Civil War, Syrian Uprising | featured news

President Bashar al-Assad was quoted on Thursday saying the price of an invasion by foreign powers would be “more than the world can afford.”

An Islamist suicide car bomber killed at least 50 Syrian security men on Monday, an opposition group said, in one of the bloodiest single attacks on President Bashar Assad's forces. It came a day after Syrian government forces killed 179 people, said the Syrian Network for Human Rights, an activist monitoring group.

Protests emerged onto the streets across Syria on Friday as a temporary cease-fire marking the most important Muslim holiday of the year largely held at the start of its first day.

As his camcorder scanned the charred walls and partially collapsed roof of the mosque on the outskirts of town, Adnan Sheikh began his narration like he had dozens of other times: "Moadamyeh al Sham, 8-30-2012, the remnants of the damage and destruction that Assad's gangs inflicted when they stormed the city," he said. "Even the houses of worship were not spared."

Lakhdar Brahimi’s plan calls for guns to be silent on the main Muslim holiday of the year, but numerous do-it-yourself aspects of the plan immediately called into question whether it would quiet any fighting.

The U.N. refugee agency said Thursday the number of Syrian refugees who have fled their country's civil war and found shelter in Egypt has now topped 150,000 — a significant jump from last month's figure of 95,000. The director of UNHCR in Egypt, Mohamed Dayri, said that despite the growing number of refugees in Egypt, only 4,800 Syrians have registered with the agency in Cairo. He called on Egyptian authorities to help UNHCR deal with the "rising emergency" of Syrian refugees here.

The UN refugee agency warned Thursday there could be as many as 700,000 Syrian refugees fleeing the war-torn nation by the end of the year as it stepped up its call for emergency funding.

Syrian soldiers backed by tanks entered the Damascus suburb of Mouadamiya on Tuesday, killing at least 20 young men and burning shops and houses before gradually withdrawing from the town, residents and opposition activists said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned the West on Tuesday against any unilateral action on Syria after President Barack Obama said U.S. forces could act if the Syrian leader deployed chemical weapons against rebels trying to topple him.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad performed Eid prayers in a Damascus mosque on Sunday, state television showed, in his first appearance in public since a July bombing in the Syrian capital that killed four top security officials.