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The kidnapping of six international Red Cross employees and one employee of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent in Syria has added more fuel to worries about the growing hazards of providing aid to hundreds of thousands of Syrians displaced by the country's ongoing civil war.

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) spokesman Robert Mardini wrote this morning that the Syrian and three of the other kidnapped aid workers have been released, but also drew attention to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the country.

The BBC reports details of the kidnapping:

The ICRC is active in conflict spots around the globe, but also operates in less overtly dangerous realms - the Red Cross has been in the news recently for delivering food aid in Britain and advocating the punishment of war crimes in video games.

The dangerous atmosphere in Syria seems unlikely to fade anytime soon, despite international diplomatic pressure. Proposed talks in Geneva hit a major speed bump when a large rebel group refused to participate in them.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has also been pushing an end to the violence, albeit on a temporary basis. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning group, working with Syria and the international community to identify and destroy Syria's chemical weapons stockpile, has been challenged by the violent conditions of the civil war and told the BBC that it is calling for local, short-term cease-fires to allow its experts to work.

The chaos of the civil war has made untangling the origins and motivations of specific violent acts difficult if not impossible. A car bomb Monday killed at least 12 people in the rebel-held town of Darkoush in Idlib Province, reports The Associated Press.

And an evacuation has given some relief to a rebel-held suburb of Damascus where hunger has become a serious scourge, according to The New York Times:

The challenge of moving food, medical aid, and international observers around in a civil war is a serious one, reports the Times in a story about the country's highways.

Part of the problem lies with the nature of the rebellion, a much contested and increasingly complicated part of the story of Syria's civil war. The Washington Post looked at the rival Al Qaeda-linked groups within the rebellion:

As factionalism mounts among rebels, so have rebel-linked atrocities. The Economist looked at attacks on Alawites, the minority group to which the ruling Assad family belongs.

But is President Bashar al-Assad actually lucky to have so many jihadis squaring off against him? Perhaps, says a Monitor story, which suggests that Mr. Assad may have aided the radicalization of the rebels in hope of winning international support for his besieged regime:

But whether hard-line Islamists make up a large percentage of anti-regime fighters is an open question that is difficult to resolve. The Monitor does its best to break it down and finds that there is much wiggle room between confirmed facts and sometimes dubious analysis: