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.

Related links: 

'Sheer savagery': Syrian rebel rips out soldier's heart, Human Rights Watch says

Syria denies blame for Turkish border bomb blast that killed at least 46

NBC News coverage of Syria 

Ugarit News via AP file

In this image taken from video obtained from the Ugarit News, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, a man reads a statement as four abducted Filipino UN peacekeepers are seen in Daraa, Syria, on Thursday, May 9, 2013. The peacekeepers have now been released.

Four Filipino United Nations peacekeepers abducted last week by armed men while patrolling in the demilitarized area between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights have been released, officials said Sunday.

U.N. officials and the Philippine army both said that the four are in good health.

The rebels from the Yarmouk Martyrs' Brigade had said they were holding the soldiers for their own safety after clashes with Syrian government forces had put them in danger, Reuters reported.

They were seized on Tuesday as they patrolled close to an area where the same rebel group held 21 Filipino observers for three days in March.

A rebel spokesman said the four were handed over on Sunday morning at a border checkpoint called Beit Ara, in an area where the Jordanian and Israeli borders join with the Golan Heights.

"They have been handed over in a spot in the Yarmouk Valley," Abu Iyas al-Horani told Reuters.

Philippine Foreign Minister Albert del Rosario confirmed to Reuters in Manila that the four had been released.

Brigadier General Domingo Tutaan, a spokesman for the Philippine armed forces, said the four had already been taken back to their battalion in the U.N. peacekeeping force on the Golan Heights.

The Philippines said it aimed to pull out 342 soldiers on peacekeeping duties in Golan after the abduction.

Israel captured the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East War and later annexed them, a move not recognized internationally.

Meanwhile, at least 82,000 people have been killed and 12,500 others are missing after two years of civil war in Syria, the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Sunday.

Most of the dead were killed by troops and militia loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and most of the missing are believed to have been detained by the government's secret police and other loyalists, the monitoring group said.

"The vast majority of civilian victims were killed by the regime. Killings in unofficial jails are commonplace, and the conditions under which prisoners are held are horrific," said Rami Abdulrahman, the Observatory's president.

The Observatory, established by Abdulrahman in Britain seven years ago, said 4,788 children were among the 34,473 civilians killed. Another 12,916 anti-Assad fighters were killed, along with 1,924 army deserters, it said.

On the loyalist side, 16,729 troops and 12,000 militiamen and informers have been killed. The report said the fate of around 2,500 loyalist troops believed to be held by rebels is unknown.

Reuters contributed to this report

Nine Turkish citizens were arrested Sunday in connection with the car bomb attacks that killed 46 people in a town near the Syrian border on Saturday.

The attacks, in the town of Reyhanli, were carried out by a group linked to Syria's intelligence service, Turkey’s deputy prime minister, Besir Atalay, told reporters.

However, Syria rejected Turkey's allegations that it was behind the bombs.

"Syria did not and will never do such an act because our values do not allow this. It is not anyone's right to hurl unfounded accusations," Syrian Information Minister Omran Zubi was quoted as saying on state media.

The car bombs increased fears that Syria's civil war was dragging in neighboring states despite renewed diplomatic moves towards ending two years of fighting in which more than 70,000 people have been killed.

Reyhanli, in the southern Hatay province, is in an area known to be home to many refugees. There are more than 300,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey, most of them in camps along the volatile border

It has also become a logistics base for rebels fighting Syria’s president Bashar Assad.

Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said those involved were thought also to have staged an attack on the Syrian coastal town of Banias a week ago in which at least 62 people were killed, Reuters reported.

"The attack has nothing to do with the Syrian refugees in Turkey, it's got everything to do with the Syrian regime," Davutoglu said in an interview on TRT television, Reuters said.

"We should be careful against ethnic provocations in Turkey and Lebanon after the Banias massacre," he said. 

Related: Turkey PM: Red line has been crossed

This story was originally published on Sun May 12, 2013 9:10 AM EDT

Bilal Hussein / AP

Pro-Syrian-government fighters from Lebanon stand guard at the border of the two countries on April 12. The head of Lebanon-based Hezbollah has threatened that his heavily armed group, backed by Iran, may become further involved in the battle against forces trying to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad.

BEIRUT -- The leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group said Tuesday that Syrian rebels will not be able to defeat President Bashar Assad's regime militarily, warning that Syria's "real friends," including his Iranian-backed militant group, were ready to intervene on the government's side.

Hezbollah, a powerful Shiite Muslim group, is known to back Syrian regime fighters in Shiite villages near the Lebanon border against the mostly Sunni rebels fighting to topple Assad. The comments by Sheik Hassan Nasrallah were the strongest indication yet that his group was ready to get far more involved to rescue Assad's embattled regime.

"You will not be able to take Damascus by force and you will not be able to topple the regime militarily. This is a long battle," Nasrallah said, addressing the Syrian opposition.

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"Syria has real friends in the region and in the world who will not allow Syria to fall into the hands of America or Israel."

Hezbollah and Iran are close allies of Assad. Rebels have accused them of sending fighters to assist Syrian troops trying to crush the two-year-old anti-Assad uprising, which the U.N. says has killed more than 70,000 people.

Deeper and more overt Hezbollah involvement in the Syrian conflict is almost certain to threaten stability in Lebanon, which is sharply split along sectarian lines, and between supporters and opponents of Assad. It also risks drawing in Israel and Iran into a wider Middle East war.

Nasrallah said Tuesday there are no Iranian forces in Syria now, except for some experts who he said have been in Syria for decades. But he added: "What do you imagine would happen in the future if things deteriorate in a way that requires the intervention of the forces of resistance in this battle?"

Hezbollah has an arsenal that makes the group the most powerful military force in Lebanon, stronger than the national army. Its growing involvement in the Syrian civil war is already raising tensions inside the divided country and has drawn threats from enraged Syrian rebels and militants.

Nasrallah also said his fighters had a duty to protect the holy Shiite shrine of Sayida Zeinab, named for the granddaughter of Islam's Prophet Muhammad and located south of Damascus.

He said rebels have captured several villages around the shrine and have threatened to destroy it.

"If the shrine is destroyed things will get out of control," Nasrallah said, citing the 2006 bombing of the Shiite al-Askari shrine in the Iraqi city of Samarra. That attack was blamed on al Qaeda in Iraq and set off years of retaliatory bloodshed between Sunni and Shiite extremists that left thousands of Iraqis dead and pushed the country to the brink of civil war.

In recent weeks, government troops have overrun two rebel-held Damascus suburbs and a town outside the capital. They also have captured several villages near the border with Lebanon as part of their efforts to secure the strategic corridor running from Damascus to the Mediterranean coast, which is the heartland of the president's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

Related:

• Obama: 'Some evidence' Syria used chemical weapons
• Bomb blast in Syria's capital kills at least 13
• 6 killed as bomb targets Syria's prime minister

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.

Related:

Fighting reported near suspected chemical weapons site in Syria

Obama reiterates chemical weapons would be 'game-changer'

Inside a Syrian city split between rival militias

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."

Slideshow: Syria uprising

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

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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.

Related:

Syrian rebels ask US to shoot down Assad's warplanes with Patriot missiles

Arab nations set to declare the right to arm Syrian rebels

'Chemical weapon' rockets fired in Syria, rebels say

Government forces in Syria used chemical weapons against rebels near Damascus, an opposition campaigner told Reuters on Monday. 

Rebels had surrounded an army base in the town of Adra, on the outskirts of Damascus, when soldiers used rocket launchers to fire the weapons at them, killing two fighters and wounding 23, according to activist Mohammad Doumani. The claim could not immediately be verified by NBC News.

Slideshow: Syria uprising

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

Launch slideshow

"Doctors are describing the chemical weapon used as phosphorus that hits the nervous system and causes imbalance and loss of consciousness,” Doumani told Reuters from the nearby town of Douma, where the wounded were transported for treatment.

“The two fighters were very close to where the rockets exploded and they died swiftly. The rest are being treated with Atropine," he added.

There was no independent confirmation of the attack, which follows the death of 26 people in a rocket attack near the city of Aleppo last week. The authorities and rebels accused each other of firing a missile carrying chemicals there.

On Tuesday, both the rebels and the government claimed a chemical weapon was used during fierce fighting, with each side blaming the other for the attack. 

Reporting from inside Syria is increasingly difficult, and independent confirmation of the use of chemical weapons was impossible to ascertain.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday announced that the United Nations will launch an investigation into the allegations.

However, the prospects for a quick conclusion to the probe will depend on cooperation from the warring parties and safety for investigators — problematic conditions in the chaos of the country's civil war, experts say.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Related:

'Suffocating in the streets': Chemical weapons attack reported in Syria

US defense chief: Intel 'raises serious concerns' about Syria chemical weapons

Full Syria coverage from NBC News

This story was originally published on Mon Mar 25, 2013 9:23 AM EDT

KINSHASA — Nearly 250 rebels who attacked a military camp and the provincial governor's office in Democratic Republic of Congo's southern mining hub of Lubumbashi on Saturday have surrendered, the country's U.N. peacekeeping mission said.

The government said it had killed about 15 of the estimated 300 Mayi-Mayi Kata Katanga separatists who attacked the capital of the Central African nation's copper and cobalt-rich Katanga province armed mainly with bows and arrows and machetes.

"The U.N. Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) welcomes the peaceful surrender of 245 Mayi-Mayi Kata Katanga combatants who sought refuge inside the MONUSCO compound in Lubumbashi," said a statement released on Sunday.

At least 35 people were killed in the violence, the statement said, citing local sources.

"The rebels should be handed over soon to the Government, following negotiations mediated by MONUSCO, between the governor of Katanga, military and provincial authorities and the Mayi-Mayi," it said.

Among the group were 54 injured fighters, 15 of them with serious wounds, the U.N. said.

Millions have died in the vast former Belgian colony's long-simmering armed conflicts concentrated in the eastern borderlands, but the mining areas around Lubumbashi have remained relatively calm.

However, the Mayi-Mayi, feeding off local grievances and secessionist sentiment, in recent months have ventured outside their stronghold in northern Katanga and towards the heart of the mining industry around Lubumbashi.

A witness to Saturday's attack said the group had attempted to hoist the flag of Katanga's short-lived 1960s-era independent republic before members of the army's elite Republican Guard launched a counterattack.

Katanga hosts many international mining companies, including Freeport McMoRan and commodities trader Glencore and exports about half a million metric tons of copper a year.

Wael Hamzeh / EPA

Supporters of the Salafist Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir take part in a rally showing solidarity with the Syrian people in Beirut, Lebanon, on Feb. 8.

Syria warned it may strike at rebels hiding in neighboring Lebanon if the Lebanese army does not act, the state news agency SANA said on Friday, the second anniversary of the civil war.

Syria's Foreign Ministry told its Lebanese counterpart late on Thursday that a "large number" of militants had crossed Lebanon's northern border into the Syrian town of Tel Kalakh over the past two days, SANA said.

"Syria expects the Lebanese side to prevent these armed terrorist groups from using the borders as a crossing point, because they target Syrian people and are violating Syrian sovereignty," the diplomatic cable said.

It said Syria's "patience is not unlimited," even though "Syrian forces have so far exercised restraint from striking at armed gangs inside Lebanese territory."

Fighting near the border resulted in a large number of casualties, SANA said, before the gunmen retreated into Lebanon.

Lebanon has a policy of "dissociation" from the two-year civil war in Syria but officials say they feel their country is increasingly at risk of being dragged into a conflict that the United Nations says has killed 70,000 Syrians.

Threat to Lebanon's existence
U.N. refugee agency chief Antonio Guterres said on Friday that the Syrian conflict threatens Lebanon's existence.

"The international community should recognize that the Syrian crisis represents an existential threat to Lebanon and should show Lebanon ... much stronger support than has happened until now," he told reporters in Beirut.

Lebanon, a nation of 4 million, fought its own devastating civil war from 1975 to 1990 and has sectarian tensions among Christians and Sunni and Shiite Muslims that have been heightened by the fighting in Syria.

Tensions between Lebanese groups that support the Syrian opposition and those that support Syrian President Bashar Assad have been intensifying and have sometimes turned violent.

The International Committee of the Red Cross appealed to foreign powers Friday to press combatants in Syria to halt attacks on civilians and aid workers, saying all sides were violating the Geneva Conventions. 

"Many atrocities against civilians have been reported or witnessed over the past two years, and we have also seen indiscriminate attacks against civilians and the targeting of health-care personnel and aid workers," said Robert Mardini, head of ICRC operations for the Near and Middle East. 

Meanwhile, European Union governments rejected a Franco-British push on Friday to lift an EU arms embargo to allow weapons supplies to Syrian rebels, voicing fears this could spark an arms race and worsen regional instability.

France and Britain found little support for their proposal to ease the embargo at an EU summit in Brussels, EU diplomats said, although they asked the bloc's foreign ministers to look again at the issue next week.

"Nobody really is interested (in lifting the embargo)," an EU diplomat said. "There is no prospect of change any time soon."

EU governments want to support the rebels, but many expressed fears on Friday that allowing weapons to flow to them could lead to arms falling into the wrong hands -- especially Islamist militants in the rebel ranks -- and lead Assad's backers to step up arms deliveries to his government.

European Council President Herman van Rompuy said leaders had asked their foreign ministers to look at the issue "as a matter of priority" at a March 22-23 meeting in Dublin. 

Reuters

Related:

Syrian army eroded by defections, battle deaths

'Human river' of Syria refugees hits 1 million; UK to send armored vehicles to rebels

Can aid without weapons help resolve Syrian conflict?