The rumours that circle around the Syrian Civil War are manifold. Assad is weak and ready to be toppled. The regime has bunkered down and is ready to use chemical and biological weapons. Western, Saudi and Qatari forces are backing the Free Syrian Army. There is a safe haven; the Kurds are revolting and so on.
This tells us little about the sources of the conflict or the nature of how it will be resolved. One window is the role of foreign soldiers within the opposing forces. For the rebels, there is the accusation of Islamism and Al-Qaeda: foreign jihadists using the conflict as a pathway to paradise. A Telegraph article interviewing a British convert to Islam and jihadist indicates that the relationship between Syrians fighting for freedom and jihadists fighting for themselves ("paradise") is a fraught one.
The role of foreign fighters is hotly disputed in rebel ranks. One story — possibly apocryphal — is that two Indian Muslim jihadists who arrived in Homs saying they wanted to die for Allah were immediately sent by secular FSA leaders to attack one of the toughest checkpoints in the city. The checkpoint was destroyed and the two men were killed, which meant, said the secular activist who told the story, that everyone was happy.
But many media activists and rebels fear they are a liability, adding little to the cause and attracting suspicion among potential backers in the West.
For the Ba'athist regime, defections by Sunni Muslims is being shored up by strong intervention from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (and probably Hezbollah) with militia training, weapons support and, perhaps, active engagement with the enemy. Yet, as the uprising continues, such surreptitious support does not appear adequate to save the slow dissolution of the despot.