Syria Live: A Cease-Fire in Aleppo.... But Just to Gather the Bodies

The Red Crescent gathers 31 bodies, some lying for months, from the streets of Aleppo during a cease-fire

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Bahrain (and Beyond) Live: Stepping Up the Formula 1 Protests
Tuesday's Syria Live Coverage: Airstrikes Continue Around Damascus

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2020 GMT: Assad Interview

More on President Assad's defiant appearance on pro-regime Al-Ikhbariya tonight....

"We have no choice but victory. If we don't win, Syria will be finished and I don't think this is a choice for any citizen in Syria," Assad said. "The truth is there is a war and I repeat: no to surrender, no to submission."

The President said that the West was "supporting al-Qaeda in Syria, Libya and other places and [would] pay the price later in the heart of Europe and in the heart of the United States."

Assad addressed the effort --- including the US, Britain, France, and Arab States --- to arm insurgents from a base in Jordan:

We cannot believe that thousands of insurgents are entering Syria with their weapons, at a time when Jordan was capable of stopping and arresting one person carrying a simple weapon for the Palestinian resistance.

"The fire will not stop at our border and everybody knows that Jordan is exposed as Syria is.

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Syria Live Coverage: Airstrikes Continue Around Damascus

Photo: AFP1942 GMT: Fighting Near Border with Lebanon.

NOW Syria reports from the border village of al-Qasr, just inside Lebanon, where insurgent fire hit for the first time:

Al-Qasr [did not] feel like a place hit by lethal rocket fire just two days ago. Despite an army statement Sunday declaring its increased presence in the area, there wasn’t so much as a routine checkpoint impeding our entrance. In the village center, all shops were open; adults and children alike going about their business as usual. It could have been anywhere in the Beqaa.

Except, of course, for the two crumbled walls near the main mosque, results of an unprecedented series of rockets fired Sunday by Syrian rebels that, for the first time, left one resident dead and up to nine injured (another was killed by the same attack in Hosh al-Sayyid Ali, a nearby village on the Syrian side of the border). The blood of 23-year-old Ali Hassan Qataya, light brown by now, still spans the width of the street where he died.

“He was just visiting,” said a local resident who did not give his name. “He lived in Beirut, and came here to visit his fiancée.”

Why, then, was Qataya killed? The Syrian National Coalition, the opposition body recognized by over a dozen countries as the representative government-in-exile, said Monday that “the Free Syrian Army was forced to respond to [the] repeated aggressions” of Hezbollah, whom it accused of carrying out “military operations on Syrian territory.”

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Syria (and Beyond) Live Coverage: The US and Turkey Make Plans --- But What are They?

Saturday night protest in Morocco (see 0714 GMT)

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Syria (and Beyond) Live Coverage: Fighting Continues in Aleppo

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2045 GMT: Syria. The Local Coordination Committees claim 110 people have been killed by security forces today.

The LCC reports that of 45 slain in Damascus and its suburbs, many were members of the Free Syrian Army in the area of Kisweh.

2015 GMT: Syria. A tribute by Syrian TV to Yara Salem, one of three journalists of the pro-regime Al-Ikhbariya channel who were abducted near Damascus last week:

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Syria (and Beyond) Live Coverage: Fighting Continues in Aleppo

A reporter for Press TV, escorted by Syrian military, declares that Salah Ed Dine is Aleppo is free of "terrorists" --- In his previous broadcast from Aleppo on 30 July, the reporter said, "All is normal"

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Iran and Syria Audio Feature: Why Tehran's Conference "Stunt" Means Little --- Scott Lucas with Monocle 24
Friday's Syria (and Beyond) Live Coverage: The Battle for Aleppo Continues

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2025 GMT: Syria. The Local Coordination Committees reports that 80 people have been killed by security forces today, including 19 in Damascus and its suburbs and 15 in Aleppo Province.

1915 GMT: Syria. A Lebanese judge has charged former Minister of Information Michel Samaha and two Syrian army officers with setting up an armed group to incite sectarian strife through “terror attacks”, including bombings and assassinations.

One of the Syrian officers as General Ali Mamluk, the Syrian National Security chief.

The indictment also said that Samaha and the Syrian army officers set up the armed group to commit crimes, fueling sectarianism “by targeting the authority of the state and its civil and military institutions.” It alleged that the group conspired “with the intelligence services of a foreign country to undertake attacks against Lebanon".

Samaha was arrested on Thursday, initially in a case linked to explosives.

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