Gen. Mustafa al-Sheikh, who heads the military council of the Free Syrian Army, said in an interview that notions that the Syrian regime may be on its last legs are belied by the difficulties the rebels continue to face on the ground. “The reality is not like it appears,” he said. “We’re not there yet.”

A string of FSA successes over the last two weeks—including the seizure of border posts and the first sustained offensives inside Damascus and Aleppo, Syria’s two most important cities—has brought with it speculation that an endgame may be at hand. Aleppo, Syria’s commercial capital, has seen particularly intensive fighting in recent days, and the unexpected rebel presence there has dealt a blow to the strongman stature of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “The fall of Aleppo will be the fall of the regime,” Sheikh said.

"It will be a long battle,” said General Manaf al-Filistini, a defector from the regular army who is now fighting with the rebels. He predicted a guerrilla war in Aleppo for months to come.

Yesterday afternoon, in a house a few miles down the road, Khaled Issa, a former Air Force officer who now commands two companies of FSA soldiers, sat in a living room buzzing with fans. Like many rebels who use Turkey to rest and recover or restock supplies, Issa can come and go with ease, and he planned to rejoin the fight in a matter of days. On the front lines, he said, he felt little connection with the military leaders holed up in the Apaydin camp—“they just give us support in the media,” he said, and advocate with foreign governments. Instead, the insurgency was being directed by the commanders on the ground, who tend to coordinate informally with one another instead of looking to instructions from a chain of command. “The real work is being done inside Syria,” he said.

The Syrian uprising has been roughshod and loosely organized from the start, a fact that has played heavily in discussions over supporting the rebels in the West. Amid so much apparent confusion, though, the FSA has managed to pull together a series of concerted, coherent, and strategically important efforts over the last two weeks. Longstanding concerns over command and control, these recent successes suggest, may be obscuring the fact that FSA is running an increasingly effective campaign on the ground—even if it remains hard to tell who’s directing the efforts behind the scenes. “We’re still talking about a rag-tag army, but they’ve been able to strike a severe blow against the regime,” says Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Institute’s Doha Center.

But Habous also said that depends on whether his forces get high-tech weapons from the United States to finish the job. He cited Stinger missiles, the shoulder-fired rockets the Central Intelligence Agency supplied Afghan holy warriors in the 1980s, “that can neutralize the helicopters and tanks of Assad’s regime.” According to Habous, “This is all in the hands of the Americans. They have the say and we will hold them responsible for more victims."

Another rebel commander, Ahmed Nema, who heads the military council for the Free Syrian Army in Daraa, said on Sunday, “The regime is falling no matter what. I expect in four weeks the regime will go down, but because we lack advanced equipment it could go longer.”

According to a reports first circulated on Twitter, the London-born and educated Mrs. Assad, who is banned from traveling to Europe—and who is now very much blamed along with her husband for the deaths of thousands of civilian victims—landed in Moscow two days ago. A spokesman for Russia’s foreign ministry, Alexander Lukashevich, quickly laughed off the report, but Russian experts on the Middle East believe the invitation for the Syrian leader’s wife and other family members is a long decided matter.

“Doubtlessly, the evacuation plan for Assad’s wife, children, mother, and other family members has been ready for a long time,” says Yuri Krupnov, a pro-Kremlin analyst. “Everybody is going to be moved to Moscow safely as soon as it is really needed.” Illustrating the tricky diplomacy matters that would prevent many other nations from sheltering the Assads, Krupnov dismissed the chance that neighboring Belarus would become a new home for the first lady, given investments in Belarus by Gulf states: “[Belarussian president Alexander] Lukashenko will not do it—he cannot risk investments and contracts with Qatar,” Krupnov said.

Obama administration officials tell The Daily Beast that the CIA has sent officers to the region to assess Syria’s weapons program. One major task for the CIA right now is to work with military defectors to find out as much information on Syria’s weapons of mass destruction, according to one U.S. official with access to Syrian intelligence. Another focus will be to sort through reams of intercepted phone calls and emails, satellite images, and other collected intelligence to find the exact locations of the Syrian weapons, this official said.  

This task has become more urgent in recent days. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Syrian military was moving its chemical weapons out of storage. On July 17, Nawaf Fares, Syria’s ex-ambassador to Iraq, told the BBC the regime would not hesitate to use chemical weapons against the rebel fighters. On Wednesday, a bomb killed the Syrian defense minister and the brother-in-law of President al-Assad in Damascus. The blow to the al-Assad cabinet raised the prospect that the Syrian regime may be on its last legs.

In a series of coordinated assaults on the capital this week, billed as the “Battle for Damascus,” the rebels landed a debilitating and potentially game-changing blow to al-Assad's command structure. Syrian state television reported that the defense minister, Daoud Rajha, and the president's brother-in-law, Asef Shawkat, and Hassan Turkmani, a former minister of defense, were all killed in the attack.

An activist staying at a safe house in the old district of Damascus said rebels were spread throughout the area and controlling territory on all but the main thoroughfares, where government tanks were still parked. “We have the feeling that this is the final battle,” said the activist, who wanted only to be known as "Adam." "Pray for us, pray for us, victory is very close.”

But what seems to be the case in Syria can be deeply misleading. And the mysteries big and small that surround almost every aspect of this conflict are what make it such treacherous ground for any attempt at diplomatic solutions.

Opposing the Assad regime in this increasingly bloody civil war is a ragged and disorganized collection of rebels, some of whom are fighting for their villages, some of whom are defectors from the Syrian armed forces, and a few of whom are al Qaeda–linked Syrian jihadists who once fought against the Americans and the Shiites in Iraq, and have now taken their war home.

We did not give up our own dreams of freedom. But we died for them for 24 years. The Indonesians, too, endured a dictatorship that did not seem to even stop and think before slaughtering real or perceived enemies en masse.

No one came to our rescue. On the contrary, all regional and world powers consorted with the Suharto regime.

The delegation would be Syria's biggest since the Moscow Games in 1980, said a Syrian sports reporter who requested anonymity in talking to the media. Majed Ghazal has a fair shot at snagging a medal in track-and-field events, he said; other athletes include boxer Wissam Salamni, weight lifter Ahed Joughili, swimmers Azad Barazi and Bayan Jumaa, cyclist Omar Hassanein, and equestrian Ahmad Hamsho, who will be riding his horse Wonderboy.

The likely competitors also count three women in their ranks, including Syria's first-ever female weight lifter, Soraya Sabah. Rounding out the team are runner Ghafran Muhammad, and—sure to raise some eyebrows, given the political context—sharpshooter Rayya Zineddin.

News that the giant firm Finmeccanica had sold a secure emergency radio network to Syria’s government through a subsidiary named SELEX Elsag first emerged Thursday from a disclosure by the embattled WikiLeaks organization. Finmeccanica quickly admitted to the deal, which it said was made in 2008. In a statement emailed to The Daily Beast by Finmeccanica spokeswoman Angelica Falchi, the company emphasized that the high-tech system wasn’t sold to Syria’s military. “This system was intended for use by emergency and rescue organizations (‘public safety’),” the statement said. “The supplied Tetra technology was designed precisely for this purpose—that is exclusively for civil, and not military use. Any other use that was carried out is beyond the control of SELEX Elsag.”

John Pike, an arms expert who founded GlobalSecurity.org, told me he is skeptical that the Syrian government, now accused of torture and repression on a massive scale, can make distinctions in how the security forces might use the communications system. “It’s the domestic-security people there,” he said, “who are rounding people up and slashing their throats. Any internal police or emergency management people who are not involved in that, Bashar would be asking why they aren’t!” William Hartung, an arms trade expert with the Center for International Policy, agreed. “I think the system could definitely be applied to the police for repression,” he told me.