Introduction to the evening news 12-07-2012

Akkar residents are not the only ones who began to flee for fear of Syrian shells. Lebanese politics have been displaced permanently and turned merely into repercussions of the Syrian crisis. This crisis entered a new phase with the recent wave of high-level defections from President Bashar Assad’s regime.       

After Manaf Tlas, a brigade commander in Syria's Republican Guard, Syria confirmed today the defection of its ambassador to Iraq Nawaf al-Fares, though via a dismissal statement issued by the Syrian Foreign Ministry. In the field and for the first time, clashes reached neighborhoods in the Syrian capital.     

Diplomatically, Ankara announced that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will visit Moscow on Wednesday to hold talks on the Syrian crisis. Meanwhile, Moscow threatened to use its Veto right once again to vote against the new Western draft resolution on Syria, if it was referred to the Security Council.        

The draft resolution put forth by the Great Powers yesterday gives the Syrian regime ten days to put an end to the use of heavy weapons at the risk of imposing economic and diplomatic sanctions on it, in virtue of article 41 of the U.N. Charter listed under Chapter 7, stipulating economic and diplomatic sanctions, without allowing the use of force.