,The Arab League has affirmed member states’ right to give military support to the Syrian insurgency. /Syrian Conflict News

The Arab League summit on Tuesday in Qatar has granted the Syrian seat in the body to the opposition Syrian National Coalition in a symbolic move presented as an important victory against the Syrian Bashar al-Assad government.

The summit also issued a draft resolution on Syria, reaffirming “the right of every [member] state to offer all forms of self-defense, including military, to support the resistance of the Syrian people and the Free Syrian Army.”

“Syrian people alone should determine who rules the country,” the leader of the foreign-backed opposition delegation, Moaz al-Khatib, proclaimed upon taking the seat despite his earlier official resignation from the body. Khatib was accompanied by the recently appointed prime minister of the SNC, Ghassan Hitto, a Western-educated former businessman and US citizen whose candidacy had faced resistance not only within the self-proclaimed governing opposition body, but also among the divided group fighting on the ground.

Upon taking the seat in the league, Khatib immediately demanded further support and broader recognition for the SNC. According to Khatib, the opposition is now eyeing Syria’s seats in other international organizations, including the United Nations. In the meantime, he had requested NATO to effectively impose a partial no-fly zone over Syria by extending the Patriot missile-defense protections deployed in Turkey to cover northern parts of Syria held by the rebels.

The Arab states have been sending to the rebels as much military aid as they could for the past year, Syria Tribune editor-in-chief Ali Mohamad told , adding that he doesn’t see what else they could send to “topple the balance of power on the ground.”

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