Syrian rebels tell West: 'forget Russian proposal and act now - we are dying every day' The problem is not only the chemical weapons. The main problem is that the Syrian people are killed every day with all kind of weapons. We call on the world not to turn our fight with a brutal dictatorship into a problem about the use of chemical weapons. The Syrian National Coalition said in a statement the initiative was a "political manoeuvre" and that it did not "address the issue of accountability for crimes against innocents." John McCain, the US senator and former Republican party presidential candidate who has been the strongest backer of American military intervention, said the cause of the rebels was being obscured. "There's nothing that will drive Syrians more into the hands of extremists than to feel they have been abandoned by the West," he said in an interview with MSNBC. Supporters of intervention say they face a vicious circle under which the longer outside support is delayed, the more "moderate" rebels turn to the better funded and better disciplined jihadist militias - in some cases aligned to al-Qaeda - and the harder it becomes to drum up Western sympathy for the opposition cause. On Wednesday the Syrian army fought to recapture the historic Christian town of Maaloula, one of the last places where Western Aramaic - a dialect of the language spoken by Christ is still spoken, from the al-Qaeda linked Jabhat al-Nusra and other rebel militias. While some pro-government Syrian media outlets reported that the army had retaken the town, eye witnesses said that the battles were continuing, and that the Syrian army was taking heavy casualties. Separately, a regime air raid on a field hospital in the northern, rebel-held town of Al-Bab near Aleppo killed 11 people including a doctor, according to the British-based monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The group also said that fighters belonging to Jabhat al-Nusra in Homs province killed 20 civilians from three villages occupied by members of the Alawite sect of President Bashar al-Assad.