Fierce clashes have been reported between Syrian government forces and opposition fighters in Douma, near the capital Damascus, and in other parts of the country, amid doubts over the government's declared commitment to meeting an imminent ceasefire deadline.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday that violence against civilians had not stopped and that the year-long conflict was getting worse.

"Despite the Syrian government's acceptance of the joint special envoy's [Kofi Annan's] plan of initial proposals to resolve the crisis, the violence and assaults in civilian areas have not stopped," Ban told the U.N. General Assembly.

"The situation on the ground continues to deteriorate," he said.

The continuing violence comes as a U.N. monitoring team led by Major General Robert Mood is expected in Damascus on Thursday to review the government's promise of a troop withdrawal to army bases by Apr. 10.

Major General Mood is a former chief of staff of the Norwegian armed forces and former head of the U.N.'s Jerusalem-based UNTSO Middle East peacekeeping mission.

The U.N. Security Council is calling on Syria "to urgently and visibly" fulfill its pledge to halt the use of troops and heavy weapons in cities and towns by 6am Syria time on Apr. 12, giving the government and opposition groups 48 hours to end all hostilities.

The U.N. is already asking member nations to contribute about 200 to 250 soldiers who would monitor the ceasefire.

Challenge for Annan

Annan ...

In addition to shooting unarmed civilians, Syrian military personnel routinely have raped women and girls, tortured children and encouraged troops to loot the houses they storm, former foot soldiers say.

"What I have seen with my own eyes, it was indescribable," said Rolat Azad, 21, who said he'd served as a master sergeant in Idlib province in the northeast of Syria. There, he commanded 10 men who'd break into houses seeking to arrest men whose names they'd been given by the country's intelligence agencies. "They gave us orders: 'You are free to do what you like,' " he recalled.

Starting last July, he said, his unit arrested and tortured five to 10 people daily. "We had a torture room on our base," he said. "There was physical torture — beatings — and psychological tortures," said Azad, a Syrian Kurd who deserted and fled in March to the Kurdistan region of Iraq. "They also brought women and girls through. They put them in the closed room and called soldiers to rape them."

The women often were killed, he said.

 Azad — as with other former soldiers here, the name is a pseudonym assumed to protect his family, still in Syria — was interviewed at a camp that Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government set up for Syrian army deserters. He recalled the torture of two young teenage boys. He said they'd been arrested either for shooting videos of the military or showing disrespect for the military and the regime, something that wasn't uncommon, even among children. "I once asked a small kid why he wasn't going to school," Azad said. "He said, 'We won't until this regime is gone.' "

 One boy, about 13, was brought into the torture room and given electrical shocks, Azad said. Another, 14, was brought into the room in late ...

Although the impulse to try to end the ongoing repression by the Syrian regime against its own people through foreign military intervention is understandable, it would be a very bad idea.

Empirical studies have repeatedly demonstrated that international military interventions in cases of severe repression actually exacerbate violence in the short term and can only reduce violence in the longer term if the intervention is impartial or neutral. Other studies demonstrate that foreign military interventions actually increase the duration of civil wars, making the conflicts longer and bloodier, and the regional consequences more serious, than if there were no intervention. In addition, military intervention would likely trigger a "gloves off" mentality that would dramatically escalate the violence on both sides.

Even putting aside the recent historical record, however, virtually anyone familiar with Syrian politics and history can recognize the fallacy of such foreign support for the armed struggle.

Many nonviolent protesters have tragically been killed, as will many more. However, proportionately a far greater number of armed resisters have been killed and will continue to be killed. The question is not whether thousands will continue to die but what is the best way for the Syrian people to overthrow the hated regime, end the violence and bring democracy and social justice.

Violence vs. Nonviolence

The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians engaged in the ongoing resistance against the regime are nonviolent. Some support the simultaneous armed struggle; some don't. However, there is little question that the regime fears ...

For more than a year now, the best minds in Washington have assured me (and you) that the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad is about to fall. These assurances are always delivered with great confidence, winks and nods oozing gravitas, and yet the wispy Assad, an ophthalmologist masquerading as a despot, hangs on, slaughtering his own people, destroying and despoiling whole neighborhoods, calling the bluff of the Arab League, the Turks and even the European Union, which just the other day — in a measure apparently intended to give Assad a fatal case of the giggles — banned his wife from shopping on the Continent. Sherman was right: War is hell.

Having sheathed his credit card, Assad pressed on with his war that has cost as many as 10,000 lives, produced well over 100,000 refugees, and brought large-scale misery to Syria. But it has also lifted “the veil of fear” — a useful phrase coined by former assistant secretary of state James P. Rubin. He used it to refer to the once-widespread belief that the Assad were invincible and that to challenge them would bring the most horrendous consequences. This is no longer the case. A great many people have been challenging them for some time now. The costs have been great, but the insurrection goes on nonetheless. The veil has been shredded.

What has also been shredded is the naive belief that Assad would fall in Syria as did Hosni in Egypt and wind up, to the delight of the vengeful, in a defendant’s cage. But Mubarak either would not or could not use unrestrained force against his own people. Assad did, and will ...

Who is writing that brilliant, stupid, nasty, brave and/or dishonest online comment? We haven't a clue, because the author hasn't shared his or her name, hometown, gender, age and/or nationality. Or even worse, the author pretends to be another real person. Scammers, misfits, crooks, creeps, criminals and nice people all venture through cyberspace without identifying themselves. We can only guess what they're up to.

Web anonymity is often a force for evil in the civic conversation. There is the celebrated case of the blog known as "Gay Girl in Damascus." Followed by many and quoted by some journalists as an authority on events in Syria, the gay girl turned out to be a 40-year-old married American man writing from Scotland.

Some defenders of Web anonymity hold that not only was the Gay Girl blog not evil, it was a potential force for good. Maybe the author wasn't really a lesbian in Syria. The blog did help real gay men and lesbians by giving them a forum in a country where homosexuality is shunned or worse.

But did it? How could gay Syrians know that they were really communicating with other gay Syrians? A forum participant may have been a heterosexual teen in Dallas or a table of drunken friends in Seattle having fun at another's expense. "He" or "she" could have been a homophobic resident of Damascus, luring local gays ...

This week was supposed to be all about Iran – at least, that's how Israel and its powerful U.S. lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), had planned it - and why the U.S. should prepare to bomb it very, very soon if its leadership doesn't cave into Western demands to abandon its nuclear programme.

By week's end, however, the most urgent foreign policy issue with which U.S. policy-makers – and their media camp followers – were grappling was whether to bomb Syria first instead.

Remarkably, the sudden deviation was triggered by Tuesday's dramatic call on the floor of the Senate by Republican Sen. John McCain for the U.S. to provide decisive support to rebels battling to oust the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

"The only realistic way to do so is with foreign air power," declared McCain, whose strategy was swiftly endorsed by his two hawkish fellow-travellers, Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham and independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman.

"The United States should lead an international effort to protect key population centres in Syria, especially in the north, through airstrikes on Assad's forces," he declared, touching off a vigorous new debate ...

Any U.S. military effort to protect civilians in Syria zone would take weeks to implement, the top Pentagon civilian and military officials said Wednesday, underscoring the limited U.S. options for ending President Bashar Assad's violent campaign against Syrian rebels.

Another option — a full-fledged military campaign against Assad — would take even longer and would have to begin unilaterally as the United States is the only nation whose military could weaken Syria's vast air defense systems, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services committee.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta added that Assad's air defense systems are located within population centers, which would likely lead to civilian casualties.

There would be "severe collateral damage," Panetta said.

Panetta and Dempsey offered the first outlines of what a military campaign would look like even as they cautioned increasingly frustrated members of Congress against unilateral U.S. military action against the Assad regime. The Obama administration has called for Assad to step down but can do little on its own to make that happen — exposing its limited options for alleviating a crisis that President Barack Obama called "heartbreaking and outrageous" at a White House news conference on Tuesday.

At least 7,500 civilians have been killed as parts of Syria have endured weeks-long barrages by Assad's forces, according to the United Nations. The U.N. humanitarian chief, Valerie Amos, visited the besieged city of Homs on Wednesday and said that it was "completely devastated," the BBC reported.

Panetta told the Senate panel that the Obama administration was trying to build an international consensus, adding that without international legal justification, intervening would be a mistake. However, Russia and China have blocked action by the U.N. Security Council, ...

Republican Sen. John McCain said the United States should lead a military air assault on government forces in Syria, arguing the Obama administration's continued efforts at diplomacy and sanctions against the Assad regime is "starting to look more like a hope than strategy."

The influential GOP senator becomes the highest ranking member of Congress to call directly for U.S.-led airstrikes to support the Syrian Free Army and other opposition sources battling President Bashar al-Assad's military attacks on civilians.

"The president must state unequivocally that under no circumstances will Assad be allowed to finish what he has started, that there is no future in which Assad and his lieutenants will remain in control of Syria, and that the United States is prepared to use the full weight of our airpower to make it so," McCain said in a speech Monday in the Senate. "The Syrian people deserve to succeed, and shame on us if we fail to help them."

Defense hawks in Congress have previously suggested the United States could play a "junior role" in an international effort to support the Syrian resistance with military and logistical aid as lawmakers seek more information about the various groups and alliances fighting the regime. A United Nations resolution calling on Assad to step down failed last month as two key members of the Security Council, Russia and China, objected.

McCain, who is the top Republican on the Armed Services committee, framed the U.S. role as a moral and national security imperative, and suggested modeling a U.S.-led effort on action taken by the international community in the Balkans.

Saying that Homs, the Syrian city government troops have been pummeling, "is lost," McCain said military intervention now could establish "safe havens" in other parts of the country that could be used by opposition forces for organizing.

"The United States ...

The departure of al Qaida-affiliated fighters from Iraq to join the rebellion against Syrian President Bashar Assad in Syria has had one benefit, Iraqi officials say: Violence has dropped in this country, in some areas by as much as 50 percent in just a few months.

Iraqi officials declined to provide precise figures for the drop-off or to estimate how many al Qaida-affiliated fighters have left the country for Syria. But the impact of the departure, they said, has been especially apparent in Ninewah province, which borders Syria and has long been the scene of some of al Qaida in Iraq's most violent bombings and assassinations.

The province's capital, Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, was once home to as many as 800 al Qaida-affiliated fighters, U.S. officials estimated last summer. But one provincial security officer said al Qaida in Iraq attacks in Mosul have become infrequent this year, and the attacks that do occur generally are small or are detected before they can be carried out. The officer spoke only on the condition of anonymity because regulations prohibit him from talking to reporters.

"Violence is down in Mosul, maybe one or two operations per day, sometimes none," the officer said Monday. "Today, members of (al Qaida in Iraq) attempted to booby-trap a house, but they were discovered and the operation failed. Yesterday, two IEDs" — improvised explosive devices — "were planted and both were discovered, and they failed again. The day before that there were no operations at all."

As for the rest of the province, "I can say that violence is down more than 50 percent since autumn of 2011, and much more than that if compared with an earlier date, like autumn of 2010," the officer said.

Last Thursday, James R. Clapper, the Obama administration's director of national intelligence, told Congress that the United States thought al Qaida-affiliated fighters were ...

Few spectacles have been more surreal than senior U.S. officials — starting with the president, the secretary of state and the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. — solemnly lecturing Bashar al-Assad and his beleaguered Syrian government on the need to accommodate rebel forces whose sponsors are intent on slaughtering the ruling Alawite minority or driving them into the sea.

At one grimly hilarious moment last Friday, these worthy sermons were buttressed by a message from Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of al-Qaida, therefore presumably the No. 1 target on President Obama's hit list, similarly praising the "Lions of Syria" for rising up against the Assad regime. Al-Qaida and the White House are in sync!

The last time the United States faced serious internal dissent was in the 1960s and early 1970s, from war resisters and black and Native American movements. The government responded instantly with a methodical program of violent repression, including a well-documented agenda of assassination.

In 1993, the first year of the Clinton administration, federal agents launched an armed assault on a religious group in a compound outside Waco, Texas. Attorney General Janet Reno concluded that negotiation with the besieged Christian fundamentalists was useless and ordered an assault. Seventy-six Branch Davidians were burned ...

Al Qaida's Iraqi affiliate appears to have infiltrated Syrian opposition groups and was likely responsible for recent suicide bombings in Damascus and the industrial capital of Aleppo, senior U.S. intelligence officials told Congress Thursday.

"We believe that al Qaida in Iraq is extending its reach into Syria," Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

It was the first time that a top U.S. official publicly confirmed the involvement of al Qaida in Iraq, or AQI, in the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad, which began nearly a year ago as peaceful protests for an end to his family's four-decade-long rule.

Clapper's comments came one week after a McClatchy report quoted unnamed U.S. officials as saying that AQI was responsible for suicide bombings in Damascus in December and January, and was believed to be behind two strikes last week in Aleppo. The four attacks targeted intelligence and security compounds and killed at least 70 people.

The U.S. officials told McClatchy that AQI was encouraged to become involved in Syria by Ayman al Zawahiri, the Egyptian extremist who assumed the leadership of al Qaida's Pakistan-based core group after U.S. special forces killed Osama bin Laden in May.