Syria-Based Rebels Slam Exiled FSA Leader

Syria-based insurgents fighting the regime of President Bashar Assad on Thursday took to task their exiled leadership, in a stark show of divisions within the armed opposition.

"Nobody has the right to issue press releases, take decisions, or speak about operations in the Free Syrian Army's name, except for the FSA command inside Syria," the group's spokesman Colonel Qassem Saadeddine told Agence France Presse.

He was reacting to a statement by Turkey-based FSA chief Colonel Riad al-Asaad who earlier denied that armed rebels gave the Syrian regime an 0900 GMT Friday deadline to observe a U.N.-backed peace plan to end the violence.

A putative truce came into force on April 12, brokered by U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan, but it has been systematically violated since.

"There is no ultimatum, but we hope Annan announces the plan's failure, so that we do not take the blame for any future operations against the regime," Asaad told Al-Jazeera television.

An FSA statement issued from inside Syria earlier had given the Syrian government until noon on Friday to observe the Annan plan.

"If the Syrian regime does not meet the deadline by Friday midday, the command of the Free Syrian Army announces that it will no longer be tied by any commitment to the Annan plan ... and our duty will be ... to defend civilians," a FSA statement said.

Saadeddine, speaking to AFP via Skype from Syria, said: "From now on, all decisions will be taken from inside Syria.

"Anyone who wants to speak in the name of the FSA should do it from the battlefield, not through media," said Saadeddine.

"We are the ones leading the operations, we are the ones mobilizing the street," he said.

"It is our children who are being massacred, not the children of those staying in hotels and in (defectors') camps," he added, in reference to Asaad and other army deserters who sought refuge in neighboring Turkey.

Saadeddine added that "Asaad represents only himself, because he is far from the battlefield."

The FSA in Syria carries out operations against regime troops, and is theoretically under the command structure of the Turkey-based leadership. Asaad was one of the first army officers to defect from the regular army.

U.N. observers have deployed in Syria since the Annan ceasefire went effect on April 12 but they have been unable to stop violence and bloodshed in the country, where 108 civilians were massacred in the central town of Houla last week.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, more than 13,000 people have been killed since an anti-regime uprising broke out in May last year, most of them civilians.