ATAREB, Syria (Reuters) – For two months, Dana and her 12 children fled from village to village trying to escape bombardment by Syrian forces. Finally, she gave up and took them back home.

“Everywhere we went, the bombs found us. If we’re going to die, I want it to be in our own house,” she says, rocking two young daughters in her lap.

ATIMA, Syria, Oct 24 (Reuters) – Hundreds of Syrian refugees
have poured into a makeshift refugee camp overlooking the
Turkish border, fleeing a week of what they say are the most
intense army bombardments since the uprising began 19 months
ago.

In the past two days, 700 tents have been erected in a
sprawling olive grove on a hill just inside Syria and all of
them have already been claimed.

AL-ALANEH, Syria (Reuters) – From a rooftop, Abdullah called out to the Syrian government soldiers hiding in a hilltop encampment that his rebel unit had surrounded: “Defect, defect, we promise your safety!”

The response came swiftly with a volley of gunfire, sending the young rebel in faded camouflage pants diving for cover.

ALEPPO (Reuters) – Plucking up his courage, a young boy ducks and darts down a bullet-scarred street in Aleppo, as a rebel with a megaphone shouts directions.

“Don’t turn right! Stay left, stay left. Now go, run, run!”

A sniper shot cracks out, and the boy’s dangerously bright pink shirt disappears behind a row of charred buses dragged across the road for cover. But the bullet misses, and fighters at the other end of the street burst into cheers.

BEIRUT, Sept 29 (Reuters) – Hundreds of shops were burning
in the ancient covered market of the Old City of Aleppo on
Saturday as fighting between rebels and state forces in Syria’s
largest city threatened to destroy a UNESCO world heritage site.

The uprising-turned-civil war that is now raging across
Syria has killed more than 30,000 people, according to activist
groups like the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

BEIRUT, Sept 28 (Reuters) – Syrian rebels struggled to make
headway against government forces on Friday in a battle for
Aleppo, the country’s largest city.

On the second day of an offensive they have billed as
decisive, the rebels also threatened to take on local Kurdish
militants – a move which would further complicate a war that has
already spilled over Syria’s borders.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian rebels battled government forces along the Turkish border on Tuesday in an attempt to seize a border crossing into its northern neighbor, which has backed the 18-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

Iran’s foreign minister proposed a new regional monitoring mission to try to stem the bloodshed in Syria and will have talks with President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus on Wednesday, state media said. Previous monitoring initiatives collapsed.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah made a rare public appearance on Monday to tell the United States it would face more anger and grave repercussions across the Muslim world unless it suppressed a film that demeans the Prophet Mohammad.

Arguing that the world had not yet grasped the depth of hurt felt by Muslims, Nasrallah called on governments to block access to websites showing the film, which was made in California and depicts Mohammad as a womanizer, homosexual and child abuser.

BEIRUT, Sept 16 (Reuters) – Pope Benedict urged Arab leaders
on Sunday at a huge open-air Mass in Lebanon to work for
reconciliation in a Middle East riven by Syria’s civil war and
blazing with fury over a film mocking the Muslim Prophet
Mohammad.

“May God grant to your country, to Syria and to the Middle
East, the gift of peaceful hearts, the silencing of weapons and
the cessation of all violence,” the pope said in a prayer after
Mass that organisers said was attended by 350,000 people.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Pope Benedict urged Middle Eastern Christians on Sunday to work for peace and against “the grim trail of death and destruction” in the world, in a sermon delivered in Lebanon as civil war raged in neighboring Syria.

Benedict was speaking at an open-air Mass on Beirut’s Mediterranean seafront attended by 350,000 worshippers, according to the organizers’ estimate, and leaders of Lebanon’s Christian and Muslim communities including from militant Shi’ite group Hezbollah.