Pressure is building on a new Syrian opposition coalition to choose leaders and transform itself into a political force that could earn formal recognition from the United States and other countries as a viable alternative to the Syrian government. 
 
 The coalition, formally known as the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, was pulled together from a variety of opposition groups at a meeting last month in Doha, Qatar, that was convened at the insistence of the United States and other nations. 
 
 On Nov. 13, France became the first Western country to formally recognize the coalition, and President François Hollande said France would consider arming it. Britain, Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council have also recognized the coalition. 
 
 But the coalition has struggled to agree on a slate of governing leaders that would unite what is still a loosely allied organization, trying to weave together local councils, splinter organizations, disparate opposition groups and the loyalties of the armed units fighting the forces of President Bashar al-Assad. 
 
 On Wednesday, the United States, just ahead of a meeting next Wednesday of the so-called Friends of Syria in Marrakesh, Morocco, expressed fresh support for the coalition, as American intelligence said it had detected that Syrian troops had mixed precursor chemicals for a deadly nerve gas. American officials hinted that the United States would upgrade relations with the opposition, possibly to formal recognition, if the coalition had made progress on a political structure by the meeting. 
 
 “Now that there is a new opposition formed, we are going to be doing what we can to support that opposition,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said at a news conference in Brussels, adding that at the Marrakesh meeting “we will explore with like-minded countries what we can do to” end this conflict. The State Department announced on Wednesday that Mrs. Clinton would lead the United States delegation at the meeting. 
 
 Separately, the United States is moving toward designating one Syrian opposition group, Al Nusra Front, as an international terrorist organization, American officials said. The group is seen by experts as affiliated with Al Qaeda. The step would be synchronized with the emerging strategy toward the opposition and would aim to isolate radical foes of the Assad government. 
 
 With the pressure on to create a government framework, the coalition and its delegates have held meetings in Cairo to try to agree on how to choose leaders, including a prime minister. Another round of talks could take place there on Saturday. Yaser Tabbara, a member of the coalition, said they might also try to identify candidates for 10 to 15 cabinet positions. 
 
 The spotlight on the coalition as a governing alternative is also growing stronger at the same time that pressure is building on the Assad government. 
 
 This week, fighting has raged around the capital, Damascus, and the airport, and diplomatic setbacks have come in waves. A senior Turkish official has said that Russia, a staunch supporter of Mr. Assad’s government, had agreed to a new diplomatic approach that would seek ways to persuade him to give up, and a Foreign Ministry spokesman was said to have defected. 
 
 In addition, President Obama, Mrs. Clinton and NATO ministers warned Syria that any use of chemical weapons would be met with a strong international response. The Syrian Foreign Ministry told state television that the government “would not use chemical weapons, if it had them, against its own people under any circumstances.” 
 
 But American intelligence officials detected that Syrian troops have mixed together small amounts of precursor chemicals for sarin, a deadly nerve gas, at one or two storage sites, and that the chemical weapons might be loaded into aerial bombs or artillery shells and deployed in the fighting there. Mrs. Clinton again highlighted the new concerns. 
 
 “And I have to say again what I said on Monday, what President Obama has said repeatedly: We’ve made our views absolutely clear to the Syrians, to the international community, through various channels — public, private, direct, indirect — that this is a situation that the entire international community is united on,” she said in Brussels on Wednesday after the NATO meeting. 
 
 “And our concerns are that an increasingly desperate Assad regime might turn to chemical weapons or might lose control of them to one of the many groups that are now operating within Syria.” 
 
 Fighting continued on Wednesday in the suburbs of Damascus as the government pressed a counteroffensive against rebels. Some antigovernment fighters said they had taken the Aqraba air base near the Damascus airport, which has been effectively closed during six days of fighting, but activists said the fight for the base, and for Damascus was continuing. 
 
 Speculation percolated about whether Mr. Assad would seek asylum in a foreign country. State media in Cuba and Venezuela have reported that the Syrian deputy foreign minister, Faisal Miqdad, visited the countries in late November and delivered written messages from Mr. Assad to their leaders, who share his defiance of the United States. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that he had requested asylum in Latin America. 
 
 But the subject of the meetings remained unclear, and some analysts expressed doubt that Mr. Assad would leave Syria.In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Mark Toner, said, “We do understand that some countries, both in the region and elsewhere, have offered to host Assad and his family should he choose to leave Syria.” 
 
 But Mr. Miqdad, making the first appearance by a Syrian government official in more than a week, called the media reports “laughable.” 
 
 “I assure you 100 percent that President Assad will never leave his country,” he said. ||||| A merger between terrorist groups spells even more trouble for Syrians caught in the middle. By Jamie Dettmer. 
 
 Syrians battling to oust President Bashar al-Assad shouldn’t settle for democracy as the reward for their sacrifices but should embrace strict Islamic sharia law when the Syrian regime has been finally defeated, says the emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. 
 
 In a recorded audio message lasting 20 minutes and released yesterday to jihadi websites, Al-Baghdadi acknowledged that Al Qaeda has been involved in the fighting in Syria, confirming that the Jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra, which has become one of the most effective and disciplined rebel formations in the civil war, is an extension of Al Qaeda in Iraq, otherwise known as the Islamic State of Iraq. 
 
 Al-Nusra, which has launched more than 40 successful bombing attacks against mainly government military targets, often using suicide bombers, has been tagged a terrorist organization by the Obama administration because of its links with al-Qaeda. It has been enjoying growing cachet among Syrian rebels from recent operational accomplishments on the battlefield and has been in the vanguard of many successful full-scale rebel clashes with Assad forces. 
 
 Al-Baghdadi says that al-Nusra’s ties with Al Qaeda were kept obscure for security reasons and to provide Syrians the opportunity to judge the jihadist fighters through their own eyes as opposed through the filter of a biased international media that would immediately have dismissed them. 
 
 According to the Al Qaeda leader, there were already jihadist cells in Syria before the conflict erupted. These cells were “awaiting the chance” to expand their operations and when the civil war started Abu Muhammad Al-Julani was dispatched along with other Iraqi jihadists to establish al-Nusra and to set strategy. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been splitting its funds with al-Nusra, he says. 
 
 His boast will be seized on by the Assad regime, which has consistently spun the propaganda line that the rebellion is a foreign conspiracy relying on terrorists and foreign Jihadist fighters. 
 
 The evidence on the ground is that al-Nusra has been able to swell its ranks with homegrown fighters as well foreigners drawn from elsewhere in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia and with a sprinkling from Europe. 
 
 The Obama administration, which took major criticism from Syrian rebels for tagging al-Nusra a terrorist organization, will likely highlight al-Baghdadi’s remarks as final justification for its desgination. 
 
 Al-Baghdadi is a highly effective if brutal leader. He has been responsible for directing large-scale operations in Iraq such as the August 28, 2011 attack on the Umm al-Qura mosque in Baghdad that killed prominent Sunni lawmaker Khalid al-Fahdawi. He has had deep experience in setting up jihadist groups and organized the flow of fighters from Syria and elsewhere into Iraq, a recruitment process that strengthened Al Qaeda in Iraq, say U.S. intelligence sources. He became the emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq in 2010. 
 
 On December 2, 2012 Iraqi officials claimed that they had captured him in Baghdad following a two-month-long investigation but later admitted they had lifted a less important jihadist leader. Al Baghdadi became notorious before taking over the Al Qaeda leadership for running Islamic courts to try locals for working with the Iraqi government and coalition forces and would sometimes abduct whole families. Those he found guilty were publicly executed. 
 
 Al-Baghdadi’s remarks are likely to complicate the arming of Syrian rebels by Gulf powers. Since January, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have increased significantly weapon supplies to brigades affiliated with the Free Syrian Army in the hope that the weapons would shift the balance of the war decisively and quickly in favor of the rebels. But videos posted by al-Nusra last month show their fighters using Croatian anti-tank weapons the Gulf powers are thought to have earmarked for the FSA. 
 
 The British and French governments have been pushing to increase the flow of weapons to the Syrian rebels and for a European Union arms embargo to be lifted, but other European nations have resisted, arguing the equipment would fall into the hands of jihadist groups such as al-Nusra. European critics of the Anglo-French position say the intended recipients of the weapons, the FSA rebel units, work too closely with al-Nusra to keep the weapons to themselves, say German diplomats involved in EU negotiations. 
 
 “We are concerned that the FSA isn’t really a cohesive force with a single command-and-control structure,” says a German diplomat based in Brussels. “The FSA can’t stop weaponry from being shared with al-Nusra and other jihadists,” he says. 
 
 According to al-Baghdadi al-Nusra will now be officially merged with Al Qaeda in Iraq and the two groups will operate under the name Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham. The name change is significant and highlights Al Qaeda’s ambitions to use the Syrian conflict for greater regional goals. Al-Sham refers to Greater Syria, a pan-Arab geographical definition of a hypothetical united Arab state that corresponds to a medieval Arab province encompassing the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the Levant as well as Western Mesopotamia. 
 
 In recent weeks al-Nusra fighters have come closer to Lebanon and the likelihood has increased of a confrontation along the border between Lebanon’s Shiite armed movement Hezbollah and Sunni jihadists with al-Nusra, who have been moving into Shiite villages on the Syrian side of the border along a 30-mile stretch in the mountainous al-Nabk area about 50 miles north of Damascus, say Lebanese intelligence sources. 
 
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 In his audio message al-Baghdadi says the new merged group will not abide by geographical borders or be constrained by ethnic affiliations. That echoes what al-Nusra has said in recent months to other smaller Jihadist groups fighting in Syria. 
 
 In January al-Nusra issued a call to arms after a meeting in the Syrian province of Deir al-Zour with nine other jihadist groups. Al-Nusra urged all jihadist brigades to “unite in the cause of Allah, organize the efforts and the attacks against the soldiers of disbelief and apostasy, and distinguish the ranks of truth from falsehood.” The statement continued: “We call upon our sincere mujahedin brothers all over the strong Levant to unite their ranks in groups, pure of the filth of suspicious groups and the infiltration of people who have no qualities or faith, in order to clarify their banner and purify their path.” 
 
 As well as being at the forefront of major battles with Syrian government forces, al-Nusra has unleashed a bombing campaign. Its first suicide bombing came nine months after the uprising against Assad began with a two-car bomb attack on December 23, 2011—targeting the regime’s intelligence offices, killing at least 44 people, and wounding more than 160. According to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, it is likely that two female suicide bombers from Iraq carried out that attack. Since then the pace of al-Nusra bombings has increased from one a month in the first three months of 2012 to four to six a month now. 
 
 The group has been careful in the past to limit its jihadi messages when interacting with locals in rebel-held territory and has talked more in terms of assisting the poor. It has basked in growing popularity in the rebel areas of Idlib and Aleppo provinces tucked under the border with Turkey. Civilians contrast the discipline and honesty of al-Nusra fighters with some FSA fighters and argue the jihadists share war spoils with civilians unlike FSA units.
– Some of Syria's most powerful rebel groups have disavowed the Western-backed National Syrian Coalition's government in exile, in a move that may further complicate efforts to find a diplomatic resolution to the country's civil war. Thirteen groups, spearheaded by the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front, released a statement last night declaring that the newly-formed interim government "does not represent or recognize us" and urging their fellow rebels to make Sharia law "the sole source of legislation." Three of the signatories control large amounts of territory, CNN reports. The jihadis aren't the only ones dismissing the opposition government, either. Syria's deputy foreign minister yesterday dismissed the coalition as having little influence, the New York Times reports. He further dimmed the prospect of peace talks by saying the regime wouldn't negotiate with anyone who'd taken up arms against it, though it might talk to religious leaders "who have influence on the ground." Russia, meanwhile, said a peace deal could only be reached if the US stopped calling for Bashar al-Assad's ouster, Reuters reports.