“Enough of the ongoing bloodshed,” Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said during the opening of the press briefing early Sunday morning [April 21] after a six-hour meeting of the Syrian opposition and its 11 main foreign supporters in Istanbul. But the question for the past two years since the Syrians took arms to bring down Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime remains unanswered: How will this bloodshed end?

Davutoglu said, “What’s important is that these 11 countries are determined to express a clear support to the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), and that they presented a political will to do all kinds of work to stop the massacres.” These 11 countries besides Turkey are the United States, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Italy, Germany and France.

A Syrian opposition figure, who asked to remain anonymous, told Al-Monitor that the main challenge in the meeting was “for a millionth time to persuade the Westerners to agree to provide arms to the opposition, but they still have reservations because of the radical elements.” One senior opposition figure also told Reuters: “The world must know if they don’t agree on our right to receive weapons this will be the last meeting the opposition attend. We will not attend any meetings after this.”

It is, however, impossible not to take into consideration the radical and extremist elements of the opposition when devising a policy. Especially when there is a growing sense that they are more dominant on the ground than the Free Syrian Army, which is mostly composed of defected members of the Syrian military. Although it will be difficult to square the mentality, but many in the region — from diplomats and intellectuals to the general public — are convinced that the West is creating the chaos in the region on purpose, bringing the Islamists to power. With that perspective, there is no doubt that the SNC is getting frustrated and actually fighting against the conviction alive on the Arab streets, where people believe that it was the United States that created al-Qaeda in the 1980s to fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and that the horrific 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Pennsylvania, and on the Pentagon, have all been part of this grand strategy.