REPORT: US-Russia Syria talks end without agreement

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said the UN-brokered talks on Tuesday aimed at setting up a conference to end the war in Syria ended with U.S. and Russian officials failing to agree on many questions, including the dates and participants.                     

The two sides will return to their capitals to discuss how to take the process forward, but there was still no agreement on who would represent the Syrian opposition and whether Iran would be at the table, he told reporters after the five-hour talks.                          

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will meet next week, and further talks on the conference were expected to follow, a U.N. statement said.                                      

Earlier, the Saudi Arabian foreign Minister said the Kingdom regards the involvement of Iran and Hezbollah in Syria's civil war as dangerous and believes the rebels must be offered military aid to defend themselves.                      

Speaking at a news conference with US Secretary John Kerry in Jeddah, Prince Saud al-Faisal added that Saudi Arabia "cannot be silent" about the Iranian intervention and called for a resolution to ban the flow of arms to the Syrian government.                                      

Earlier, Syria envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said that a conference on ending the war in Syria would not take place in July as he had hoped, and called on the United States and Russia to help contain the conflict.                               

Also on Tuesday, the White House said in a statement that US President Barack Obama spoke with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on Monday about the situation in Syria, "including the regime's use of chemical weapons against its own people".          

On another note, the official Syrian news agency said that President Bashar Assad issued a law penalizing those who enter the Syrian territories illegally. 
                                       
The news agency said that the law stipulates that whoever enters illegally into the Syrian territories faces imprisonment from one to five years and pays a fine of 5 million to 10 million Syrian pounds (50 thousand to 100 thousand dollars).                                                              

Separately, the World Food Program (WFP) said that families in Syria are increasingly resorting to begging for food to cope with shortages and high prices wrought by the civil war.                          

A survey of 105 families conducted by WFP food monitors in seven provinces, including the hotspots of Homs and Aleppo in April and May, found many switching to lower-quality foods in order to spend less, the United Nations agency said.      

WFP spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs told a news briefing in Geneva that the WFP was stepping up food deliveries in Syria ahead of the start in early July of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, during which devout Muslims fast from dawn to dusk and economic activities are disrupted.                                                
WFP hoped to reach 2.5 million Syrians with food supplies in June, up from 2.4 million in May.                              

On the field:                                           

Meanwhile, fierce battles raged on the outskirts of Damascus as the Syrian army pressed a major assault to crush rebels around the capital, activists reported.                      

This as rebels in the city of Aleppo attempted to advance into western regime-held districts, sparking clashes with the regime forces, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.                                

"The Syrian army is trying to control Qaboon, Barzeh, Jubar, Al-Hajar Al-Aswad and Yarmuk," the Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said.
                                
"The army is unable to control the said neighborhoods while the rebels are fighting back. The humanitarian situation there is appalling," Abdel Rahman told Agence France Presse.                         

An activist in Qaboon said the army's attack launched on the capital's northeastern district entered its sixth day on Tuesday.                               

On another note, a Syrian branch of al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for suicide attacks on security compounds in Damascus that killed at least five people.
                              
Jabhat al-Nusra claimed Sunday's attacks in Damascus in a statement posted on a militant website Tuesday.                                      

The statement said the group sent seven suicide bombers wearing Syrian military uniforms to break into a police station in northern Damascus and a security compound in a southern district of the capital.                                             

The statement warned President Bashar Assad's government that the "criminal regime" should know that the group's fighters "do not fear any confrontation with the enemies."                

More than 93-thousand people have been killed in the Syrian conflict that started in March 2011 as largely peaceful protest against Assad's rule.      
                     
The uprising turned into a bloody insurgency in response to a military crackdown by regime forces on the protest movement. 


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