OF THE
TIMES
"Everything was peaceful when we fell asleep on the fifth day of Ramadan in 2012. When we woke up, the rebels were there. Initially they took control of the police station, killing law enforcement officers and imposed a curfew," he recalled. "Then they started terrorizing those who could not fight back."The rebels showered locals with promises of a better life and threats of what Damascus and its forces would do to them, but those were empty words. The militants turned schools and hospitals into command centers. As a result, Khaled's eight-year-old son and others children could no longer go to school.

Comment: Last week five French military officials were killed en-route to Libya in an aircraft crash outside Malta airport. Subsequent reports in the French media, confirmed that at least three of the five French passengers who perished in the crash were officers of the General Directorate for External Security, France's external intelligence agency, which goes by the initials DGSE.