SYRIA IS IN CIVIL WAR

88 more people have been killed in the army attacks on various settlements. The Red Cross has qualified what is happening in Syria as civil war. Syria's ambassador to Iraq Nawaf al -Fares who defected to the opposition has called for international intervention and has said he knows the nature of the regime and Al Assad will not step down unless force is used to unseat him. Fares said he supported the idea of international intervention and called on Al Assad to take a lesson from history and show mercy for the Syrian people. Homs and Rastan which have been the target of heavy weapons for a long time have been battered again by the regime forces. The army opened fire indiscriminately on the opposition forces in Damascus, Idlib, Daraa and Deir ez Zor killing dozens of people, among them children. The Syrian Revolutionary Council said many bodies bearing signs of torture had been found in Idlib.

Meanwhile, reaction is pouring in for the massacre in Tremse , a village of Homs, where more than 200 people were killed. The Damascus administration says it has no responsibility over what it calls the alleged violence in Homs and says the number of deaths in the village is 39 and no heavy weapons were used in Tremse. The spokesperson of the Syrian Foreign Ministry Cihad Makdisi says the army did carry out an operation but it was done at the behest of the villagers. UN observers say that those targeted in the massacre were for the most part the houses of the members of the army who had defected or of the opposition figures.

The Red Cross has said the violence in Syria is officially nothing other than a civil war, which makes the combatants in the country subject to the Geneva Convention.