Syrian
President Bashar Assad received Greek Orthodox
Patriarch of Antioch and All the East John Yazigi on Monday and praised the
high patriotism of the Orthodox Church and its role in strengthening national
unity.
Yazigi voiced his trust that Syria will emerge victorious
from the crisis, stressing the necessity that Syrians stick to their national
principles.
Assad had told a Jordanian delegation in Damascus
that Syria will not submit to pressures and plots.
This as a top US military officer said
on Sunday he favored the idea of arming Syrian rebels during discussions within
the Obama administration about how to help resolve the country's civil war, but
there was never a specific plan under review.
General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he thought arming the rebels might help end the
crisis more quickly and avert the collapse of government institutions, which
could lead Syria to become a failed state.
"Conceptually I thought if there were
a way to resolve the military situation more quickly it would work to the
benefit not only of the Syrian people but also us," Dempsey told reporters
aboard his plane from Afghanistan, where he attended a change-of-command
ceremony for NATO-led forces.
On the other hand, the Washington Post Daily reported
that Iran and Hezbollah are preparing themselves for the day when the
Syrian regime led by Bashar Assad is overthrown. Quoting officials in the US
and Middle East, the paper reports that Iran and Hezbollah are building a
"network of militias inside Syria" that will protect their interests
in a post-Assad Syria.
On the Field:
A vehicle exploded at a border crossing on Turkey's border with Syria near the Turkish town of Reyhanli on Monday, killing at least seven persons and wounding several, a Turkish government official said.
"It was not an air strike. The explosion came from a car but we cannot yet confirm what caused it. There are definitely dead and wounded," the official told Reuters.
This as activists said that Syrian opposition fighters are battling troops loyal to President Bashar Assad for control of the country's largest dam.
Rami Abdul-Rahman, a Britain-based anti-regime activist, says there are sporadic clashes taking place around the al-Furat dam on the Euphrates River in the northeastern province of Raqqa.
He says a group of Assad's loyalists is held up Monday in the dam's control room but that most of the regime troops stopped fighting the day before after the rebels overran the nearby town of al-Thawra.
The fall of al-Furat dam into the opposition hands would be a significant blow to the regime because it supplies water to much of Syria.
Abdul-Rahman, who heads the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, says the rebels already control two other dams on the Euphrates.
REUTERS/LBCI
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