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In an article that appeared in The Hindu (http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/obamas-syrian-dilemma/article6416557.ece), Vijay Prashad states: "the FSA has gone in two directions — toward extortion and smuggling, and toward coordination with the Islamist rebels for territorial gains."
The charge of extortion and smuggling apparently rests on a single article that appeared in the Telegraph by someone named Ruth Sherlock. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10485970/Syria-dispatch-from-band-of-brothers-to-princes-of-war.html). Since Sherlock (no relation to Holmes as far as I know) was reporting from southern Turkey, it is a little difficult to understand how much knowledge she has about reality on the ground inside Turkey.
More importantly, if you read her article carefully, it would seem that some of the men involved in criminal activity are not exactly FSA but ex-FSA:
One officer, Ahmed Hamis, had been a representative in the Supreme Military Council for the Jisr al-Shugour area in Idlib province and had fought honestly against the regime, Mahmoud said. “Then a foreign sponsor started supporting him with money and weapons. He broke away to form a small gang.
“He has a lot of weapons but he hasn’t run one battle against the regime. He has no time for that because he has his own business, smuggling diesel and setting up checkpoints to levy taxes,” he said. “He also deals in kidnappings. If they catch a government soldier they’ll sell him back to his family.”
So "he broke away". Is the FSA responsible for the criminality of former members? I have no doubt that some brigades have succumbed to FARC type activity but even in the case of Colombia it is difficult to reduce the guerrillas to "criminal gangs" in the face of a protracted war in which the need to buy weapons and ammunition sometimes involves behavior that falls short of a romanticized Maoist fantasy.
After all, according to the wikipedia entry on Vijay Prashad, he regards the FARC to be at the receiving end of "the animus of US imperialism" because they continue to resist "its hegemony". Maybe if the FSA got involved in cocaine distribution networks, they'd get a clean bill of health as well. Who knows?
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