World press on crisis in Syria (June 8-9, 2012)

On Friday the mission of UN observers arrived in Syria to investigate
a massacre in central Syria and visited the village of Qubair, where at
least 78 people were reported killed after having been surrounded for a
day by Syrian authorities, the "U.N. monitors investigate Syrian
massacre" article published in the Washington Post reports. "The U.N.
personnel, accompanied by a handful of reporters, encountered a
virtual ghost town inhabited by swarms of flies and reeking of charred
flesh, according to U.N. officials," – the article reads. "Surviving
residents of the tiny village, a cluster of about 20 homes, said
security forces had visited them the night before and threatened them
with death if they cooperated with the monitors" and the monitors were
able to talk to only one witness of the massacre. The recent events in
Syria prompted new discussions over the toughening of sanctions
against Syria's official government, despite the opposition of Russia
and China to any consideration of mandatory sanctions against Syria,
the newspaper reports.

The article "Deadly Shelling Strikes Southwest Syrian City, Activists
Say" published by the New York Times states that new violence took
place in Syria on Saturday in the city of Dara. "The Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in London,
said the victims from the violence early on Saturday included 10
women, a 10-year-old girl and two teenage boys," the article reads.
The author of the article believes that the killings in Dara and the
recent killings in the village of Quebir are "part of a new stage in
the conflict that has crossed dangerously into sectarian hatreds,
fomented by Mr. Assad’s government and a situation for which efforts
like Mr. Annan’s peace plan are too late. 'We’ve reached the point of
no return,' said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center
in Qatar and a former United Nations official. 'Diplomacy has not kept
up with the reality on the ground.' " – the article concludes.

Another article published today by the Washington Post on the crisis in
Syria is entitled "Syria rebels gaining ground, strength." "Though the
rebels insist they are still not being helped by foreign countries,
they say they now have ample access to money from Syrian opposition
figures and organizations outside the country, which they are using to
purchase supplies on a revived black market inside Syria," – the
article reads. "Evidence of the rebels’ growing effectiveness has also
come in the form of intensified fighting in many places around the
country… Repeated government efforts to dislodge the rebels from their
stronghold in the town of Rastan, in Homs province, have failed." The
article also notes that the Free Syrian Army still "remains a largely
disparate group, a concept more than a structure" and lacks
organization for higher effectivness.