“Iran Warns U.S. as Syria Intensifies Crackdown” is an article published by the New York Times. It says that two Iranian warships docked in a Syrian port on Monday as a senior Iranian lawmaker denounced American calls for arming the Syrian opposition, adding to the international tensions over the nearly yearlong crackdown by the government of President Bashar al-Assad. As government forces continued to pound opposition strongholds, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it was trying to negotiate a brief pause in the violence to deliver aid to the most devastated areas. Activist groups reported intensified attacks on the besieged Baba Amr neighborhood in the central city of Homs. They said the government’s inability to eradicate the opposition there despite weeks of bombardment could be preventing the military from striking deeper and harder into other parts of the country where armed resistance and rebellion are believed to be growing, including Hama and Idlib Province to the north.
The Turkish information agency Hurriyet Daily News reported that Russia today said it would not attend an international conference in Tunisia this week aimed at seeking political change in Syria because the meeting only supported the opposition's cause. The meeting was called "for the purpose of supporting one side against another in an internal conflict," the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement. "We cannot accept the offer to attend this meeting." The Friends of Syria group will meet for the first time on Friday after being created in response to a joint veto by Russia and China of a UN Security Council resolution condemning President Bashar al-Assad for the violence. The group is backed by members of the European Union as well as some Arab nations and the United States. Russia's statement said the meeting would be unable to help establish dialogue between Assad's government and protesters on ways of ending 11 months of violence that opposition sources say have killed more than 6,000 people.
The same information agency published an article headlined “Claims of power game in Turkish intel crisis.” It says that a recent call by the prosecutor’s office for Turkey’s top intelligence staff to testify in an ongoing probe is connected to efforts to reshape the country’s political landscape in 2014, according to Dr. İbrahim Uslu, the head of a prominent research company. “The president, the prime minister, the leader of the AKP [Justice and Development Party], its top-level administrators, the situation in Parliament and the municipalities will all change in 2014. Politics, in other words, will be entirely redefined,” said Uslu, the head of the Ankara Social Research Center (ANAR). “I personally think some people may have [devised] these attacks to have a say over that process, to be able to manipulate it and gain influence over the allotment of new roles.” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is widely tipped to replace President Abdullah Gül as head of state in 2014, when the president will be chosen in a popular vote for the first time.
