At a time when rebel forces appear to have been checked in Damascus and are struggling to consolidate their positions in Aleppo it might be thought that infighting was a luxury Mr Asad's opponents can ill afford, but it was at this point that they chose instead to mount a spectacular display of disunity. At a press conference in Cairo on 31 August opposition activist Haitham al-Malih announced the formation of a 70-strong Council for the Syrian Revolution (CSR) as an alternative to the existing Syrian National Council (SNC), from which he resigned in March and which he said "had failed to help the Syrian revolution."  Mr Malih also claimed that "the brothers have asked me to form a transitional government in Syria and to begin dialogue with the rest of the Syrian opposition." Unsurprisingly, this announcement did not go down particularly well with the head of the SNC, ʹAbd al-Basit Sida, who  accused the  new group on the same day of putting the cart before the horse, saying that "the process of forming a transitional government is difficult and needs consultations with all members of the Syrian opposition…but if each group came out alone announcing the formation of a new government without talks and research, this would end up in having aseries of weak governments that don't represent anyone and would not be able to  mean or do anything." The head of the main opposition military body, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Col Riad al-Asʹad, was even more scathing about the CSR, saying that its founders "were hit by a fever of…acquiring positions which led them to announce the founding of a transitional government…to ride over our revolution and trade with the blood of our martyrs." The colonel added that the CSR plan was mainly aimed at "pleasing the outside world while making the internal (groups) fight against one another to destroy the unity of the people which the FSA stands for."