Syria, Syrian Uprising | featured news

Mazen Hajisa has a secret. Amid the olive groves of Turkey just a stone's throw away from the Syrian border, he has hidden away several Styrofoam boxes. Their contents are deadly: a dozen unexploded antipersonnel mines.

Syria has accepted a U.N.-sponsored peace plan, international envoy Kofi Annan said on Tuesday, as troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad raided rebel forces who have taken refuge across the border in Lebanon.

Syrian forces pounded the central city of Homs with mortar fire while troops backed by heavy armor stormed rebellious towns across the country on Saturday, leaving six civilians and four soldiers dead, opposition activists said.

In Syria, a rescue operation to retrieve corpses of a massacred family turns up a child who survived. Arwa Damon reports.

Emboldened by faltering diplomacy and a Russian pledge to keep supplying weapons, Syria’s armed forces assaulted insurgent enclaves in the northern part of the country on Tuesday, invading the city of Idlib in an expanded campaign to crush the year-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

President Bashar al-Assad told U.N./Arab League envoy Kofi Annan on Saturday that no political solution was possible in Syria while "terrorist" groups were destabilizing the country.

A man identifying himself as the deputy oil minister, Abdo Hussameldin, appeared in a video posted to YouTube on Wednesday, and said he had left his post.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry says the violent crackdown by Bashar Assad's regime in Syria shouldn't be tolerated, but the United States and the international community must respond "in a responsible way."...

Syrian Red Crescent officials have handed over the bodies of two foreign journalists who were killed in Syria to embassy officials.

As bloody month after bloody month goes by, the United States grows ever more committed to overthrowing the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The cause is undoubtedly a just one: Avaaz, the human rights group that has been most deeply involved in the Syria crisis, reported Thursday morning that "17 civilians were beheaded or partially beheaded by regime security forces" outside of Baba Amro, the besieged Homs district that will likely soon fall to al-Assad's tanks, if it hasn't already.