Syrian Rebels Say West Has Abandoned Them Majed al-Muhammad, center, a rebel commander, said if the West continued to turn its back on Syria's suffering, Syrians would turn their backs in return. SAMAS, Syria - Majed al-Muhammad, the commander of a Syrian antigovernment fighting group, slammed his hand on his desk. "Doesn't America have satellites?" he asked, almost shouting. Can't it see what is happening? A retired Syrian Army medic, Mr. Muhammad had reached the rank of sergeant major in the military he now fights against. He said he had never been a member of a party, and loathed jihadists and terrorists. But he offered a warning to the West now commonly heard among fighters seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad: The Syrian people are being radicalized by a combination of a grinding conflict and their belief that they have been abandoned by a watching world. If the West continues to turn its back on Syria's suffering, he said, Syrians will turn their backs in return, and this may imperil Western interests and security at one of the crossroads of the Middle East. This is a theme that has resonated in recent days, not just in Syria, but in Turkey, where the government fired artillery shells into northern Syria this week after a Syrian mortar round hit a Turkish town and killed five civilians. In Turkey, there is a growing sense of frustration shared by the Syrian rebels that the West, the United States in particular, called for Mr. Assad to leave power, only to sit quietly on the sidelines as the crisis transformed into a bloody civil war. "We are now at a very critical juncture," wrote Melih Asik in the Turkish newspaper Milliyet. We are not only facing Syria, but Iran, Iraq, Russia and China behind it as well. Behind us, we have nothing but the provocative stance and empty promises of the U.S. Across northern Syria, in areas that rebels have wrested from government control, such sentiments have become an angry and routine element of the public discourse. Wearied by violence, heading into another winter of fighting, and enraged by what they see as the inaction and hypocrisy of powerful nations, frontline leaders of the rebellion say that the West risks losing a potential ally in the Middle East if the Assad government should fall. The corollary is frequently sounded, too: The West may be gaining enemies where it might have found friends. As anger grows, armed groups opposed to the United States may grow in numbers and stature, too. "The United Nations and international community are making a big mistake," said Ghassan Abdul Wahib, 43, a truck driver and now a leader in Kafr Takharim, a village in the north. By letting this be a long war, they are dragging Syria toward radicalism, and they will suffer from this for a long time. The origins of these sentiments are typically the same: a widely held view that Washington and European capitals are more interested in maintaining the flow of oil from Libya and Iraq, or in protecting Israel, than in Syria and its people's suffering. The view is supported, Syrians opposed to Mr. Assad say, by the West's stubborn refusal to provide weapons to the rebels, or to protect civilians and aid the rebels with a no-fly zone. The contrast with the West's military assistance and vocal political support to the uprising last year in Libya is frequently drawn. The donations of nonlethal aid to the Syrian opposition by Washington are often called small-scale, to the extent that none of the half-dozen fighting groups visited by journalists for The New York Times, or the many commanders interviewed in Turkey, claimed to have seen, much less received, American aid. "We haven't received anything from the outside," said Thayar, a member of the ad hoc governing body in Kafr Takharim known as the revolutionary council. He asked that his last name be withheld to protect him and his family from retaliation. We read in the media that we are receiving things. But we haven't seen it. We only received speeches from the West. Other men echoed this sentiment, and accused the United States and Europe of playing a double game, in effect of conspiring with the Kremlin to ensure that no nation has to act against the Assad government or on the rebels" or civilians" behalf.