Opposition Activists

A high-level peace envoy urged Syrian President Bashar Assad to take "concrete steps" to end the turmoil in his nation, the United Nations said Saturday, but a reported offensive against rebels in the country's rugged northwest highlighted the ferocity of the violence almost a year after the country's uprising began. Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan met with Assad in Damascus, the Syrian capital, in a bid to head off what U.S. and other officials fear could become a full-fledged civil war in Syria, where protesters and insurgents demanding Assad's ouster have been battling security forces.

Syrian authorities and antigovernment activists accused each other Tuesday of reprisal killings in the central city of Homs, where government forces recently overran rebel-held areas and continue to deny access to outside humanitarian aid and human rights observers. The Syrian army has said it is "cleansing" the Homs neighborhood of Baba Amr of mines and booby traps left behind by "terrorists" when rebel fighters with the Free Syrian Army withdrew from the area last week. But activists and human rights groups said government troops in Baba Amr were carrying out revenge killings, which they say claimed an entire family, among others.

Al Deen occasionally let out a goofy, drawn-out laugh when he recalled some of the absurdities he had witnessed during his three months of torture and humiliation in Syria's brutal prisons. Like the blind man accused of being a sniper. The sightless prisoner was subjected to a month of interrogation and beatings, Al Deen said, before intelligence officers finally concluded that he was in fact blind and released him. But he grimaced when he talked about the teenager from the southern province of Dara who had been shot three times, in his shoulder, chest and hand, and was given only a sling — no treatment or pain medication.

Emboldened by its takeover of a rebel-held neighborhood of Homs, the Syrian army shelled other parts of the city and nearby villages Sunday in an effort to regain control of the area, antigovernment activists said. Shells rained down through the day on the villages of Rastan, Tall Kalakh and Qusair, to which Free Syrian Army rebels were said to have fled from the battered Baba Amr neighborhood. The western city of Homs has suffered the most concentrated fighting and the highest number of casualties since the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad began last March.

With violence flaring in several regions, Syrians cast ballots Sunday for a new constitution hailed as a historic breakthrough by President Bashar Assad and denounced as a farce by his opponents. The vote came almost a year after widespread antigovernment protests broke out, inspired by so-called Arab Spring revolts elsewhere in the region. Syrian authorities responded with a fierce crackdown, but the protests persisted and evolved into an armed insurgency that has wrested some areas from government control.

Thousands of mourners braved a snowstorm and heavy security presence to march Saturday through a strategic Damascus neighborhood, turning a funeral procession into a bold opposition statement in a Syrian capital that has remained largely loyal to President Bashar Assad. The march, in the upscale Mezzeh district, started out peacefully but turned violent, opposition activists said, as security men unleashed barrages of live rounds. At least one person was reported killed and several injured, though there was no official confirmation.

Opposition activists reported dozens more people were killed in Syria on Thursday as the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly condemned the Syrian government's "systematic violations of human rights" and backed a plan calling for President Bashar Assad to relinquish power. The vote by the 193-member body in New York provided a symbolic victory for the United States, Turkey, Arab nations and others calling for the ouster of the Syrian leader. But the move seemed unlikely to make much difference on the ground in Syria, where the U.N. says more than 5,000 people have died in the conflict since antigovernment protests erupted almost a year ago. Opposition activists reported at least 63 people killed Thursday, including 38 in the rebellious northwestern province of Idlib, where the government is fighting to regain control of territory lost to armed rebels.

As the sun sets, Osama waits in his idling car near a bustling intersection, blowing cigarette smoke out a window cracked open. Down the street, a skinny figure is hawking bouquets of white flowers from beneath a beige umbrella. " Shabiha ," Osama says, fingering the vendor as a member of Syrian President Bashar Assad's plainclothes militia. Osama then spots a compatriot in a familiar car, speeding through the intersection. "That's Hassan," he says, "sweeping the area.

  Diplomats on Thursday were seeking new approaches to remedy the worsening conflict in Syria as opposition activists reported that government shelling and attacks had killed more than 100 people, most of them in the embattled city of Homs. After almost a weeklong siege, residents of Homs' Bab Amro neighborhood described scenes of blood-spattered field hospitals, bodies left unburied, terrified families staying in their homes to avoid gunfire and shortages of medicine, food, water and electricity.

Syrian government forces pressing a ferocious crackdown shelled the central city of Homs on Monday, opposition activists said, destroying a makeshift clinic and leaving dozens dead in a town that has been a hotbed of antigovernment resistance. The government of President Bashar Assad denied any involvement in an assault and said "terrorists" had attacked its forces. In Washington, the State Department announced that it was suspending operations at the U.S. Embassy in the Syrian capital of Damascus because of "growing safety risks.