Goran Tomasevic / Reuters

Free Syrian Army fighters take cover behind sand bags during clashes in Aleppo on Sunday.

NEWS ANALYSIS

Richard Engel, NBC News' chief foreign correspondent, has just left Syria after spending three weeks reporting on rebel forces in the north of the war-torn country.  Based on his three weeks of reporting, he offers an analysis of what could happen if the international community does not intervene in the conflict.

ISTANBUL, Turkey – Al-Qaida units are already entering Syria. 

Pickup trucks waving their black flags and carrying hard-looking men are increasingly evident on Syrian country roads. 

It wasn't like this just a few weeks ago.  A year-and-a-half ago, Syrian rebels started the fight to topple President Bashar Assad’s corrupt police state and end four decades of sectarian favoritism. The majority of Syrians are Sunni Muslims but they have been ruled by Assad’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. 

Rebel forces claim to have downed a Syrian fighter jet

The rebels have watched Russia arm the government. They have seen Shiite Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah send fighters and military advisors to help Assad. 

They have also watched the United Nations send observers without authority, and the United States make what seem to many appear to be toothless condemnations. 

So al-Qaida, the world’s most extremist Sunni group, is offering itself as a solution, a savior of the revolution.  It is arriving flush with money and weapons, as I reported last week.

I have spoken with rebel units who told me they were offered large amounts of money, in exchange for pledging allegiance to al-Qaida. But it comes with a caveat: they can not leave. One rebel commander told me that one of his relatives had joined al-Qaida and tried to leave – but was executed for his apparent treason. 

Still others are taking up the opportunity.

"I will go to [al-Qaida], and raise their flag if they give me support," one rebel told me. 

"I'd take money from al-Qaida.  What choice do I have?  I can't defend myself or my family," another rebel commander said.  "I'll take the al-Qaida support, and then deal with them later.  Otherwise there won't be a later." 

He's the most secular Syrian I know.  He hates al-Qaida, but feels he may have to deal with the devil to save his family and village.

Even the most secular rebel groups say they're tempted, and no wonder.  I've seen rebels at checkpoints with empty magazines in the rifles.  They have homemade grenades in pipes and shaving cream cans. 

It's easy to forget that without international support, the rebels in Libya would have lost the war and been massacred.  And the Syrian rebels are asking for much less than what was given to Libya.  They don't want ground troops, although they would take a no-fly zone, if offered.  All they’re really asking for is ammunition and a few hundred anti-aircraft and anti-tank rockets.  

Violence intensifying in Syria: the battle continues in Aleppo

Meanwhile, the United States says it doesn't know who to arm, and that it doesn’t want to give weapons to the wrong people. 

While Saudi Arabia and Qatar are believed to be arming Syrian rebels, and the United States and Britain pledged to step up non-lethal assistance to Assad's opponents, many say this is far from enough.

The United States, rebels say, is paralyzed because of the upcoming presidential elections.  Washington can’t take decisive action because of November’s vote, many rebels contend.

US, Turkey explore no-fly zones over Syria

So while the vast majority of rebels hate the idea of an al-Qaida base in Syria, they also don't want Assad to stay in power and continue his killing spree.  And international inaction may give the United States' worst enemy a gift that it has always wanted – a base at the heart of the Middle East. 

Slideshow: The lives of Syrian rebels

NBC News

People resisting the army of President Bashar Assad in northern Syria cope with loss and prepare for fighting.

Launch slideshow

And this would be a danger to Syria, its neighbors, and the United States.

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The girls circle the stage in a nightclub outside of Damascus, holding hands in protective pairs as they march, always counterclockwise, at the same slow pace, one unenthusiastic step per second.   

It's 3 a.m., but bright as a hospital ward in here.  The club owners leave on the fluorescent lights so customers can get a good look at what's for sale.  The girls' faces are painted in slashes of pink blush. Their lipstick is drab browns and beiges.  They want it that way, so it doesn't distract from their eyes, accented with glittering splashes of emerald green and sapphire blue.  Many girls connect their thin, shaped eyebrows with a black pencil, and have orange and yellow plastic flowers in their long hair, blackened with henna.

One girl, gawky and about 13, has eyeglasses tucked into the top of her tight, lilac sequined dress.  Her sister, who says she's 14, chews bubble gum and keeps borrowing the glasses.  She can't see when she puts them on and waves her hands in front of her, pretending to be blind.  It makes the sisters laugh.  They are bored circling all night.  I guess they also want to forget where they are.  Maybe it helps if you can't see.  The 14-year-old also has a mobile phone stuffed into her bra.  She pulls it out when men, mostly from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, call her over to their tables to exchange 'missed calls.'  The men call the next day and negotiate a price and a meeting place.

There are dozens of clubs just like this one the outskirts of Damascus -- a red light district built on the slender shoulders of little Iraqi girls in belly dancing costumes. The girls are nearly all Iraqi refugees forced into what U.N. relief agencies call "survival sex."  The reason why is cold math.  There are 1.4 million Iraqi refugees in Syria.  Syrian laws do not allow Iraqi refugees to work in Syria, which struggles to provide enough jobs for its own citizens.  But Iraqi children can often slip under the law, especially if they work on the black market.  They work to support their families.  Many were traumatized even before they left Iraq, and had relatives murdered or kidnapped.  Now they are forced into prostitution -- victims of war, victimized again every night.

Some of the girls we saw also looked very young, perhaps under six years old.  The club owner told us they were younger sisters or cousins who had come to the club because they couldn't find babysitters.  But the little girls were dressed in tight costumes and gyrated in unbalanced pirouettes.  They were apprentices and once on stage, everything has a price.

It is difficult to imagine how these girls will ever recover from the trauma of the war and subsequent exploitation.  A senior U.N. official told me the refugee crisis is a 'time bomb' in the Middle East waiting to explode, creating rage that is building from Baghdad to the nightclubs of Damascus, rage directed mostly at the United States and its war in Iraq.

Richard's complete report will air on Tuesday's 'Nightly News' broadcast.

Maha didn't sound like the murderer she wants to be.

The 20-year-old sounded polite and soft-spoken as she told me about her plans to become a suicide bomber. Her motivation, as she told me over the phone (she was too scared to meet in person), is not political, patriotic, religious or even, like some male suicide bombers, bizarrely sexual; for her there would be no 72 houris, the dark-eyed female attendants some Islamic teachings say care for male martyrs in paradise.

Our talk took me back to a trash-filled street in Cairo where in 1997 I spoke with a group of young men, all poor, unmarried, undereducated Islamic radicals who were trying to convert me. They repeatedly stressed how virgins would dote me on me in heaven.  One of the men pulled a cigarette lighter from his pocket and held the yellow flame under my outstretched palm.  I pulled back my hand in pain.

"Does that hurt you?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

Read more in our sister blog, "WorldBlog"

NBC Correspondent Richard Engel has posted a dispatch on our sister blog "Blogging Baghdad" about the timing of Saddam Hussein's execution being a religious debate rather than a legal one.

Click to read his blog

Editor's note: Richard's story on Thursday's broadcast, about the stress U.S. troops face in the field and back at home, drew a considerable amount of response. One item in particular stirred up debate, so he wrote more about it in Blogging Baghdad. Here's an excerpt, with a link to the full post below.

How war has changed. Saigon: Comfort women, an embarrassing shot from the medic, booze, pot, secrets from wives at home. Soldiers here say, "not this time."

Now they're worried the tables have turned, and that the soldiers' wives are on the make while they live like monks on bases.

"The extent of our social lives is a trip to the porta-john with an FHM magazine," a soldier told me.  The troops here worry about "The Jody."

"Jody?"

I'd never heard of it. I know al-Qaida in Iraq, the Mahdi army, and other nefarious death squads that want to kill American troops. But Jody? I drew a blank. 

A soldier filled me in: "Jody is the guy back home with you wife or your girlfriend," he said, suddenly deadly serious. "He's the guy hiding behind a corner, behind the curtain, hiding in the closet."

Read the rest in Blogging Baghdad.

So many viewers have written wanting to open their homes and offer Iraqi children new lives. Unfortunately, Iraqi lawyers, international child care agencies, officials at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and the U.S. State Department in Washington all tell us adoption is not possible. Here is why:

Iraqi laws/Islamic laws
Adoption is not allowed in Iraq for both religious and Islamic reasons. It is illegal for a foreigner to an adopt an Iraqi child. It is illegal for a non-Muslim to adopt a Muslim child.

Guardianship
What is allowed in Iraq is a system of guardianship, in which a family cares for an orphan without the child actually becoming a son or daughter. Currently, it is not permitted for a foreigner to become a legal guardian of an Iraqi child.

Wartime
Aid agencies, including UNICEF and the U.S. State Department, also discourage adoptions from countries in crisis because it is difficult to establish if children are in fact orphans, or have just been separated from living relatives because of the chaos of war.

What to do
Most aid groups working with children tell us the best way to help orphans in countries in crisis is to try to place them with their extended families and provide those families the financial support and training to care for the children. UNICEF has agreed to earmark all donations it receives as a result of our story for this type of program in Iraq. Click here to visit their Web site.

BAGHDAD -- Thirteen-year-old Marwa never cried, even when I asked her to relive the night her parents were executed in their home. It surprised me. I wondered how she'd become so tough so quickly.

"Where were you when the gunmen came?" I asked Marwa as we sat together in a classroom in the orphanage where she now lives with her two younger sisters Alliya, 10, and Sora, 6. 

"I was asleep upstairs when I head the shots," Marwa said. "I ran downstairs and saw my mother. She was shot all over and was dead. My father was barely alive."

Her father died two days later of multiple gunshot wounds.

I swallowed hard and asked what happened after that.

"We lived with my uncle for about a year, and then came here."

"Why? Why did you have to come here?" I asked.  I hated asking the question, but it bothered me that her uncle would send the girls to live in an orphanage. I wanted to know how Marwa rationalized it. She was very matter of fact.   

"He couldn't afford to keep us, so he brought us here."

Editor's note: Read the rest of Richard's post in Blogging Baghdad and watch Nightly News tonight for more of the girls' story.

I was alone, reading a copy of the Saturday Evening Post last week from January 1962, when I thought to myself, "Richard, you need a life."

Evidently, the management at NBC News agreed. They decided to give me the opportunity to open a Middle East bureau based in Beirut, Lebanon -- a dynamic city with enough high-life and low-life to keep things spicy. I can have a home there. Life in Baghdad has involved a lot of nights reading old magazines in a dingy, poorly lit, empty hotel room. Ah, the romantic life of a foreign correspondent!

I will continue to cover the Baghdad beat, my daily diet for the past three years, but also be able to explore the rest of the region, which brings me back to the Saturday Evening Post article. It was entitled "The Seething Arab World." In words as appropriate today as they were 44 years ago, the magazine reported: "The observer, looking at the Arab world today and trying to predict what may happen there, is in a position of a seismologist peering at a great range of volcanic mountains and trying to guess which smoldering cone will explode first."

I think a seismologist examining the region today might be even more nervous. I suspect the mountains are even more explosive. The new bureau will allow us to look beyond Iraq and to examine how the war has affected the wider region, asking questions like: Why has neighboring Iran been emboldened by the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime? What are the Gulf States doing with the their windfall oil revenues? And why does this region consistently supply radical groups with young people willing to kill themselves to kill Americans?

Covering the broader Middle East is a daunting task that reporters have struggled with for decades.  Again, I quote the Saturday Evening Post from 44 years ago: "There is a saying in the Middle East that a foreign journalist who comes there and stays for a week goes home to write a book, in which he presents a pat solution to all the Middle East's problems. If he stays a month, he writes a magazine article, filled with 'ifs' and 'buts' and 'on the other hands.' If he stays a year, he writes nothing at all, for the complexities and paradoxes of this explosive area have left him bewildered and confused."

After 10 years living and reporting in the Middle East, three of them in Iraq, I am equally bewildered and confused, but also excited and immensely grateful. I will endeavor to do my best.

While it is not yet guaranteed, and certainly there have been last minute changes, political party representatives in Iraq tell us it looks very likely that Jawad al Maliki will be Iraq's next prime minister.

Here's a thumbnail analysis:

Why he's good
Sources told me Maliki is a pragmatic negotiator. He has been described as the 'architect' of the national unity government. He attended nearly every negotiating meeting over the past four months (a track record better than many of his colleagues) and was the one burning up the telephones, calling the Sunni Arabs and Kurds. In the process, he earned their trust. A negotiator said he's "someone with mud on his hands."

Also… Maliki is not Jaafari. Critics say Jaafari's performance was abysmal and that starting fresh with practically anyone is better than going ahead with the same leader who seemed unable to deal with Iraq's growing sectarian violence, Shiite militias, Sunni-led insurgency, and serious economic problems.

Maliki is also seen as more practical and straightforward than Jaafari, who was poetic, intellectual, vague and wiley.

Why he's bad
Poltiical analysts say Maliki is not a strong, independent thinker. He has been a Dawa party functionary his entire life and is seen as someone who can be influenced from the sidelines by powerful Shiite figures like SCIRI's Abdel Aziz al-Hakim and radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. He is therefore not likely to tackle their militias, the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army.

Also, Maliki is not an international statesman. He speaks English poorly and has limited experience with the West. He has lived extensively in Syria and Iran.

The Sunni Arabs also don't like that Maliki was a member of the de-Baathification committee, which has been in charge of purging Iraqi institutions of Baath party members and has been accused of conducting witch hunts of Sunni Arabs.

What this means for the United States
This is great news for the United States, even if Maliki is not the person American officials would have chosen... he is not. At least now, however, the United States has a government to talk to. For the past four months there has been no effective Iraqi government. The U.S. has been in an awkward position of 'transferring authority' to an Iraqi government that didn't exist. Soon, U.S. officials will be able to say, 'there is a democratically elected full-term government in place, the first one in Iraq's modern history,' and that the United States has a legitimate counterpart to deal with. The plan is for this full-term government to start asserting itself so that it can take on more responsibility, especially in terms of security so that when General George Casey (the top U.S. commander here) reviews troops strength later this spring he can confidently reduce troop levels. Another advantage, if this government lasts its full four-year term (see next point) there will finally be some consistency on the Iraqi side. Most of the Iraqi politicians of the past two years have been focused mainly on elections and constitutional negotiations and not on their main job of running the country.

The big dangers
There is a threat that too much damage has been done and the that government will not be strong enough to reverse the trend. Also, the government, so laborious to create, could collapse during the first major national crisis. One political analyst told me tonight he doesn't expect the government to last six months. Watch for a political crisis in the run-up to the next vote on amendments to the constitution.

Who can you trust? What do you do when the two people you trust most tell you not to trust anyone?

I was given the first of two frank warnings just after I had walked into my office this morning after a few weeks out of Baghdad.

I dumped my flak jacket by the door, and exchanged three kisses on the cheeks with an old friend I call brother. We had sweet coffee. He smoked, and as he twisted out a third cigarette he told me, "only dumb people trust these days."

An hour later, a young Iraqi who has risked his life to keep me safe several times told me, "Trust no one."

They are perhaps the two people I trust with my life in this land of opportunism, and perhaps still opportunity.  But both told me not to. So should I trust what they say? And then do what? 

It reminded me of a joke by comedian and master of irony Stephen Wright. He said he'd named his dog "Stay" just so he could torment it by saying, "Come here, Stay," "Come here, Stay." 

Editor's note: Richard Engel just returned to his reporting post in Baghdad after some well-deserved R&R.  Read the rest of his post in Blogging Baghdad.

Cameraman Doug Vogt had it all figured out. He was set, settled, snug. Doug looked relaxed as we were having a drink at our bureau in Baghdad a few months ago. 

He told me how much he loved his house in southern France and that he was working less and spending more time with his family, finally. Doug had arrived at that elusive place in his life where he wanted to be, spending about half the year as a gentleman farmer (fixing his house, playing with his kids), and the other half paying for it by working in the worst war zones in the world.

There's a deplorable tendency among those of us who report in Baghdad to blame the victim. I think it makes us feel better to say, "They took too many risks." But that's impossible to do this time. 

Bob Woodruff and Doug are serious, well-prepared and disciplined professionals. I have worked with both of them. They were just doing their job, and were unlucky.

Editor's note: You can read the rest of Richard's post in Blogging Baghdad.