Middle East, Syrian Uprising | featured news

Syrian forces have pushed rebels back from a strategic district of Aleppo, but skirmishes continued in the city and the United Nations said the conflict engulfing Syria would have no winner.

Syrian Prime Minister Riyad Hijab has defected to the opposition seeking to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, a spokesman for Hijab said on Monday, marking one of the highest profile desertions from the Damascus government.

Thomson Reuters said its blogging platform for Reuters News was hacked, resulting in multiple false posts to its website, including a fake interview with a Syrian rebel army leader.

Armed clashes erupted in at least three Syrian cities on Friday amid reports of a deadly mortar attack on a major Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, an event that threatened to draw Syria’s displaced Palestinian population into its civil war... Western nations, led by the United States, have accused Russia of helping to sabotage Mr. Annan’s diplomacy and have questioned the need for a United Nations monitoring presence in Syria if there is no viable peace plan to monitor.

Syrian fighter jets fired on rebel positions in the commercial capital of Aleppo on Wednesday, U.N. observers told The Associated Press, a development that could signal a significant escalation in the battle for control of the key city.

The Assad government targets rebel positions. The U.N. says 200,000 people have left the city, but the opposition denies the military is driving out insurgents.

A Russian official suggests Moscow could offer asylum to Syrian President Bashar Assad, if he requests it. Russian officials, who have strenuously resisted U.S.-led efforts to push Syrian President Bashar Assad from power, are beginning to question whether the beleaguered leader can hang on, but say they have little influence over him as rebels take the fight to his country's biggest cities.

Since he joined a poorly armed, ragtag rebel group, Syrian fighter Radwan al-Saaour has been mostly on the run, hiding in the woods of Idlib province near Turkey as loyalist forces overran town after town killing people at will.

The Foreign Ministry spokesman, addressing repeated questions about Syria’s chemical weapons that have arisen in recent days, said the army would only use such weapons in case of an external attack.

Government forces claimed to have retaken a pocket of Damascus, as state television reported that a fourth member of President Bashar al-Assad’s elite circle died of wounds from Wednesday’s rebel bombing.