A rebel fired toward government snipers in Aleppo on Friday. The White House has accused Hezbollah of helping Iran train Syrian forces against the opposition.

10/08/2012

‘There will be no winner in #Syria,’ UN chief warns, as refugee crisis grows

After months of protests and violent crackdowns, a look back at the violence that has overtaken the country.

10/08/2012

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned Friday “there will be no winner in Syria,” as the world body said nearly 150,000 refugees fleeing the 17-month-old conflict had registered in neighboring countries.

In Aleppo, rebels fighting in the Salaheddine district, a southern gateway to the commercial hub, said they had been forced to fall back from frontline positions on Thursday by a fierce bombardment which had reduced buildings to rubble.

“There have been some withdrawals of Free Syrian Army fighters from Salaheddine,” rebel commander Abu Ali told Reuters. Others said the main frontlines in the area, which had been held by rebels for more than a week, were now deserted.

The center of the district, near Salaheddine mosque, was abandoned when Reuters journalists visited on Thursday. The only sound was the constant echo of artillery shelling. There were no rebels, no security forces, and only a few residents darting in and out to pick up belongings — while evading army snipers.

All-consumed fighting
President Bashar Assad, engaged in an all-consuming fight with his mostly Sunni opponents, appointed a Sunni as his new prime minister on Thursday after his predecessor fled Monday in the highest-level defection so far in an uprising that has killed around 20,000 people.

Wael Nader al-Halqi, from the southern province of Daraa where the revolt began, replaces Riyad Hijab, who had spent only two months in the job before making a dramatic escape across the border to Jordan.

Assad’s authority was shaken by the assassination last month of four of his top security officials and by rebel gains in Damascus, Aleppo and swathes of rural Syria.
But he has persevered with a crackdown on opponents seeking to end half a century of Baathist rule and topple a system dominated by members of the president’s minority Alawite sect.

Video (top): Rebels say minority Shiite and Alawite Muslims, the groups that have ruled Syria for decades, are being left alone in the carnage inflicted by Syrian troops. NBC’s Richard Engel reports.

As the battle for Aleppo raged, Iran, Assad’s closest foreign backer, called for “serious and inclusive” negotiations between the Syrian government and opposition.

Assad replaces fugitive PM, deals blow to rebels in key Aleppo district

Assad has repeatedly said he is ready for dialogue, but he has vowed to crush the armed rebels he says are terrorists. His opponents say he must step aside before any talks, arguing negotiations would be meaningless while the bloodshed persists.

Machine guns operated by motorcycle brakes? Get a glimpse at the rebels fighting against Assad’s forces in Syria’s mountainous Jabal al-Zawiya area.

Iran made the call after gathering diplomats from like-minded states in Tehran for talks on the conflict not attended by Western and most Middle Eastern states, which have demanded Assad end his family’s 40-year rule.

‘Long-term civil war’
The violence has already shown elements of a proxy war between Sunni and Shiite Islam.

“There will be no winner in Syria,” Ban said in a statement read by a U.N. representative to the conference in Tehran.

“Now, we face the grim possibility of long-term civil war destroying Syria’s rich tapestry of interwoven communities,” it said.

Refugees pour across borders
In Geneva, Adrian Edwards, spokesman of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, told a news briefing that the number of registered Syrian refugees in four neighboring countries continued to grow.

‘Situation is desperate’ at makeshift hospitals on Syrian-Turkish border

The total includes 50,227 recorded in Turkey, where more than 6,000 Syrians arrived this week alone, the United Nations said.

“There certainly in the past week has been a sharp increase in the numbers arriving in Turkey, and there many of the people are coming from Aleppo and surrounding villages,” Edwards said.

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

“Now if you look at other areas, I think that the situation is more of a steady and continued increase, but where fighting happens we tend to see the consequences,” he said.

As of Thursday night, there were 45,869 Syrian refugees registered in Jordan, 36,841 in Lebanon and 13,587 in Iraq — which has also seen the return of 23,228 Iraqis from Syria since July 18, according to the agency.

Complete international coverage on NBCNews.com

“In several countries we know there to be substantial refugee numbers who have not yet registered,” Edwards said.

Some Syrian refugees have also turned up in other countries including Algeria, Egypt and Morocco, and Evros, the Greek region that borders Turkey, he said, adding that the numbers were “really tiny” compared to the flows to Syria’s neighbors.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Mahmoud, a 21-year-old Palestinian resident of Syria, rests in a field hospital after he was found, Aug. 6, 2012, having been blindfolded, beaten and sprayed with bullets. (AP)

07/08/2012

(AP) ANADAN, Syria — The guards pulled him from his cell before dawn on Monday, bound his hands, blindfolded him and drove him to an empty lot in the Syrian city of Aleppo. They sat him in a row with 10 other captives, he said, then cocked their guns and opened fire.

“They sprayed us,” recalled 21-year-old Mahmoud, the lone survivor of the latest mass killing of Syria’s civil war. “The first bullet hit my chest, then one hit my foot, then my head. As soon as my head got hit, I thought, `I’m dead.”’

Reports of such killings have surfaced frequently during the 17 months of deadly violence that activists seeking to topple President Bashar Assad say has killed more than 19,000 people. But details are usually scarce — no more than activist reports or amateur videos of bloodied bodies or mass graves posted on YouTube.

Mahmoud related his grisly ordeal to The Associated Press hours after it happened. Struggling to speak, he lay in a bed in a makeshift rebel-run field hospital set up in a wedding hall in this town 13 miles north of Aleppo. Bandages covered his foot, head and chest. Plastic vines and colored lights adorned the walls of the darkened building, and two red velvet chairs once used by brides and grooms sat on a small stage.

Mahmoud gave only his first name to protect his family who still live in the area.

While his story could not be independently confirmed, Mahmoud’s wounds matched his story and residents who found him and his dead colleagues corroborated certain details.

Together, they painted a picture of the summary slaying of 10 men, at least some of whom had only loose links to the armed rebels seeking to topple the regime. That story jibes with activist claims of the increasingly brutal tactics regime forces are using to try to crush the rebellion that has spread to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city.

Syria’s uprising started in March 2011 with peaceful protests calling for political reforms that were met with a fierce regime crackdown. Government brutality grew as dissent spread, and many in the opposition took up arms as the conflict morphed into a civil war.

Aleppo has been a stronghold of government support throughout the uprising, with a wealthy business class and many minority communities who fear they’ll suffer if Assad falls. Until recently, the city of some 4 million people had been spared the violence that has ravaged other Syrian cities.

But during the last two weeks, rebels have been pushing into Aleppo’s neighborhoods, clashing with security forces and torching police stations in a push to “liberate” the city. Syrian media has vowed the army is gearing up for a “decisive battle,” while anti-regime activists have reported swelling numbers of troops and tanks on the city’s edges.

The Syrian government blames the uprising on armed gangs and terrorists backed by foreign powers that seek to weaken Syria.

Mahmoud receives treatment in a field hospital after he was found Aug. 6, 2012, with three gunshot wounds in the town of Anadan

 (Credit: AP)

It was amid these tensions that Mahmoud, a Palestinian resident of Aleppo, had his fateful brush with Syrian security. On Thursday, Mahmoud said, he and a friend went to collect their paychecks from the thread factory where they work and heard clashes nearby. Soon eight men in civilian clothes stopped them and asked for their IDs and cell phones.

On Mahmoud’s phone they found videos of anti-government demonstrations and messages he sent to rebels from the Free Syrian Army, asking God to protect them and make them victorious. The men threw Mahmoud and his friend in the trunk of a car and drove them to a trash dump, where they were blindfolded, bound and beaten with sticks and large rocks before being taken to a security office.

Mahmoud was locked in a crowded cell with about a dozen other men, he said. Each day, some were taken out and new ones brought in.

“We were there for four days and they only gave us water to drink once. They never fed us,” he said. “They never asked us anything. Every day it was beating, beating, beating.”

Before dawn on Monday, guards pulled Mahmoud and 10 others from their cells and told they were going to see a judge. They were bound at the wrists, blindfolded and driven to Aleppo’s Khaldiyeh neighborhood, where they were lined up on a patch of rocky soil.

“They sat us all down next to each other, `You here, you here, you here,”’ Mahmoud said. “Then each one cocked his weapon and the shooting started.”

Mahmoud was shot three times. Bullets pierced his chest and foot and one grazed his skull. Minutes later, silence returned, and he realized he was still alive.

“I breathed, I said the shehada,” he said, referring to the Muslim declaration of faith meant to put him right with God. “I tried to get up then started screaming because blood was coming out of me.”

He scraped his face on a rock to remove the blindfold and crawled to where some nearby residents found him.

Among them was a 22-year-old electrician who said he heard the gunfire early Monday and worried that people were being killed because he had discovered six bodies in the same spot a day earlier. He showed videos of the victims on his cell phone, their bodies piled atop each other covered in blood, some bearing large bruises that appeared to be from beatings. He said all had been shot dead.

He and others asked not to have their names published because they have to pass through government checkpoints to get home.

The killings shocked residents of Khaldiyeh, a working-class neighborhood on Aleppo’s northwest side that has seen little violence until now. While many residents support the rebels, they have not established a foothold in the area, and the relative quiet has drawn thousands of people fleeing violence in other Aleppo neighborhoods or nearby villages.

As Mahmoud spoke, a white pickup pulled up outside the field hospital with the bodies of nine of the men killed Monday. The body of the tenth victim had been taken away by his family. All still had their hands bound and two still wore blindfolds. Two had bullet wounds to their heads, and others had blood on their faces and chests or coming out of their ears. None wore shoes.

Those killings convinced one Khaldiyeh resident who helped collect the bodies that the neighborhood needs arms.

“We want the Free Army to come to our neighborhood to protect us,” he said. “If they can’t come, then they need to give us weapons so we can defend ourselves.”

The field hospital’s doctor, Mohammed Ajaj, said he is no longer shocked when the dead and wounded pass through town on their way to burial in nearby villages or for treatment across the northern border in Turkey.

“We’ve gotten used to it,” he said.

An 18-year-old activist who helped collect the bodies said none of them had IDs.

“We really know nothing about them,” he said, adding that he would stop in neighboring villages to see if anyone recognized them before delivering them to a morgue further north.

“If nobody claims them, we’ll take their photos and put them on our Facebook page so their families can find out that they’re dead,” he said. 

Free Syrian Army members patrol Attarib, on the outskirts of Aleppo province July 30, 2012. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra

31/07/2012

TEHRAN: Iran “will not allow the enemy to advance” in its key ally Syria, but does not yet see the need to directly intervene, the deputy chief of the Islamic republic’s armed forces was quoted as saying in reports Tuesday.

“There is still no need for Syria’s circle of friends to fully enter the arena, and our assessment is that there will be no need to do so,” Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri said, according to the Shargh daily.

“In special situations, we decide how to support the regional (anti-Israeli) resistance and our friends. We shall wait to see the future situation and conditions,” he said.

“We are very sensitive when it comes to our friends in the (anti-Israeli) resistance in the region, and we will not allow the enemy to advance,” he said.

A senior commander in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, General Hamid Reza Moqadam-Far, was quoted in another newspaper, Kayhan, saying that Syrian civilians were now fighting rebels alongside the regime’s troops.

He added that, if the rebellion was routed, it would “deliver an enormous blow to Saudi Arabia and Western countries,” which Tehran sees as directly helping the insurgents.

Iran is one of the key allies of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, alongside Russia and China. It sees Syria as part of a regional anti-Israeli bloc that includes itself, the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, and the Palestinian group Hamas.

Tehran has been providing humanitarian aid and diplomatic support to Damascus, but denies reports it has already sent military assistance.

Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi held a telephone conversation late Monday with his Swedish counterpart, Carl Bildt, in which he said there was a need for a dialogue to be held between Syria’s regime and opposition to resolve the conflict.

“Syria’s friends and those who want peace and stability in the region must prepare the ground to permit dialogue between the regime and the opposition to facilitate an exit from the crisis,” Salehi was quoted as saying by the official news agency IRNA.

On Monday, the Syrian regime sent helicopter gunships and artillery to pound rebel-held districts in Aleppo, the country’s commercial capital.

The 16-month uprising in Syria, and Assad’s crackdown on it, has cost more than 20,000 lives according to activists and sent hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing their homes.

(26/07/2012) BEIRUT — Syria’s most prominent defector has put himself forward as someone to unite the fractured opposition as the disparate factions gathered in Qatar Thursday to try to agree on a transitional leadership if Bashar Assad’s regime is toppled.

In the commercial capital of Aleppo, activists said regime forces have intensified their firepower against a rebel challenge over the past two days, with attack helicopters and fighter jets strafing opposition targets as well as artillery bombardments of several neighborhoods. The fighting in Syria’s largest city stretched into a sixth day amid expectations of a major government ground assault.

Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass, who has been described as a former close confidant of President Assad, defected in early July and is now in Saudi Arabia, where he told the Al-Sharq Al-Awsat daily that he does not see a future for Syria with his former friend at the helm.

“I will try and help as much as I can to unite all the honorable people inside and outside Syria to put together a roadmap to get us out of this crisis, whether there is a role for me or not,” he said.

Tlass, whose father was once defense minister and comes from a prominent Sunni Muslim family, said there were many good people in the regime without blood on their hands and the country’s institutions should be preserved. He said he was against the harsh crackdown on the uprising, which began as peaceful protests in March 2011 but morphed into a civil war after a bloody crackdown by Assad loyalists.

He said he had been unable to keep Assad from listening to his close circle of security advisers who counseled him against crushing the opposition.

“Sometimes in a friendship you advise a friend many times, and then you discover that you aren’t having any impact, so you decide to distance yourself,” he said, explaining that he defected when he realized there was no way to deter the regime from its single-minded pursuit of the security option.

The meeting in Doha will focus on forming a transitional administration that could step in as a stopgap government if rebel forces topple Assad. It marks the most comprehensive bid to bring together various Syrian opposition groups and show world leaders a credible alternative to Assad.

The Syrian National Council has acted as the international face of the revolution, but it’s been unable to unite all dozens of disparate rebel factions under one banner or even assert much control over the rag-tag rebel groups fighting inside the country.

Rebels in Aleppo are bracing themselves amid reports that the government is massing reinforcements to retake the embattled city of 3 million, still wracked with clashes.

“Regime forces have been randomly shelling neighborhoods and the civilians are terrified,” local activist Mohammed Saeed told The Associated Press via Skype. “The government reinforcements have yet to arrive.”

The fighting had spread to neighborhoods close to the center of the city, which has a medieval core that is a UNESCO world heritage site.

Last week, Syrian troops used a similar combination of artillery bombardments and overwhelming ground force to quash the rebel assault on Damascus. Even though the government forces far outgun the rebels, it took them a week to get the assault under control in a sign that the opposition’s capabilities are improving.

The White House said Wednesday that the use of heavy weapons in Aleppo showed “the depth of depravity” of Assad’s regime. Spokesman Jay Carney said Syrian forces were perpetrating “heinous violence” against civilians in the city.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the fighting and shelling in Aleppo killed 26 people on Wednesday, including many children. It estimated that a total of 160 died throughout the country, where fighting continues in the cities of Hama, Homs, Daraa and Deir al-Zour.

The clashes across the country have made July the bloodiest month so far in the uprising against Assad’s regime that began peacefully in March 2011. With death tolls estimated at well over 100 people a day, it has become as bad as Iraq when it was in the depths of a sectarian civil war in 2006. Activists say 19,000 have been killed since the uprising began.

In a visit to Iran Thursday, Syria’s deputy prime minister, Omar Ibrahim Ghalawanji, evoked a strong pledge of support from the country’s remaining ally in the Middle East, Iran.

“Tehran is ready to give its experience and capabilities to its friend and brother nation of Syria,” said Iran’s vice president in charge of international affairs, Ali Saeedlou, according to the state news agency. He did not elaborate.

The Qabun neighborhood in Damascus where Syrian rebels have clashed with forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad. Photograph: /Reuters

Free Syria Army braced for counterattack by forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad after four days of dramatic gains

The Syrian military gave residents 48 hours to leave the parts of Damascus now held by rebel forces as it prepared a counterattack aimed at retaking control of its power base and pushing back four days of dramatic rebel gains.

The rebel Free Syria Army on Thursdaycontinued to hold ground it had seized in key parts of the capital during this week’s major attack, and was bracing for a decisive battle against loyalist forces who appear to have been caught off guard by the co-ordinated assault.

Guerrilla units continued to push their gains elsewhere in the country, apparently seizing control of at least two border crossing points into Turkey and all crossings into Iraq, according to videos posted on the internet. Such crossings could prove crucial in funnelling supplies into besieged rebel areas.

Syria’s second city of Aleppo also saw fresh fighting, with rebels claiming to have routed loyalists from the Azzaz neighbourhood, and to be involved in heavy fighting in nearby Idlib city.

The clashes came a day after a bomb planted in a key security building killed three of the regime’s most senior figures, including Assef Shawkat, the intelligence chief who had overseen the 17-month crackdown.

In the wake of the assassinations, the Syrian armed forces’ chief of staff, Fahad Jassim al-Freij, was rapidly named as a replacement for killed defence minister, Dawood Rahja.

“This cowardly terrorist act will not deter our men in the armed forces from continuing their sacred mission of pursuing the remnants of these armed terrorist criminal gangs,” Freij said on state television, in a bid to douse fears of a power vacuum. “They will cut off every hand that tries to hurt the security of the nation or its citizens.”

Activists and Free Syria Army commanders continued to report a sharp increase in defections in the wake of Wednesday’s bombing, but there was nothing yet to indicate that the overall command structure of the Syrian military had been weakened.

The day before the bomb attack, an opposition figure involved in organising defections claimed there were more figures inside the regime who had secretly switched sides and stayed in place than those who had publicly defected, like Republican Guard general Manaf Tlass and the ambassador to Baghdad, Nawaf al-Fares.

“Those were symbolic defections, but we have a lot of ministers and officers working with us, who are still inside. These are far more valuable figures,” the opposition source said. “The week before Tlass defected, 50 officers in the Republican Guard were put under house arrest. They don’t know who to trust. And two days before the Tlass defection, 18 senior officers and 200 soldiers came over to our side.”

The spectacular attack at the heart of one of the regime’s key weekly military strategy meetings continued to reverberate outside of Syria, with some commentators speculating that foreign intelligence organisations may have helped rebels target the meeting.

Paul Salem, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut, suggested Washington may have “tapped into” the Syrian military’s communications. “They [US intelligence] can listen and they can jam. They have aerial night-time capacity. The Syrian military can’t operate at night,” he said, adding that this top-secret intelligence was far more useful to the rebels than “a few guns”.

Rebel leaders have insisted, however, that the intelligence was theirs alone and had been gathered over many months in which key regime aides had been recruited and trained. Before the attack, rebel forces had shown a sharp improvement in command and control and a new ability to co-ordinate large operations.

Salem said that the bombers had struck a “crushing blow” against the Assad regime: “The panic level inside Assad’s inner circle must be enormous. They [the Free Syrian Army] have just blown up his entire command,” he said, adding: “The sense that this ship is going down must be high.” He predicted further defections from Assad’s team, including possible “soft defections”, with commanders opening lines of communication with the Russians and Chinese.

“They can’t recover from this, is my reading. The slide is on. It’s rapid,” he said, adding that Assad may have already left his crumbling power-base in Damascus, or would have to leave soon.

Salem suggested that Assad an, his key advisors, and army units still loyal to him, could eventually abandon the Syrian capital and retreat to the traditional Alawite heartland in the country’s mountainous north west and Mediterranean coast, which would act as a stronghold.

Here, they would continue resistance, while possibly carving out a land corridor to Iraq and to Iran, Assad’s key regional backer. Central to this strategy would be the loyalist port cities of Latakia and the important naval base of Tartus. “They will take their guns, money, the sea lanes,” Salem suggested. “They will build a completely secure Alawite zone. The regime has planned for this day for 40 years,’ he said, observing: “The Sunnis can’t beat them there.”

On Thursday, residents of Damascus, Homs and Hama reported intense shelling from regime positions in each city as well as rocket fire from helicopters. The barrage came ahead of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which is due to begin on Friday. Ramadan is traditionally a time of fasting and reflection and had been thought likely to mark a lull in the fighting now ravaging the country.

However, the regime’s warning to Damascus residents clearly suggests that this Ramadan will be different and could instead herald a decisive phase in the uprising in Syria that the International Committee for the Red Cross now designates as a civil war.

The bomb blast that killed three members of the Syrian regime’s inner sanctum on Wednesday is being touted as the most significant strike against President Bashar al-Assad since the uprising began.

The detonation, which is being reported as both a suicide blast by a rebel fighter and as an explosive placed in the at the scene by a member of the regime, ripped through the national security council in al-Rawda, Damascus.

Both the Free Syrian Army and the Liwa al-Islam have claimed responsibility.

Regardless of who is behind the attack, the blast shows is that the regime, which has shown a collective defiance despite 16 months of bloody rebellion, could finally be unravelling under internal pressure from its opponents.

The bombing killed the President’s brother in law, Assef Shawkat, the man widely regarded as the mastermind behind the government’s brutal crackdown.

Pictured in 2000, Syrian President Bashar Assad, right, his brother Maher, center, and brother-in-law Major General Assef Shawkat, left

The country’s defence minister, Daoud Rajiha, was also killed, as was former defence minister Hasan Turkmani. Maher Assad, the president’s brother and the leader of the renowned 4th Armoured Division, reportedly sustained injuries.

The attack follows the recent defection of the country’s former ambassador to Iraq, Nawaf Fares, who fled the country, carrying with him worrying overtures of Syria’s chemical stockpile, a cache that, according to Fares, Assad would show no hesitation in using should he be corned.

A senior Republican Guard commander also recently defected, while rumours suggest further high-profile desertions are imminent.

Global reaction to the bombing has been swift. Foreign Secretary William Hague said the situation in Syria “is clearly deteriorating”, while US defence chief Leon Panetta expressed “concern” over the escalation in violence.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said on Wednesday that a “decisive battle” was underway over Syria’s future, while adding that Moscow would not agree to a new UN draft resolution threatening further sanctions should Assad not comply with a UN-backed peace initiative.

Following the attack, Syrian state TV remained defiant, suggesting that “terrorists” backed by the west were responsible, while the army issued at statement that said the country was “more determined more than ever to confront all forms of terrorism and chop off any hand that harms national security”.

Despite the regime’s seeming unwavering resolve, Wednesday’s bombing alongside the recent defections indicates that the long reign of the Assad and his Alawite cohorts may finally be coming to an end.

A picture released by the Syrian opposition shows smoke rising from a Homs neighborhood Wednesday.

Are you in Tremseh in Hama? Send photos and stories to CNN iReport.

(CNN) — Syrian protesters Friday demanded the removal of international envoy Kofi Annan after government forces shelled a village a day earlier, killing hundreds, opposition activists said.

Annan, a former U.N. chief, is serving as a special envoy to Syria for the United Nations and the Arab League.

He brokered a peace plan in Syria in April, but opposition fighters and regime forces have largely shunned its mandates, including a call to lay down their weapons.

Protesters took to the streets in solidarity with victims of the late Thursday attack that left at least 220 dead in the village of Tremseh in Hama province, according to the opposition Local Coordination Committees of Syria.

Regime forces targeted the village with relentless shelling for hours, leading to the “massacre,” the opposition group said.

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, another opposition group, issued a conflicting toll. It said it received reports of 160 deaths in the village, but has documented only 40.Regime forces targeted the village with relentless shelling for hours, leading to the “massacre,” the opposition group said.

CNN cannot independently verify reports from Syria because the nation has restricted access by international journalists.

If confirmed, the death toll reported by the LCC would make Thursday the bloodiest day in Syria since the uprising against the government started 16 months ago.

“We had some hope about the Annan mission, and that hope died with the new massacre in Tremseh,” said Ahmed, an activist from Homs who did not want all names used for safety reasons. “And what is Annan going to do?”

The government painted a different picture of the attacks.

In a report in state media, Syria said more than 50 people were killed in Tremseh, maintaining its stance that “armed terrorist groups” are to blame. The government said residents called security forces for help after the terrorist groups raided the neighborhood.

Regime forces arrested some of the members of the terror groups and confiscated their weapons, the government said.

The conflict in Syria has left world leaders scrambling to find a solution in a series of talks that have included Annan.

On the main Facebook page for the uprising, opposition leaders accused Annan of failing to stop the killing of civilians.

They demanded his removal from his role as special envoy and urged protesters to make that the theme of Friday protests.

President Bashar al-Assad’s bloody crackdown on civilians has sparked international condemnation, but the support of allies such as Russia and China has protected the Syrian regime and hindered a resolution by the United Nations.

Annan brokered the six-point peace plan in April, and Syria accepted the plan, which proposed an end to the violence, access to humanitarian groups and an inclusive political dialogue.

“Kofi Annan is doing, so far, difficult but good work,” al-Assad said Sunday. “There are many obstacles, but it shouldn’t be a failed plan.”

Russia and China, which are permanent U.N. Security Council members, have vetoed draft resolutions that would have condemned the Syrian regime.

The U.N. Security Council on Thursday discussed dueling draft resolutions on Syria. Ambassadors remain at odds over whether a Western-backed resolution should invoke a U.N. charter mandating sanctions and ultimately leading to an authorization of the use of force.

Syrian activists and political opposition groups have said the Security Council meetings are not yielding results, and they urged their fighters to mobilize and intensify their efforts to oust the regime.

“We keep hearing about the reports they keep submitting to the Security Council, but to no avail, and the empty promises of protecting the Syrian people, without any serious action on the ground,” the Syrian National Council said in a statement.

The U.N. Security Council discussions at the ambassador level are scheduled to resume Friday. Annan plans to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday in Moscow.

Meanwhile, the regime has suffered a series of setbacks. Syria’s ambassador to Iraq defected Wednesday and joined the opposition, days after the son of a former defense minister cut ties with the government.

CNN’s Ivan Watson, Saad Abedine and journalist Shiyar Sayed Mohamed contributed to this report.

President Hugo Chavez and the country’s state-run oil company have defended fuel shipments to Syria.

Caracas, Venezuela (CNN) — While many world leaders have condemned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the embattled leader has found an ally in Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

The South American country’s state-run oil company has sent large diesel shipments to Syria, despite international sanctions.

In recent months, Venezuela supplied Syria with at least three shipments of diesel fuel in exchange for Syrian naphtha, a refined petroleum product, according to a May report from the U.S. Congressional Research Service.

In late May, Syria’s oil minister said that an oil tanker loaded with 35,000 tons of diesel fuel had arrived in his country from Venezuela, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency reported. At the time, he said Venezuela was preparing another tanker to head to Syria.

Citing Venezuelan and Syrian government documents, the Wall Street Journal reported this week that a fourth shipment was in the works. CNN has not independently confirmed that report.

“If they need diesel, and we can provide it, there is no reason not to do it,” Rafael Ramirez, Venezuela’s energy minister, told reporters in February, according to state media reports.Chavez and the president of Venezuela’s state-run oil company have defended their sovereign right to send fuel to Syria.

Ramirez, who also heads the state-run oil company, said Venezuela was not worried about possibly facing international sanctions for sending fuel to the Middle Eastern nation.

“We cannot determine our foreign policy with fear of U.S. sanctions,” he said. “We have said that those truly don’t matter to us.”

Chavez and al-Assad have a “longstanding personal fraternity,” Venezuela’s foreign ministry said in a statement after the two leaders spoke on the phone in April.

This week, Chavez criticized what he said was Washington’s imperialistic approach to Syria.

“They should be focusing on solving their own country’s problems, but they want to impose themselves, like they did in Libya, where they killed thousands and thousands of people to then kill (Libyan leader) Moammar Gadhafi, and now they want to do the same with Syria and they are also threatening Iran,” he said, according to state-run VTV.

In March, Venezuela’s parliament passed “an agreement in solidarity with Syria in light of the imperial threat presented by the United States and its Arab allies.”

“The document exhorts the international community and peace lovers to undertake a massive campaign to reject intervention in that nation,” Venezuela’s interior ministry said.

Critics have alleged that fuel sent by Venezuela has been used to maintain the Syrian government’s military operations.

Otto Reich, a U.S. assistant secretary of state during President George W. Bush’s administration and a fierce critic of Chavez, told Venezuela’s El Universal newspaper last month that he feared ships sending fuel could have a more nefarious purpose.

“Chavez uses his own vessels because no self-respecting international shipping firm will transport fuel to Assad’s killing machine. There is another advantage, however: since he controls the entire voyage, from dock to dock, Chavez may be sending Assad military material hidden in the ships,” he said.

Alberto Aranguibel, a political analyst in Caracas who supports Chavez, told CNN en Español Tuesday that the fuel shipments are an economic and humanitarian matter.

U.S. sanctions against Syria must be stopped, he said.

“There is a humanitarian reason. The blockade is arbitrary, illegal and illegitimate. … It doesn’t affect the government. It affects the people,” he said.

Mauricio Meschoulam, an international relations professor in Mexico City, told CNN en Español that Venezuela was one of many nations that had become involved in the Syrian crisis.

“They are, unfortunately, feeding the parties that are clashing,” he said.

U.S. sanctions in Syria and Venezuela’s attempts to defy them are part of a global geopolitical battle, he said.

“There are no good or evil (countries). They are all fighting for resources, each one searching for its piece of the pie,” he said.

The close relationship between Venezuela and Syria has been years in the making.

After signing several agreements with al-Assad on an October 2010 trip to Syria, Chavez said the country’s capitals “have become the poles of the new world.”

“We are obligated to weave the connections between Damascus and Caracas with threads of steel … new economic, political, agricultural and scientific relations much strengthen so we can overcome together the great challenges that the times we live in impose,” Chavez said.

Violence erupted in Syria in March 2011, when Syrian forces launched a brutal crackdown on anti-government demonstrations, part of the Arab Spring that swept through several countries. Syrian officials have regularly blamed “armed terrorist groups” for the clashes.

The United Nations says more than 10,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the violence. Opposition groups give an even higher figure.

CNN cannot independently confirm reports of violence in Syria, as the country’s government has severely limited the access of international journalists.

CNN’s Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN en Español’s Fernando del Rincon and journalist Osmary Hernandez contributed to this report.

Russia has circulated among UN Security Council members a draft resolution to extend its mission in Syria for three months so it can shift focus from monitoring a non-existent truce to securing a political solution to the conflict.

The deeply divided council must decide the future of the mission, known as UNSMIS, before July 20 when its initial 90-day mandate expires.

International envoy Kofi Annan is due to brief the council on Wednesday on his bid to broker peace in Syria.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have killed more than 15,000 people since a crackdown on pro-democracy protesters began in March 2011, some Western leaders say.

Damascus says rebels have killed several thousand of its security forces.

The Russian draft resolution is unlikely to satisfy the United States and European council members, who have called for a resolution under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which allows the council to authorise actions ranging from diplomatic and economic sanctions to military intervention.

US officials have said they are talking about sanctions on Syria, not military intervention.

Russia’s Deputy UN Ambassador, Alexander Pankin, said a resolution under Chapter 7 would be “counterproductive” in what he described as a “delicate situation”.

Russia and China have previously vetoed U.N. resolutions designed to pressure Assad.

“There is no mention of Chapter 7 (in the Russian draft) and that’s a matter of principle for us because we believe the special envoy is doing a commendable job,” Pankin told Reuters.

“(The draft) is a continuation of the mission bearing in mind the recommendations of the Secretary-General.”

MORE PRESSURE

UN chief Ban Ki-moon has recommended the emphasis of UNSMIS’ work shift from military observers - who suspended most of their monitoring activities on June 16 because of increased risk amid rising violence - to the roughly 100 civilian staff focusing on a political solution and issues like human rights.

The mission would keep its current mandate for up to 300 unarmed observers under this option, but significantly fewer likely would be needed to support the new focus.

The Russian draft resolution, obtained by Reuters, does not specify a number, but “stresses the need for UNSMIS to have a military observer capability to conduct effective verification and fact-finding tasks”.

It also “calls upon all Syrian parties to guarantee the safety of UNSMIS personnel without prejudice to its freedom of movement and access, and stresses that the primary responsibility in this regard lies with the Syrian authorities”.

The resolution also strongly urges all parties to cease all violence and stressed “that it is for the Syrian people to find a political solution and that the Syrian parties must be prepared to put forward effective and mutually acceptable interlocutors” to work with Annan toward an agreement.

One Security Council diplomat, who did not want to be named, described the Russian draft as “basically a rollover”.

“At the very least it needs to be combined with some real pressure on the parties,” he said.

Annan met with Assad in Damascus on Monday before travelling to Iran and Iraq for talks on the conflict.”The council will need to address the Syria situation in a more comprehensive way.”

Annan said Assad had suggested easing the conflict on a step-by-step basis, starting with districts that have suffered the worst violence.

- Reuters

He is a Republican Guard brigadier and son of Syria’s longest-serving defence minister. But most of all Manaf Tlas is a friend of President Bashar al-Assad, a member of his inner circle and a prominent figure in the Damascus “young guard.”

Reuters / Handout

Syrian Brigadier-General Manaf Tlas in Damascus in April 2011.

Or he was. Rebels and a news website with links to the Syrian security apparatus said Thursday Brig. Tlas had fled to Turkey. If confirmed, he would be the first real insider to defect from the embattled elite fighting off a revolt against the Assad clan.

Tlas has long been a rare Sunni name within a ruling clique dominated by Mr. Assad’s fellow Alawites; the brigadier’s flight may reflect a growing sectarian divide and eroding support for the dynasty among richer Sunnis, who have been slow to join a revolt launched by poorer sections of the majority population.

A handsome man in his 40s with a beautiful wife, Brig. Tlas cut a dashing figure on the Damascus social scene, entertaining diplomats, artists and journalists, and rooting for what he saw as reformist policies of his president friend.

An enthusiast of fancy cars, he smokes cigars and his favourite holiday spot is the French Riviera.

But he grew increasingly disillusioned with the system that awarded his family rank and privilege.

His playboy father, Mustafa Tlas, attended military academy with Hafez al-Assad and remained his friend, confidant — and defence minister — through his three decades in power.

When Hafez died in 2000, Mustafa Tlas helped arrange a smooth transition for his son Bashar; at the same Baath party congress that anointed the younger Assad, Mr. Tlas’s son Manaf was elevated to the Central Committee of Syria’s ruling party.

The elder Tlas and another son have both left Syria since the revolt against Mr. Assad began last year. Mustafa Tlas left for France for what he described as medical treatment some months ago. Opposition sources say he is still there, though his whereabouts could not be independently confirmed. His son Firas, a business tycoon, left for Egypt; he is now thought to be in Dubai.

Like their fathers, Manaf Tlas and Bashar al-Assad are old friends and underwent military training together. Brig. Tlas helped introduce Bashar, now 46, to the Sunni Damascus social scene when he was being groomed for power in the 1990s.

In the decade that followed, Brig. Tlas spoke of reform but defended its cautious, some said glacial, pace under the Assads: “You need time. You need years,” he told The Washington Post in 2005. “There’s a generation you have to push forward.”

But the 2011 uprising rocked his cosy world. His father’s home town Rastan, about 160 kilometres north of Damascus, was among the first to rise up against Mr. Assad — and get hammered by the army for its defiance.

Peaceful demonstrations were silenced by the gun, prompting Rastan’s residents, many of whom served in the army and had the patronage of the Tlas family, to take up arms.

Brig. Tlas was privy to the inner working of the military crackdown by the core Alawite forces. As a senior officer in the Republican Guard, he would have been in regular contact with its commander, Bashar’s feared younger brother Maher, an architect of repression.

AFP PHOTO/LOLO/AFP/Getty Images

A destroyed Syrian army tank is abandoned after fighting with rebels on the side of a highway between Aleppo and Damascus Wednesday.

He did not like what he saw, and tried to do something to ease the crackdown, friends and opposition sources say. They credit him with intervening to negotiate local ceasefires.

“Manaf has been growing increasingly frustrated for months,” one friend said. “Being from Rastan, he felt increasing dishonour as his hometown was being leveled and hundreds of his relatives fell dead or injured.

“He started to tell people he trusted that he wanted out, and that he has respect among the Free Syrian Army,” the friend said, referring to the rebel force that has attracted many Sunni officers and soldiers from Rastan.

A Western diplomat who served in Damascus said Brig. Tlas, with his boyish good looks and fluent English and French, a taste for paintings and concerts, stood out among an officer corps drawn largely from the historically disadvantaged Alawite minority and often poorly educated.

He and his wife Tala regularly spent weekends in Paris, where his sister Nahed, widow of billionaire Saudi arms dealer Akram Ojjeh, is a prominent socialite.

“Manaf does not give the impression that he is a thug,” the diplomat said.

“But he mattered in the military. His defection is big news because it shows that the inner circle is disintegrating.”

Others take a different view.

“If his defection is confirmed I do not think it will have any impact. The Tlas family has distanced itself for some time from what is happening,” said a Lebanese official close to the Damascus government.

“It will not change anything in the balance of power inside the country. They do not have any influence on the ground. They have made promises that they did not deliver.

“The main goal for this defection will be to cause a moral shock. The Americans will try to use it to the maximum.”

Syriasteps, the website with Syrian security links that reported Brig. Tlas’s defection, quoted a security official for Assad’s administration saying, “His desertion means nothing.”

With files from Agence France-Presse

By Hugh Macleod and Annasofie Flamand

LATTAKIA, Syria and BEIRUT, Lebanon — As Syria descends into civil war, Abu Jaafar said he is ready to kill women and children to defend his friends, family and president.

“Sunni women are giving birth to babies who will fight us in years to come, so we have the right to fight anyone who can hurt us in the future,” said the Allawite militiaman, a member of the ancient offshoot of Shiite Islam to which Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the powerbase of his regime belong.

With his massive, tattooed muscles, shaved head, bushy black beard and trademark white trainers, Abu Jaafar, 38, looks every bit the figure of terror that is now imprinted on the international conscience. It is militiamen like Jaafar that are believed responsible for recent massacres in Houla and Qbeir, in which nearly 200 Sunni civilians were killed, many of them women and children who were stabbed to death.

Though he has a wife and children at home, after a day lifting weights at the gym and having drunk some local Arak to get in the mood, Jaafar spends most evenings in the nightclubs of Lattakia, the port city on Syria’s Mediterranean coast where regime forces this week attacked a rebellious village.

As a member of the mafia militia who grew up smuggling commodities, appliances, drugs and guns between Syria and Lebanon at the behest of Assad’s extended family, Abu Jaafar has no problem getting past the nightclub bouncers.

Except when the “mualem,” his master, calls.

“If I get a call from my boss then my whole day is changed,” he said. “When I leave the house, I don’t know when I will be back.”

Packing up the Kalashnikovs, pistols, machine guns and grenades he said were given to him “by the government,” Jaafar joins his gang of 100 shabiha — the Allawite militia named either after the Arabic word for ghosts or the old Mercedes shahab popular for its smuggling-sized trunk — and sets off to crush the Sunni Muslim protesters who dared rise up against his president.

In an interview with a GlobalPost reporter in Lattakia, Jaafar gave a frank and unique insight into the violent, disturbed world of the shabiha, a group that suffers from a dangerous cocktail of religious indoctrination, minority paranoia and mafia roots.

The massacres in northern Syria, which UN officials, eyewitnesses and Human Rights Watch all concluded were perpetrated mainly by shabiha from neighboring villages, triggered a wave of international revulsion.

US officials raised the prospect of military action even as analysts described the marauding shabiha as a “Frankenstein” now beyond the control of the president. The regime blamed both massacres on foreign terrorists.

Like many of Syria’s estimated 2.5 million Allawites, a small mystic off-shoot of Shiite Islam which forms just 12 percent of the country’s population, compared to Sunni Muslims who represent 75 percent, Jaafar said he grew up struggling with poverty.

“My story is similar to all shabiha: I was born in a small village and didn’t finish school. Instead I went to work with my father in our lemon farm,” he said.

It was during his military service that Jaafar first got recruited into the murky world of Syria’s security services, where uniformed officers worked with plain-clothed thugs in regime-sanctioned smuggling.

“I was bigger than the others so I got picked to be the bodyguard of a senior officer,” he said. “After military service he asked me to be his man in dealing with some Allawite smugglers.”

Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, Jaafar lived the gangster high life, plying his trade in well-organized smuggling networks, anchored on its control of Lattakia’s port.

Food, cigarettes and commodities subsidized by the Syrian state would be smuggled from Syria into Lebanon, then in the midst of a civil war, and sold for massive profit. Luxury cars, guns and drugs, meanwhile, would flow from Lebanon up the Bekaa Valley and into Syria’s tightly restricted, Soviet-style economy established under Hafez al-Assad, the country’s former dictator.

“They were noted for their brutality and cruelty and their blind devotion to their leaders,” writes Yassein Haj Saleh, a historian and dissident. “The shabiha were untouchable and operated with impunity. If there were ever a conflict between the shabiha and the local authorities, the authorities would not dare defend themselves.”

The impunity stemmed from a single, but all powerful source: The direct links between the shabiha and the Assad family.

Reportedly established by Namir al-Assad, President Hafez al-Assad’s cousin, and Rifaat al-Assad, the late president’s brother, each shabiha gang grew up owing allegiance to a particular member of the extended Assad family.

In May 2011, the European Union imposed sanctions on Assad’s first cousins, Fawwaz and Munzir, for their involvement in “the repression against the civilian population as members of the shabiha.”

Syria experts say members of the shabiha would be carefully selected for their physical strength, lack of education and blind loyalty to the Allawite sect and the Assad family in particular.

“The loyalty of the shabiha for the regime is far greater than the loyalty of the other security forces because, if the regime is toppled, they will be the first to be wiped out,” a former Syrian army officer, now defected to the rebels, told GlobalPost.

By the mid 1990s, however, the shabiha were beginning to get out of control and Hafez al-Assad ordered his elder son and heir apparent Basel, famed for horsemanship and a furious temper, to bring the militias to heel. He did so, but soon after died in a car crash, catapulting his awkward younger brother Bashar, then an eye doctor with no military credentials, into the presidency.

Following Basel al-Assad’s crackdown, Jaafar said he left his gang and opened a liquor store in Lattakia. He continued to exercise his biceps, which are now emblazoned with a tattoo of the zulfiqar, the sword of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, who Shiites follow as the rightful inheritor of Islam — the root of the the great divide with Sunnis.

“Last June, friends from the shabiha asked me to return to work with them,” Jaafar said. “They said we must defend President Assad and his family and keep the power for the Allawite sect.”

Soon, Jaafar’s pay of about $20 for a day’s thuggery had risen to a steady monthly salary of about six times the average state wage.

“We started by facing the protesters, but when the opposition became armed we attacked them in their villages,” Jaafar said. “In addition to our salaries we take whatever we can get during the attacks: TVs, video players, electronics.”

But the shabiha don’t just attack and steal. Eyewitness accounts speak of dead children, some with hideously deformed faces, where the machetes split their skulls. Such extreme violence triggered an international outcry earlier this month.

“Whole families were slaughtered,” Abu Ahmed, a resident of Houla who witnessed the immediate aftermath of the attack, told a GlobalPost reporter in the area. “Women and children were shot from close range or slaughtered with knives. The shabiha did all of that.”

Jaafar defends the government’s crackdown by repeating the regime’s long-held claims — which are now increasingly becoming true — that the armed opposition is receiving support from religiously conservative Sunni Muslim states like Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

“We got money and arms from our government to fight those Wahhabi radicals who will force my wife and daughters to wear the veil and will close all wine shops,” Jaafar said.

In addition to fears of rising conservatism is a lethal strain of religious hatred and a sense of persecution. Jaafar argues that the Sunni have held power wrongly for more than 1,400 years, since the death of the Prophet Mohammed, and that the right balance in Syria was only restored after Hafez al-Assad seized power in 1970, when he stacked his massively expanded army and security services with an almost exclusively Allawite power structure.

Leading analysts on Syria now see the escalating violence perpetrated by the shabiha as beyond the control of the president, blunting any hopes for implementation of the UN-Arab League ceasefire plan, let alone a negotiated solution to Syria’s crisis.

“The regime has been spawning militias, as deep down it is a militia pretending to be a state,” said a leading Syria analyst based in Damascus, who asked for anonymity to speak freely. “The Frankenstein is now completely out of control.”

Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, said President Assad, who took power in 2000, had presided over “a state that has become a kind of mafia extortion network” in which militias and the businessmen who pay them have grown beyond his control.

“Bashar is the president but he does not command. In Syria it is not about constitutional authority but about kill or be killed, and Bashar is not the top killer. He’s a prisoner of the presidential palace,” Salem said.

Yet the shabiha who killed women and children in Houla arrived by military escort. The defected former army officer said that during his service in the military it was known that Maher al-Assad, Bashar’s much feared hardline younger brother, had established networks of shabiha “to do the regime’s dirty work.”

“Each group of shabiha is linked to a security officer who takes direct orders from Maher,” he said, suggesting also that the gangs were becoming self-financed from looting and extortion.

The way Jaafar tells it, however, money is not the prime motivator for the violence that follows the call from mualem.

“I know the Sunnis will take revenge for what we have done. I am fighting to guarantee a good future for my sons and grandsons. So this is the final battle: Win, or die. There’s no third choice.”

(CNN) — The U.N. peacekeeping chief says Syria is now in a civil war.

Some experts agree with U.N. official Herve Ladsous that the war-torn country has reached that chilling milestone. Others say the country is hurtling in that direction. The conflict began in March 2011 when a fierce Syrian government crackdown on peaceful protesters morphed into a bloody government uprising.

Stephen Biddle, Roger Hertog Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations said popular conversation about civil war tends to be dominated by images of the U.S. Civil War and it conjures a vague picture of a “really bad conflict.” But the rigorously-defined scholarly meaning of civil war fits Syria now, just as it applied to Iraq last decade, he said.

“A civil war is a conflict in which at least one side is a non-state actor, with at least 1,000 total battle deaths and at least 100 on each side,” he said.

Anuradha Chakravarty, assistant professor of political science at the University of South Carolina, cites a similar threshold and notes that the estimates of 10,000 to 14,000 battle-related deaths so far in Syria fulfills the definition. She said the definition has “little to do with the growing use recently of attack helicopters” to wage war.

“Syria did not start out as a case of civil war because the opposition to the government mainly took the form of a popular uprising in March 2011,” she said.

“However, later that year, the Free Syrian Army and its organization of an armed rebellion against the government (in defense of the civilian uprising) fulfilled at least the most basic criterion of a civil war — the armed confrontation between a rebel group and the government. Thus, Syria turned into a civil war situation much earlier than recent observations by the U.N. would suggest.”

Like other civil wars, she said the situation has “notable international dimensions,” with reports of Russian military support for the regime and reports of the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey backing the rebels.

James Fearon, a professor of political science at Stanford University, defines a civil war as “an armed conflict within a country between organized groups who are fighting to control the central government or over control of a region.” The Syrian conflict “has qualified as a civil war for a while now,” said Fearson.

He cited the same academic thresholds political scientists and sociologists use for a civil war: 1,000 killed or a higher 1,000 killed per year, but added, “How many is enough to qualify is matter of opinion, and this arbitrariness might be the source of some of the disagreement about whether Syria, etc, is having a civil war or not. “

It doesn’t matter how much of the country is in conflict for unrest to be defined as a civil war, he said.

“For instance, we call the conflict in the U.S. in the first part of the 1860s a civil war even though things were entirely peaceful in almost all of the North,” he said.

Two organized forces facing off against each other is also a necessary part of the definition, said Joseph Holliday, a researcher at the Institute for the Study of War. In Syria, there have been sectarian tensions between the Sunnis and the Alawites, with the opposition overwhelmingly Sunni and the pro-government Alawites, who dominate the regime of Bashar al-Assad, also an Alawite.

“When you let the sectarian genie out of the bottle, it’s hard to put back in,” Fearson said.

He said the opposition fighters are becoming an organized militia force. The pro-regime Shabiha militias, dominated also by Alawites, are becoming more significant, signaling an erosion in the government’s chain of command.

“I think Syria is a civil war or has all of the components to become one in the future.”

Michael Weiss, Syria expert at the Henry Jackson Society, said parts of Syria are in civil war.

“Civil war suggests the previous state that exists all but failed and collapsed,” he said. In some regions, the government lacks control and there is a “growing equalization” of forces, he said.

Steven Heydemann, senior adviser for Middle East initiatives at the U.S. Institute for Peace, said the regime’s tactics, the escalation in violence and a growing supply of weapons to the opposition indicate the conflict is moving closer to a civil war.

While “some isolated areas in Syria where conditions have crossed the threshold for civil war,” Syria has not yet “crossed that threshold with respect to the conflict as a whole.”

He used Lebanon and Libya as the model for civil war.

In Lebanon during the 1980s, the state collapsed and “we saw a proliferation of armed groups across society in multiple directions” in a society with no controlling authority, Heydemann said. During last year’s civil war in Libya, there were two competing armed forces, with the quality of weapons and the scale of the units largely comparable on each side.

“Neither of those conditions exist in Syria,” he said.

The regime commands armed forces totaling about 200,000 troops and has ample resources such as tanks and helicopters, he said. The armed opposition is basically a “localized insurgency,” much smaller, poorly equipped and trained and “not integrated into any coherent command and control structure.”

So while the conflict between these forces does not constitute a civil war at the moment, said Heydemann, the pace and intensity of opposition activity could change that.

Jeff White, a defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Syria is edging toward civil war, but is not there yet.

“My definition of civil war is a situation which is characterized by conflict between two, or more, segments of society. I still see the situation in Syria as one of fundamentally an armed and unarmed insurrection against the government. That is, the people are fighting the state not each other.”

That said, the elements of civil war are taking hold.

“The regime is heavily, perhaps increasingly reliant on Alawite fighters both within the regular military and in its irregular forces. The regime has also begun using Alawite villagers in attacks on neighboring Sunni towns and villages. There are also reports of Sunni retaliation for attacks. This is the kind of activity that creates its own dynamic and can spread easily,” he said.

The tipping point could be a “tipping period.” That would be when “communal violence increases in scope and intensity until it dominates the situation,” White said.

“We will know it when we see it; but things to look for would include: organized and directed violence by one sect against another (as opposed to spontaneous actions), declarations by community political and religious leaders that the enemy is the other sect (as opposed to ‘Bashar’s dogs/pigs’ and ‘terrorists’), cleansing of areas, organization of irregular forces along sectarian lines, regime arming of Alawite villages for ‘defense’ against Sunnis, breakdown or Syrian military forces along sectarian lines. We have bits and pieces of this now and the bits and pieces seem to be accumulating.”

The rhetoric used to describe the conflict has important meaning. The term “civil war” can change the dynamics of a conflict.

“In the Iraq war, the Bush administration didn’t want the conflict described as a civil war because it feared that this would increase public opposition — if it’s a civil war, then it’s their business and we shouldn’t bother with it, or expect to be able to fix it,” Fearon said.

“In the Syria case, it is the advocates of greater intervention (and/or greater pressure on Russia) who are saying ‘It may be soon be a civil war,’ by which they mean ‘This is really bad and we have to do something about it,’ ” he said.

White said defining a conflict as a civil war has political implications.

“There is always reluctance to get involved in a civil war. So defining it so supports non-intervention. It also tends to spread the blame for violence more or less evenly across the parties. It is much easier to get behind an insurrection than take sides in a civil war.”

Chakravarty said once a conflict is deemed a civil war, it can compel “more assertive forms of actions from various international actors concerned about their interests in the country.”

This could be in the form of international intervention and heightened diplomatic efforts at negotiation, she said.

Heydemann said the specter of a civil war could increase pressure on policy makers to act so decisively that incremental measures to deal with the conflict might be “left by the wayside.”

Also, he said, the international community has been reluctant to support the opposition because it would contribute to instability, international spillover, the presence of jihadists, and the militarization of the opposition. Now that all of those factors have emerged, they might determine that “some form of engaging” would be the response to a civil war.

Holliday said labeling a conflict as a civil war matters politically, but doesn’t know how much it alone would make a difference. He cited the slaughter of civilians in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, which helped prompt international involvement in that civil conflict in the 1990s

“The instances of sectarian violence against civilians will make a difference,” he said. “That type of thing is the biggest factor to push toward U.S. involvement.”

Syria’s authorities have refused to submit a report on torture in the country to a United Nations committee scheduled to discuss the situation there next week, its secretary said on Friday.

The Committee Against Torture monitors the implementation of the UN’s anti-torture convention by state parties and is currently meeting in Geneva.

“There is no assurance that a delegation (from Syria) will come but we have been informed that no report would be submitted,” committee secretary Joao Nataf told AFP in an email.

He added that the meeting would take place on Wednesday as scheduled.

The Committee Against Torture is holding its 48^th session from May 7 to June 1 when it will focus on a number of countries including Canada, Cuba and Syria.

All states party to the convention are required to submit regular reports to the panel of 10 independent experts which then makes recommendations.

In November last year chairman Claudio Grossman wrote to the Syrian authorities highlighting the committee’s concern over reports of the spread of torture in the country where a bloody crackdown on protesters was unleashed in March 2011.

Grossman asked Damascus to provide a special report stating the measures being taken to ensure its obligations under the Convention Against Torture were being fulfilled.

Since the crackdown observers estimate more than 12,000 people have died, including more than 900 since an April 12 truce went into effect.

On Tuesday UN-Arab League envoy and broker of the peace plan Kofi Annan told the UN Security Council of his fears that torture, mass arrests and other human rights violations were intensifying in Syria.