8.48am BST

Good morning and welcome to today’s Middle East live blog, which we will be updating throughout the day.

Here are this morning’s headlines:

Syria

• The Syrian National Coalition – the main umbrella opposition group backed by the west – expressed its “deepest gratitude” to the EU for its decision to lift the arms embargo on the Syrian rebels but called for “specialised weaponry” to be sent soon. “Despite the importance of this decision, the words must be solidified by action,” the statement said. “The Coalition urges that a quick response be implemented by supplying the Free Syrian Army with specialised weaponry to repel the fierce attacks waged against unarmed civilians by Assad, Hezbollah, and Iranian forces.” Yesterday Salam Idriss, the commander of the Free Syrian Army umbrella rebel group, and the man British foreign secretary William Hague named as being a probable conduit of any arms shipment, said he was “very disappointed” the FSA would not be getting weapons immediately, and said he had run out of patience with the international community. The FSA is nominally in charge of rebel units on the ground, but in reality can exercise only very loose control over them; the connections between the Syrian National Coalition and the FSA are similarly weak.

• The US yesterday criticised Moscow’s decision to send one of its most advanced anti-aircraft missiles to the Syrian government hours after the EU ended its arms embargo on the rebels. By contrast, Washington welcomed the EU’s move, which was pushed through by Britain and France against the wishes of the other 25 members of the union. But analysts noted that both moves were more symbolic than practical at this point. Michael Elleman, a missile expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Bahrain, asked:

Does Russia have S-300 [anti-aircraft missile] batteries ready to go? I'm not sure that it does. Is it going to send engineers to integrate it with existing [air defence] architecture? Will they send trainers for the one to two years it takes to train people to use it? This seems more like an exercise in political signalling to me, saying: 'Hands off Syria.'

And Daniel Levy at the European Council on Foreign Relations argued that there could be more posturing than substance in the lifting of the EU arms embargo as any eventual weapons deliveries would be limited by legal and political constraints.

• The future of the long-running UN peacekeeping mission on the strategic Golan Heights between Syria and Israel has been thrown into question as a result of the lifting of the EU arms embargo, Ian Traynor reports from Brussels. The Austrian chancellor, Werner Faymann, and vice-chancellor, Michael Spindelegger, said yesterday they would probably pull more than 300 peacekeepers out if Britain helped arm the rebellion against Bashar al-Assad's regime. A withdrawal would heighten the growing sense of greater Middle East crisis, creating a vacuum on the strategically vital Heights which the Israelis would be tempted to fill quickly.

• The opposition Syrian National Coalition is holding fractious internal debates in Istanbul over its leadership and whether or not it should attend the planned Geneva peace talks being organised by the US and Russia. Turkish officials say they are confident that there will be opposition representation. It is unclear, however, whether Iran will attend in the face of determined Saudi opposition to their participation. Riyadh has threatened to boycott the talks if Iran attends, officials in Ankara said.

• Splits in the Syrian opposition were highlighted when four opposition factions – the Syrian Revolution General Commission, the Local Co-ordination Committees in Syria, the Syrian Revolution Coordinators' Union, and the Supreme Council for the Leadership of the Syrian Revolution – issued a statement complaining about the Syrian National Coalition’s “attempt to expand membership” to “persons and groups that have no real impact on the revolution”. The SNC leadership has “failed to fulfil its responsibility to represent the great Syrian people's revolution at the organisational, political, and humanitarian levels”, it said. The statement was a “final warning” – presumably of the groups’ intent to leave the umbrella of the SNC.

• Simon Jenkins suspects that the west’s turning against the dictators of the Middle East and abetting their downfall “may yet prove the most disastrous miscalculation of western diplomacy since the rise of fascism”.

Syria is at present certainly a claim on the world's humanitarian resources, to be honoured by supporting the refugee camps and aid agencies active in the area. Assad's suppression of revolt has been appallingly brutal, but he was Britain's friend, as was Saddam, long after his regime began its brutality. That is how things are in this part of the world. The west cannot stop them. To conclude that "we cannot allow this to happen" assumes a potency over other people's affairs that "we" do not possess. Pouring arms into Syria will no more topple Assad or "drive him to the negotiating table" than did two years of blood-curdling sanctions.

• More weapons will more likely entrench warlordism, prompt Assad's backers to increase their military support, and give substance to his claim to be fighting a foreign-backed Islamist plot, adds a Guardian leader column.

• Some 112 people were killed in fighting across Syria yesterday, including 35 in Damascus and its suburbs and 22 in Aleppo, according to opposition group the Local Co-ordination Committees. Another activist group, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, said 111 had died, including 33 in and around the capital and 18 in Aleppo. Their figures cannot be verified because media access to Syria is limited.

• Assad may be asking himself what has changed as he studies the EU’s arms embargo announcement, writes Simon Tisdall:

What has changed is that the two-year civil war is ever closer to fulfilling predictions that it will spill into neighbouring countries, principally Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Turkey, and spark a regional sectarian conflagration. Weekend missile attacks in southern Lebanon and Israel were further proof of that contention, as was Hezbollah's admission that its forces were fighting alongside Assad's troops. What has changed, as Oxfam among others has warned, is that by fuelling the conflict by sending yet more weapons to the combatants, Britain and France risk stoking a further rapid and potentially disastrous escalation; risk adding to the appalling toll of 80,000 people dead and millions displaced; and risk shooting down and killing off the already enfeebled diplomatic process they seek to sustain.

• Martin Chulov explains that the US has put its faith in Salam Idriss, the commander of the Free Syrian Army, as someone who can be trusted to be supplied with weapons via Saudi Arabia: