DAMASCUS, Syria -- Two suicide bombers hit a central Damascus square Tuesday, killing at least 14 people, activists and the state media reported. Activists said one of the explosions took place inside a police station and that many of the dead were policemen.

Syrian state TV quoted a security official as saying 14 people died in explosions caused by two "terrorist" suicide bombers near a police station in the bustling Marjeh Square in the heart of the capital. The official said another 31 were wounded.

The state-run Ikhbariya TV station showed footage of broken shop facades and mangled cars in the central square as ambulance workers were seen carrying the wounded on stretchers.

Marjeh Square has been the scene of previous attacks this year.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a network of activists on the ground in Syria, said 15 were killed in the explosions, one of which was caused by a man blowing himself up inside the police station in Marjeh Square. The group said the other explosion occurred outside the police station. It was not immediately possible to reconcile the two accounts.

SANA via AP

A photo from official Syrian news agency SANA shows damage from one of two suicide bombings Tuesday.

Suicide attacks and car bombs have become common in Damascus. Tuesday's twin explosions in the capital are the first since government troops, backed by fighters from Lebanon's Shiite group Hezbollah, captured Qusair, a strategic town in the central province of Homs, the linchpin linking Damascus with the regime strongholds on the Mediterranean coast.

Following the capture of Qusair, Syrian state-run media and the Hezbollah-owned Al-Manar TV have said the regime is preparing an offensive reportedly named Operation Northern Storm to recapture Aleppo. The regime was also believed to be advancing on the central city of Homs.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but car bombs and suicide attacks targeting Damascus and other cities that remain under government control have been claimed in the past by the al Qaeda-affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra — one of scores of rebel factions fighting the forces of President Bashar Assad.

On Saturday, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives-laden car in the central city of Homs, tearing through an area largely populated by the regime's Alawite sect and killing seven people.

Syria's conflict started with largely peaceful protests against Assad's regime in March 2011 but eventually turned into a civil war that has killed more than 80,000 people, according to the United Nations.

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DAMASCUS, Syria -- President Bashar Assad's forces are turning their sights on rebel fighters in two major cities -- Homs and Aleppo -- after capturing a strategic town in western Syria.

The latest battlefield success in Qusair, near the border with Lebanon, was partly due to Lebanese Hezbollah fighters' increasing role on Assad's side.

Government troops pressed ahead Thursday with an aggressive military offensive, seizing control of the village of Dabaa just north of the town.

Hundreds of rebel fighters who had been entrenched in Qusair for more than a year fled Wednesday after a punishing three-week assault, retreating to surrounding areas.

The regime's triumph in Qusair, a key crossroads town of supply lines between Damascus and western and northern Syria, showcased the potentially game-changing role of Hezbollah in Syria's civil war and was openly celebrated in the militant group's strongholds in Lebanon and in Damascus, the seat of Assad's power.

Syrian state-run media portrayed Qusair's fall as a turning point in the more than two-year civil war that has killed more than 70,000 people.

However, dozens of rebel fighter brigades have taken unquestioned control of huge swathes of territory in the country's north and east, setting up local councils and Islamic courts to administer affairs in towns and villages.

Kurds have all but carved out their own separate existence in the country's northeast.

Josef Holliday, of the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, said he believes Assad is not aiming for outright victory over the rebels in all of Syria.

"The objective is survival in what they (regime loyalists) consider the strategically important parts of Syria, with the majority of the population," he said.

Following the victory in Qusair, the regime's next targets are rebel-held areas in and around the city of Homs, a government official told The Associated Press.

As Syria's third-largest city and one-time epicenter of the uprising, Homs holds both strategic and symbolic importance for the regime.

In April 2011, one month after the uprising against Assad began, protesters gathered at central Clock Square in Homs, bringing mattresses, food and water in hopes of emulating Cairo's Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution.

The peaceful, mass protests eroded Assad's narrative that the uprising was the work of "terrorists" and "armed thugs," and were quickly put down. Since then, the predominantly Sunni city, with Christian and Alawite minorities, has come under crushing attack on numerous occasions.

"The (army) command has put forward a plan, which is being executed," said the government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to divulge details about ongoing military operations.

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He said the army was carrying out "quick, successive attacks" to secure the northern entrance of Homs city and seized the village of al-Khaldiyeh along the way Thursday. It also intends to regain the rebel strongholds of Rastan and Talbiseh, towns just north of Homs city.

Pro-regime media outlets have said government forces are preparing to move to retake the contested northern city of Aleppo next.

Aleppo, Syria's largest city and commercial hub, was overrun by rebels last summer, and remains one of the country's bloodiest battlegrounds as rebels and regime forces fight over it.

Hezbollah fighters were instrumental to the regime victory in Qusair, but it's not clear whether they will participate to the same extent in future battles deeper inside Syria.

Jeff White, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the rebels were in for trouble, unless they improve their military and political command structure and get more weapons.

"The regime has laid down the challenge, and the rebels will have to respond, or they will have a bleak future ahead of them," he said.

The West, particularly the United States, has been reluctant to send more sophisticated weapons out of fear they might fall into the hands of Islamic extremists fighting in the rebel ranks, including members of Jabhat al-Nusra, which has sworn allegiance to al Qaeda.

A U.N.-sponsored international conference that was to bring representatives of the Assad government and the opposition together for negotiations has now been put off to at least July. 

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SANA via EPA

Syrian army soldiers taking position in the Jarba area in rural Damascus, Syria, in this photo released May 13 by the official Syrian Arab News Agency.

News analysis

DAMASCUS, Syria – It's early Friday morning, a holy day in Syria's capital. But war is no respecter of dawn or devotion; dense smoke is rising from several suburbs and the birdsong is punctured by the thud of falling artillery shells.

This is Damascus today; a city filled with the noise of war. MiG warplanes swoop overhead en route to rebel targets, mortars land amid dense housing, tanks rumble through suburban streets and, now and again, suicide bombers detonate their vehicles in the hope of killing President Bashar Assad's men. 

But there is a difference in the war here today, from when I last visited four months ago.

Assad's men appear to be winning, in Damascus at least.

I walked through a suburb where the front line has been pushed back 600 yards by government troops. That may not seem much, but when every 50 yards can cost scores of men's lives, even a modest advance can be significant. 

The smoke from the shelling is further away from the city than before. Rebels are less able to launch attacks on the city center. In their stronghold of Jobar, a suburb of Damascus, which they have held for months, there are now around 200 rebels who are surrounded by government forces pounding them relentlessly.

Much of the fighting on Assad's side is now being done by the militia men of the National Defense Force. They are part time soldiers, trained and armed in 40 days. Their motivation is simple and strong: to defend their districts and to drive out rebels they see as Islamist extremists.

It's thought there are around 50,000 militia soldiers. They know their ground and are proving more adept at urban, street fighting than a regular army trained in national warfare and tank battles.    

Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad tells me "momentum is absolutely on our side…We have new tactics, new ways of dealing with armed groups. Now we know the art of fighting them."

It's a pattern repeated in many areas of Syria. In the country's third largest city, Homs, a key suburb, Wadi Sayeh, was retaken by Assad's men. In the South, rebels withdrew hundreds of men from one town because they couldn't be resupplied with ammunition from Jordan. In areas of the North, rebels are running low on arms and ammunition because some donors can't afford to keep paying for munitions two years into the war.

So is this a tipping point in the war?

No.

Does it mean Assad will win?

No.

It all depends on what you mean by winning. 

‘Winning’ by not losing
The former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said that rebels in a guerrilla war only have to avoid losing to win. But in Syria that maxim might equally apply to the government. 

After Tunisia's leader fell in days, Egypt's in weeks, Libya's in months, the world assumed Assad would fall quickly. It's now been years. And he's still there.

He's there partly because of Russian and Iranian help. He receives a steady supply of weapons from both. 

The latest report in the New York Times suggests Russia has now given Syria advanced anti-ship cruise missiles, in order to deter the West from mounting a blockade or no-fly-zone against the country. Russia is also gathering a flotilla of warships near Syria in a show of strength and support for its ally, before next month's planned peace talks in Geneva. Russia's more conventional weapons stocks have been supplying the guns of the government for two years.

Syria's armed forces are also being bolstered by men from the Lebanese organization Hezbollah, men trained and in many cases, practiced in urban warfare. 

Ward Al-Keswani/Reuters

Free Syrian Army fighters carry their weapons while walking down a debris-filled street in the al-Ziyabiya area in Damascus on May 5.

Rebels losing propaganda war
There is an ebb and flow to most wars. At the moment the government has the flow and rebels are on the ebb. 

They are losing ground in the propaganda war, too. Several times this week they have posted brutal videos on the Internet, demonstrating their ruthlessness.

In one, an Islamist fighter, from the Jabhat al-Nusra group that is affiliated with al-Qaeda, appears to publicly execute 11 men kneeling in front of him. Before shooting each of them once in the head, he accuses the men of being soldiers responsible for a massacre. It's one of two brutal execution videos posted by the Al-Nusra group in recent days. Another,video widely circulated in Syria, appears to show a rebel fighter from Homs cutting a hole in a dead soldier’s chest, removing the heart and appearing to take a bite.  

It may be an ancient tactic of war, to dehumanize and terrify your enemy, but the rebels are making many in the outside world queasy and ready to question whether they are worthy of further support. Memories of smiling, flag waving, peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators have dimmed.

And the opposition’s lack of organization is becoming a real problem.

There is, arguably, no such thing as the Free Syrian Army. Aid organizations say they have to deal with around 300 different rebel groups, many loosely grouped under the umbrella of the FSA. Many others are rivals of the FSA, like the al-Nusra group. An “army” is usually something with a command structure and a unified organization. The FSA appears to be nothing of the kind.

As for a political opposition to Assad, the Syrian National Coalition is far from a united coalition. Politicians in the West are frustrated by the apparent inability of the “opposition” to provide a credible alternative to the Assad government.

What international ‘policy’?
All those issues have left supporters of Syria's initial revolution in a quandary.

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The U.S., Britain, France and others are now seriously considering sending weapons to certain, vetted, rebel groups. But which ones? Would the apparent heart-eater's group qualify? How can Europe or America guarantee that the arms they ship will not end up in the hands of Islamists who later turn them against the West? Just remember Benghazi and the murder of a U.S. Ambassador happened in a Libyan city the West began a war to save.

The American administration seems to be indecisive in the face of a seemingly insoluble crisis, haunted by intervention in Iraq, talking about an ever thickening red line on the use of chemical weapons, but concerned about arming the wrong people a year too late. 

Britain and France are pushing for the arming of rebels, while Germany and Austria are pointing to what they see as the folly of doing so. 

Qatar and Saudi Arabia are pouring arms into Syria, money that is making the Islamists of al-Nusra the most effective fighting force on the rebel side. The Gulf States have no interest in the victory of "freedom and democracy" in Syria. As Sunni Muslim states, they want to weaken Shia-dominated nations like Syria and Iran. For many in Saudi Arabia, the advance of a Salafist-Islamist group like the black flagged Nusra Front is an added bonus.

More losers, than winners
Syria's is now more than a sectarian conflict. It's a regional conflict in microcosm, where Iran and Saudi Arabia face off, where Russia and the West arm wrestle, where Israel and Turkey spar for regional dominance and where Syrians die in the tens of thousands.

My old notebook records a death toll of 8,000. That seemed astonishingly high to me, just a year ago. Now it is ten times that and I'm no longer surprised. In fact the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K. based organization that tracks the death toll, now puts it at more than 90,000.

Syria's story today is one of massacres and executions, gruesomely recorded for history on video, of ruthless attacks by both sides, of MiG warplanes bombing men with mortars and machine guns, a chronicle of death foretold, everywhere.

President Assad may be "winning" the war now, whatever winning means. Rebels may "win" in the end by seeing him leave office. But nobody is really winning.

This is, and has been for months, an unwinnable war, deadlocked and deadly. Neither side can break through and neither side will give up. 

Today in Syria, there are only losers.

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NBC News coverage of Syria 

Khaled al-Hariri / Reuters

A destroyed car is pictured near the former Interior Ministry building after a blast in central Damascus on Tuesday killed at least 13 people and injured dozens more, according to state television and activists.

BEIRUT -- A bomb in central Damascus killed 13 people on Tuesday, state television said, a day after Prime Minister Wael al-Halki survived an attack on his convoy in the heart of the Syrian capital.

State television said 70 people were wounded, several critically. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that nine civilians and five soldiers had died.

Pro-government Al-Ikhbariya television showed firefighters running through thick smoke after the blast in Marjeh Square. Two bodies could be seen on the ground.

The target of the attack was not immediately clear. Footage showed the site of the blast was near the former Interior Ministry building on one of the capital's main roads.

Monday's attack on the prime minister's convoy killed six people in what has become an increasingly common tactic used by rebels.

A resident of Damascus, who lives a mile from the blast site, said the explosion shook the doors of her house.

"It must be huge for me to hear it like that. Casualties must be horrific because it is a super busy square at this time of day," she said over Skype.

Rebels have increased their attacks on Damascus, which include mortar fire from the contested suburbs, in a civil war that has cost more than 70,000 lives according to U.N. estimates.

A bomb in July killed four of President Bashar Assad's aides, including his brother-in-law Assef Shawkat and the defense minister.

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Inside a Syrian city split between rival militias

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AMMAN - Syrian forces and militiamen loyal to President Bashar al-Assad killed at least 85 people when they stormed a Damascus suburb after five days of fighting, opposition activists in the area said on Sunday.

There was no immediate confirmation of the activists' account of what they described as a "massacre," including of women and children, at Jdeidet al-Fadel. Syrian authorities have banned most independent media since the uprising began in 2011.

Syria's Sana state news agency said the military "inflicted big losses on terrorists in Jdeidet al-Fadel and destroyed weapons and ammunition and killed and wounded members of the terrorist groups."

Jamal al-Golani, a member of the Revolution Leadership Council opposition group, said the number of dead may be higher than 250 and that most of the victims were shot at close range, but the presence of army patrols made documenting all of them difficult.

"Jdeidet al-Fadel was militarily a lost cause from day one because it was surrounded by the army from every direction. There are almost no wounded because they were shot on the spot," he said.

NBC News has not confirmed the reports.

The killings happened over several days when pro-Assad forces stormed an area where there were up to 270 rebels, Golani said, adding that he had counted 98 bodies in the streets and 86 people who he said had been summarily executed in makeshift clinics where they were lying wounded.

Kerry: US to double nonlethal aid to Syrian opposition

The working class district, one of several Sunni Muslim towns surrounding the capital that have been at the forefront of the uprising against Assad, is situated near hilltop bases for elite loyalist forces, who mostly belong to Assad's minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam that has dominated the country since the 1960s.

Abu Ahmad al-Rabi', an activist in the adjacent district of Jdeidet Artouz, said: "We documented 85 summarily executed, including 28 shot in a makeshift hospital after Assad's forces entered Jdeidet al-Fadel. We fear that the victims of the massacre are much higher."

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition monitoring group operating from London, said it documented 80 names of people killed, including three children, six women and 18 rebel fighters.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights said the International Committee for the Red Cross should be allowed to evacuate civilians from the district after credible reports of "extrajudicial killings and summary executions inside homes and tens of cases of sexual violence."

Syrian state television showed troops in a pickup truck patrolling the dusty town and several bodies of dead men in front of a building that appears to have been wrecked by gunfire. A Syrian commander described them as "terrorists."

Video footage taken by activists showed three bodies of young men lying next to each other in what appeared to be a makeshift clinic, all with apparent bullet wounds. 

In a pattern seen in other towns and neighborhoods overrun by Assad's forces, activists said shops in Jdeidet al Fadel were looted and torched.

Assad's forces have been accused of massacring hundreds of Sunnis in areas they stormed in Hama and Homs provinces and Damascus suburbs, while international rights groups say rebel forces have also committed atrocities, although on a smaller scale.

Youssef Badawi / EPA

Burned cars seen at the site of what Syrian authorities said was a suicide car bombing in Damascus on Monday. At least 15 people were reported killed and 53 wounded in the blast. The government blamed 'terrorists,' and Syrian rebels blamed the government.

A suicide car bomb exploded in the main business district of Damascus on Monday, killing at least 15 people, setting cars ablaze and damaging buildings, according to state television.

A Damascus resident who described the blast as the biggest she had heard in the capital during the two-year-old revolt against President Bashar Assad said large plumes of black smoke were rising from the Sabaa Bahrat district.

State television said the explosion had occurred near a school in Sabaa Bahrat, a heavily populated area that also houses the Central Bank and the Finance Ministry. It said 53 people were wounded.

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Residents and opposition activists reported hearing gunfire and ambulance sirens in the vicinity. State television said shots had been fired in the air to clear a path for ambulances.

It showed footage of seven bodies in the street, including at least two charred corpses in the wreckage of an overturned bus. The fire brigade was dousing flames from cars crushed by the blast. Other vehicles were still on fire, lined up in what appeared to be a car park.

Men carried away a woman on a stretcher whose face was covered in blood. Panic-stricken women in long black dresses and headscarves ran toward the scene. State television showed some bandaged children in school uniform.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group with a network of local sources, including hospitals, said at least eight people had been killed.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but state media blamed "terrorists," a term the government uses for opposition fighters. Opposition groups accused the government of carrying out the attack.

Syrian insurgents based in the outskirts of Damascus have pushed into areas near the government-held heart of the city, stepping up mortar and car bomb attacks in recent weeks.

More than 70,000 people have been killed in the conflict, which started with peaceful protests against four decades of Assad family rule that were violently suppressed. An armed struggle ensued, forcing more than a million Syrians to flee abroad, and displacing millions more inside the country.

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DAMASCUS, Syria -- Mortar shells slammed into a cafeteria at Damascus University Thursday, killing at least 12 people and wounding 20, according to state media and an official. It was the deadliest in a string of such attacks on President Bashar Assad's seat of power, state media and an official said.

Rebels began firing shells at the capital earlier this year, and the strikes have become increasingly common in recent weeks as rebels clash with government troops on the city's east and south sides.

SANA via EPA

A wounded man receives medical treatment after a mortar attack on Damascus University, at Al Mouwasat hospital in Damascus, Syria, on Thursday. EDITOR'S NOTE: Photo distributed by the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA).

State-run TV said 12 people were killed when mortar shells struck the cafeteria of the university's architecture department in the central Baramkeh district. A Syrian official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give official statements said 20 people were wounded in the attack.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which came two days after rebels barraged Damascus with mortar shells that killed at least three people and wounded dozens.

The shelling rarely causes many casualties, but it has shattered the aura of normalcy the regime has tried to cultivate in Damascus.

The government blamed "terrorists," the term it uses for rebels fighting to oust Assad, and called the attack a "barbaric massacre."

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A look back at the conflict that has overtaken the country.

Launch slideshow

Government-run Al-Ikhbariya TV station showed footage of plastic tables and chairs turned upside down, shattered glass and pens and books scattered on the floor. Pools of blood were seen on the floor of the open-air cafeteria.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed the attack saying many of the wounded were in critical condition.

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