Around a dozen army officers, including as many as six generals, who defected from the Syrian army were in neighbouring Turkey on Friday, the Anatolia news agency and Syrian opposition source said. Anatolia said four generals and two colonels who had been stationed in Damascus, Homs and Latakia, had crossed the border into Turkey's southern province of Hatay to join the Syrian rebels.
Fahd al-Masri, an advisor for Syrian opposition group the Higher Revolutionary Council, told AFP that six brigadier generals had defected in the past 48 hours along with four colonels, a lieutenant colonel, a major and a female lieutenant. He said they were from the province of Idlib, near the Turkish border, where Syrian troops were massing this week, ahead of an expected large-scale offensive. However, he noted that such defections were a drop in the bucket when compared with the size of the Syrian military.