now Lebanon.

Anyone looking at images of the carnage coming out of Syria these days sympathizes with the desire to see the bloodletting end. Nobody in the West or in Israel wants to see the conflict spread, and, as the mass kidnapping in Lebanon of 20 Syrians on Wednesday suggested, there is every reason to fear that it will. So while it is worth listening to those who say they know how the Assad regime can be toppled more quickly, efficiently, and humanely than seems to be the case at present, it's also worth understanding why almost nothing that these people recommend will be done—and why what is being done, mostly in secret, is attracting so little praise.

In The New York Times, noted columnist Nicholas Kristof recently came out in favor of limited American military intervention against the Damascus regime of Bashar al-Assad. In a column headlined "Obama AWOL in Syria," Kristof (who opposed the Iraq invasion in 2003) quoted two Clinton administration officials, former Defense secretary William Perry and former secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Perry suggested a no-fly, no-drive zone. Albright said she favored intervention and more involvement, but "not on the ground."  Yet when Perry and Albright were in office, the Clinton administration's own intervention record was decidedly mixed. The invasion of chaotic, enfeebled Haiti was a short-term success. The 1999 war that eventually won Kosovo its independence from Serbia (over Russian objections and outside the U.N. framework) was a model combination of Western air power and guerrilla warfare by the locals. But in Rwanda, hundreds of thousands of people were butchered on Perry and Albright's watch, and the United States never intervened. Somalia was abandoned. The Bosnian war had gone on for three years before the U.S. finally helped tip the scale against the Serbs. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein's brutal regime managed to hold on to power despite repeated bombings and U.S.-backed coup plots—and more than a decade of no-fly zones in both the north and south of his country.

Yet as The Daily Beast discovered during a disturbing and at times surreal visit to a detention center in Al Bab in northeastern Syria on August 10, members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the main rebel-fighter force, still appeared to be involved in torture and abuse.

Their instruments of pain were on clear display: in the small dusty yard in front of the facility, not far from where guards lounged and smoked cigarettes, wooden sticks and iron bars were scattered in the shade, still coated with blood.

Saying the Syrian military is “rusting,” Hijab claimed Assad now controls just 30 percent of the country's land.

Hijab’s unexpected defection caused a sensation last week: not only is he the top civilian defector, but Hijab also bolted from the regime just two months into the job. The interest surrounding his departure only intensified in the coming days, as even the country where he was residing remained a mystery. Initial reports, confirmed by Jordanian officials, were that he had fled to Jordan overnight. But Hijab was also rumored to be on his way to Qatar, and activists in Istanbul were then buzzing that he was amongst them in the Turkish capital, where the primary Syrian opposition body is based. He said Tuesday that he had spent three days hiding out in Syria during the news flurry, before escaping into Jordan with the help of the rebel Free Syrian Army. 

The Syrian National Council was founded in Istanbul last year to give a unified voice to the revolution’s many fronts, as its counterpart in the Libyan revolution was able to do. Instead, much the opposite has ensued, and the SNC has gained a reputation for infighting and indecision. “The SNC is just not living up to what we thought it was going to,” says Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, summing up international consensus on the group.

On her visit to town, Clinton hammered this message home, ignoring the people who were supposed to be running the show, and choosing to meet with ground-level activists in their place. America, the message seemed to be, is moving on.

In recent weeks, Assad has watched his regime suffer a string of setbacks—from a bombing in Damascus that killed four members of his inner circle to a constant stream of defections, including that of his handpicked prime minister, who fled to Jordan last week. The rebels have even launched offensives in Syria’s two largest cities, Damascus and Aleppo. Nevertheless, Assad pushes on, pounding the rebels with tanks and fighter jets. Despite claims that the regime’s days are numbered, Assad’s persistence has lent credence to fears that the Syrian war will be a long bloody struggle—and that as it drags on, outside forces will come to play a larger role in shaping the country’s fate. To many rebels, the principal enemy is Iran, which has “bet the pistachio farm on Assad” in hopes that Syria will remain a political ally, says Karim Sadjadpour, a senior analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Iran is trying to buoy Assad with financial, military, and strategic aid. But Iran is stealth and tends to operate via proxy.” To the rebels, murky signs of Iranian meddling already abound. Last week, the rebels captured a busload of 48 Iranians outside Damascus who they say are members of the Revolutionary Guards. The regime has insisted that they’re just religious pilgrims, but according to The Wall Street Journal, the group booked their trip through a travel agency that “solely caters to members and families of Guards.” Meanwhile, in the Turkish border camp that houses the brass of the Free Syrian Army, the main rebel fighting force, rumors have swirled that Iranians are pouring into Aleppo. Gen. Mustafa Sheikh, the head of the FSA military council, told Newsweek that he believes Iranian snipers have been hiding on the city’s rooftops. “They’re in groups with Syrian security officers, so the Iranians can remain unseen,” he said.

On their part, the Iranians are painting the war as a wider international struggle against their man in Damascus. On a visit to the Syrian capital last week, a senior aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, went out of his way to warn that the Syrian uprising was “not an internal issue.” The aide appeared to be referring to a host of Iranian foes, including the United States, Turkey, and Qatar, all of which are publicly backing the rebels. But the longer the fighting continues, the greater the potential for Syria to become an arena for a larger struggle between Iran and its main regional rival, Saudi Arabia. Some among the Syrian opposition feel that such a battle is already taking place. As one veteran Syrian activist, Nasr Adin Ahmad, put it: “This revolution, it’s just like a chess piece between Iran and Saudi Arabia.”‬

On this latest trip in July, he and fellow photojournalist Jeroen Oerlemans were just an hour into their journey when they saw a rebel camp and walked up to it. As they did, Cantlie prepared himself for a warm welcome from the Syrians inside, who were always grateful when members of the international press arrived to document the bloody situation in the country. But when Cantlie and Oerlemans entered the camp, they didn’t find themselves among Syrians at all. Instead, they were surrounded by foreign fighters who had come to the country to wage jihad. The jihadis took away the photographers’ gear, questioned them angrily, and then led them away from the camp at gunpoint.

“You were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Cantlie remembers some of the fighters telling him as he was held captive over the coming days. The jihadis—who hailed from around the globe, including some from Cantlie’s native Britain—threatened to kill the two journalists, subjected them to mock executions, and sharpened knives in front of them as they promised to cut off their heads.

Last Friday’s session—they’re not called “debates,” as that might imply democracy, the interplay of ideas, and the possibility of votes being swayed through reasoned argument—was on the “prevention of Armed Conflict: Draft Resolution A/66/L57,” which sought to put the Assad regime squarely in the dock for the murder of 17,000 of its citizenry. It further condemns “the increasing use by the Syrian authorities of heavy weapons, including indiscriminate shelling from tanks and helicopters, in population centers and the failure to withdraw its troops and heavy weapons to their barracks.”

The session started with the General Assembly’s president, Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, saying that the “credibility of the United Nations is at stake,” as though it hadn’t been already shot through by Kofi Annan’s complete inability to affect events in Syria, with his six-point plan or in any other way. The secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, nonetheless expressed his “tremendous admiration for all [Annan] did,” without mentioning what that in fact amounted to.

With shelling and sniper fire pursuing them, hundreds of insurgents lugged RPG7 rocket launchers, heavy machine guns, and their all-purpose AK47s out of the district and filtered into neighborhoods adjacent to Salaheddin to set up new defensive positions in buildings mainly to the north and east, and to await the next move of their better-equipped adversaries.

Only days ago, as warplanes and helicopter gunships struck at rebel forces, Free Syrian Army commanders insisted they would retain the district in the southwest of Syria’s second-largest city, arguing that its strategic importance made it essential for them to hold it. Salaheddin lies on a vital supply and logistics route for government forces wanting to move men and materiel north to retake a string of towns running south from the Turkish border at Kilis.