Officials warn of Syrian civil war, 7 killed

Security forces killed at least seven people in fighting across Syria on Tuesday, activists said, in a 14-month-old revolt that the Red Cross and Arab League warned was becoming a civil war.    

Across Syria, clashes between state forces and rebels who have joined the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad raged overnight and flared again on Tuesday afternoon, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.    

Despite a shaky truce, the carnage in Syria has not stopped even as the government held a parliamentary poll a day earlier. Damascus promoted it as a milestone on its path to reform, but the opposition slammed the election as a sham and boycotted the vote.    

As election officials counted votes on Tuesday, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said fighting had been so intense in some parts of Syria that at times the conflict in those places qualified as a localized civil war.    

Jakob Kellenberger said he was very worried about conditions in Syria, where United Nations observers are being deployed to monitor a ceasefire agreement that has been repeatedly violated by state forces and by rebels.    

"I really hope that the U.N. observers will deploy rapidly," he told reporters in Geneva, indicating concern for the fate of U.N. envoy Kofi Annan's six-point peace plan for Syria. "I still hope it will not fail."  

Reuters