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Syrian tanks have rumbled into a rebel bastion in Damascus under the cover of heavy tank and gunfire, activists said, as UN observers toured hotspots in the country. Activists say the Sunday morning raid was launched to crush president Bashar al-Assad's opponents in Douma, an outlying suburb of the captial. A video posted online showed columns of smoke billowing into the sky. Heavy gunfire could be heard in the background. "Regime forces enter Douma each day, but today's assault was the largest," Damascus revolutionary council member Mohammed Saeed told AFP. He said it was "in retaliation for huge anti-regime protests there and because it's a centre of dissent in the Damascus countryside". The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights two civilians and four soldiers were killed in Douma. The violence comes a day after the UN Security Council voted unanimously to dispatch 300 unarmed observers to Syria to monitor a ceasefire that went into effe...

An advance team of U.N. observers is ready to enter Syria, where the cease-fire has been "relatively respected" despite government troops and heavy weapons still in cities and continuing abuses, the spokesman for international envoy Kofi Annan said Friday.The advance team is "standing by to board planes and to get themselves on the ground as soon as possible" once the U.N. Security Council gives approval for the mission as hoped when it meets later Friday, Annan's spokesman, Ahmad Fawzi told a news conference.   Annan has asked the 15-nation Security Council to approve sending a U.N. observer mission to Syria as soon as possible. The council's draft resolution being taken up Friday would authorize an advance element of up to 30 unarmed military observers. The resolution being considered also would demand the government ensure their "full and unimpeded freedom of movement throughout Syria" and guarantee the mission's ability to interview...

Asma al-Assad, the British-born wife of Syria’s president, told a friend that she was the ‘‘real dictator’’ in the family, according to leaked emails that suggest she holds a cherished place in the leader’s inner circle. Despite the ambitions she expressed for liberalising Syria before the uprising, Mrs Assad, 36, displays no misgivings about the regime’s bloody crackdown, which has accounted for most of the estimated 8,000 lives lost. Her correspondence with Bashar al-Assad, his aides, friends and family portray her as highly supportive of her husband.   In an email to a family friend on January 10, she praised a speech the president gave for conveying a sense of being ‘‘very strong, no more messing around’’. In another, she complains that ABC News unfavourably edited an interview with him. On January 17, she circulated an email cracking a joke at the expense of the people of Homs, shortly before a regime onslaught that would claim hundreds of lives. The people of th...

A heavy firefight broke out on Monday between Free Syrian Army rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar Assad in a main district of the Syrian capital Damascus that is home to several security installations, witnesses said.They said the sound of heavy machinegun fire and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) echoed through the heavily guarded al-Mezze district. There was no immediate word on casualties but residents said by telephone the fighting was intense."There is fighting near Hamada supermarket and the sound of explosions there and elsewhere in the neighborhood. Security police have blocked several side streets and the street lighting has been cut off," a housewife who lives in the area said.   The fighting in the capital came after a car bomb ripped through a residential area of Syria's second city Aleppo on Sunday, and as activists reported heavy clashes across the country between state forces and rebels fighting to overthrow Assad. As hundreds gathered on Sunday in...

Syria crisis very cruel at that time. Many people dead in Homs. Activists believe as many as 47 people have been killed in an attack by pro-government militia in the embattled Syrian city of Homs.Women and children are among those reported to have been tortured and killed on Sunday night in the neighbourhood of Karm el-Zeytoun. The Syrian government acknowledged the deaths, but blamed "armed terrorists". The attack happened hours after UN-Arab League peace envoy Kofi Annan ended his two-day mission to Damascus.   Homs has been under assault for weeks as government forces have tried to root out rebel fighters. Parts of the city are devastated. The main opposition group, the Syrian National Council (SNC), has called for an emergency UN Security Council meeting to discuss the killings, the AFP news agency reports. Hundreds of families fled the Karm el-Zeytoun area of the city on Monday after reports of the attack in their neighbourhood overnight, the British-based Syrian ...

Osama bin Laden news   LEAKED emails suggest the former world's most wanted man was not buried by sea. So, what exactly happened to Osama bin Laden? In a Stratfor email reportedly released by Anonymous and WikiLeaks, Osama bin Laden is rumoured to have been flown to the US for cremation at a secret site. The al-Qaeda boss was supposed to have been buried at sea off the USS Carl Vinson after he was killed in a Navy SEAL raid on May 2, 2011. Russia  reports bin Laden's body was instead transported to Delaware on a CIA plane, then to Maryland. The email purportedly claims that Stratfor's intelligence vice-president Fred Burton says bin Laden's body was "bound for Dover, [Delaware] on [a] CIA plane... onward to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda [Maryland]". "If body dumped at sea, which I doubt, the touch is very Adolph Eichman like," Burton wrote in another email referring to the Nazi Holocaust mastermind whose was caught, crem...