BEIRUT (Reuters) – Rebels fought the army in northern Syria on Saturday, activists said, and Syrian dissidents abroad gathered to try to unify and project themselves as a credible alternative to President Bashar al-Assad.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported fighting in Idlib province, on Syria’s northern border with Turkey and a hotspot of the 14-month-old revolt against Assad’s rule.

“Violent clashes are raging between Syrian regime forces and armed military defectors … The sounds of strong explosions were heard followed by security forces using heavy and medium machinegun fire,” the British-based Observatory said.

Violence has rumbled on despite a ceasefire declared a month ago by international envoy Kofi Annan and the presence of a U.N. monitoring mission now with about 150 observers on the ground.

Opposition leaders abroad flew to Rome to try to strengthen their fractured Syrian National Council (SNC), which is seeking international help in the struggle against Assad.

Political jockeying within the SNC has prevented it from gaining full international endorsement. Executive members told Reuters they may choose a new president or restructure the council in a bid to garner broader support.

In Damascus, crowds gathered for prayers to commemorate 55 people killed in twin suicide bombings in the capital on Wednesday, the deadliest there since the uprising began.

UNITED NATIONS/BEIRUT (Reuters) – Security forces killed at least 10 people in fighting across Syria on Tuesday, activists said, in a 14-month-old revolt that international mediator Kofi Annan, the Red Cross and Arab League warned was deteriorating into a civil war.

Clashes between government forces and rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad raged overnight in Syrian towns and flared again during the day, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Despite an initial pause in fighting on April 12, a promised ceasefire has not taken hold. Nor has the carnage in Syria stopped, despite a parliamentary poll on Monday which the government promoted as a milestone on its path to reform but the opposition dismissed as a sham and boycotted.

Speaking to reporters in Geneva after briefing the U.N. Security Council via video link, Annan said there were “worrying episodes of violence by the government” in Syria as well as attacks by the opposition in violation of the truce. He described a recent spate of bombings as “really worrying.”

He urged Damascus and the rebels to revive the truce.

“If you can do it for one day, why don’t you do it for a week, a month, why don’t you give peace a chance and give the people of Syria a break?” Annan said. “Why do they have to put up with this trauma?”

“There is a profound concern that the country could … descend into full civil war and the implications of that are quite frightening,” he said. “We cannot allow that to happen.”

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Security forces killed at least seven people in fighting across Syria on Tuesday, activists said, in a 14-month-old revolt that the Red Cross and Arab League warned was becoming a civil war.

Across Syria, clashes between state forces and rebels who have joined the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad raged overnight and flared again on Tuesday afternoon, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Despite a shaky truce, the carnage in Syria has not stopped even as the government held a parliamentary poll a day earlier. Damascus promoted it as a milestone on its path to reform, but the opposition slammed the election as a sham and boycotted the vote.

As election officials counted votes on Tuesday, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said fighting had been so intense in some parts of Syria that at times the conflict in those places qualified as a localized civil war.

Jakob Kellenberger said he was very worried about conditions in Syria, where United Nations observers are being deployed to monitor a ceasefire agreement that has been repeatedly violated by state forces and by rebels.

“I really hope that the U.N. observers will deploy rapidly,” he told reporters in Geneva, indicating concern for the fate of U.N . envoy Kofi Annan’s six-point peace plan for Syria. “I still hope it will not fail.”

“CIVIL WAR”

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian security forces and students armed with knives stormed a protest march at Aleppo University early on Thursday, activists said, killing four and rounding up 200 demonstrators demanding President Bashar al-Assad step down.

The pre-dawn raid was an unusually bloody incident for Aleppo, Syria’s normally fairly peaceful commercial hub, and prompted condemnation from the White House.

Washington accused Assad of making “no effort” to honor a three-week-old United Nations truce and warned that world powers might do more to bring change to Syria if the ceasefire plan brokered by envoy Kofi Annan failed.

“If the regime’s intransigence continues, the international community is going to have to admit defeat and work to address the serious threat to peace and stability being perpetrated by the Assad regime,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

“Political transition is urgently needed in Syria.”

Western powers back the 14-month revolt but lack appetite for the kind of military intervention seen last year in Libya.

Assad has counted on support from Russia and China to block United Nations sanctions. However, Moscow and Beijing backed the ceasefire plan and Western states may hope to persuade them to agree to penalize Assad if it collapses.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian security men and students wielding knives attacked a protest march at Aleppo University on Thursday, activists said, killing four and rounding up dozens of demonstrators who were demanding President Bashar al-Assad step down.

In an unusually bloody incident for Syria’s hitherto fairly peaceful commercial hub and second city, video posted on the Internet showed young people chanting slogans against the ruling family and being drowned out by gunfire. Activists posted images of a bloodied corpse and what they said was a burning dormitory.

A British-based opposition group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said at least four were killed and some 28 other students were wounded, three critically. Some 200 were arrested in the latest violence to breached a three-week-old U.N. truce.

Knife-wielding youths had joined the security forces in the attack on fellow students on the Aleppo campus, the group said, adding that teargas had been fired on what started as the latest of an almost daily series of peaceful protests by the students.

“Freedom forever in spite of you, Assad!” chanted the young demonstrators in a video shot in early morning twilight.

There was no comment from officials and it was not possible to verify the account from the northern city whose relatively prosperous, business-oriented population has been slow to join the 14-month-old revolt against the Assad’s four-decade rule.

Syria’s middle classes, and substantial religious and ethnic minorities, are fearful that an uprising dominated by Sunni Muslims, who form 80 percent of the population, against an elite around Assad, which is drawn largely from his Alawite minority, could descend into the kind of sectarian and ethnic bloodbath they have watched destroy neighboring Iraq over recent years.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian security men and students wielding knives attacked a protest march at Aleppo University on Thursday, activists said, killing four and rounding up dozens of demonstrators who were demanding President Bashar al-Assad step down.

In an unusually bloody incident for Syria’s hitherto fairly peaceful commercial hub and second city, video posted on the Internet showed young people chanting slogans against the ruling family and being drowned out by gunfire. Activists posted images of a bloodied corpse and what they said was a burning dormitory.

A British-based opposition group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said at least four were killed and some 28 other students were wounded, three critically. Some 200 were arrested in the latest violence to breached a three-week-old U.N. truce.

Knife-wielding youths had joined the security forces in the attack on fellow students on the Aleppo campus, the group said, adding that teargas had been fired on what started as the latest of an almost daily series of peaceful protests by the students.

“Freedom forever in spite of you, Assad!” chanted the young demonstrators in a video shot in early morning twilight.

There was no comment from officials and it was not possible to verify the account from the northern city whose relatively prosperous, business-oriented population has been slow to join the 14-month-old revolt against the Assad’s four-decade rule.

Syria’s middle classes, and substantial religious and ethnic minorities, are fearful that an uprising dominated by Sunni Muslims, who form 80 percent of the population, against an elite around Assad, which is drawn largely from his Alawite minority, could descend into the kind of sectarian and ethnic bloodbath they have watched destroy neighboring Iraq over recent years.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Violence erupted in two Syrian provinces on Tuesday, with a rights group reporting 10 civilians dead in an army mortar attack and 12 soldiers killed in a fire-fight with rebel gunmen as U.N. monitors sought to shore up a shaky ceasefire.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the 13-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, said nine members of one family died in mortar bomb blasts in a village in the northern province of Idlib.

An activist on the Turkish border, Tareq Abdelhaq, said 35 people had been wounded and that some were being carried 25 km (15 miles) along mountain tracks to receive emergency treatment in refugee camps dotted along the frontier.

“Some are being smuggled over the border to Turkey. They had to carry the wounded and go through the mountains to avoid checkpoints on the road,” Abdelhaq said. “One guy died on the way. He was 19 years old and had very bad injuries.”

In the eastern Deir al-Zor province, troops hit back with mortar and heavy machinegun fire after losing a dozen of their own to insurgents, killing at least one villager and destroying a school, the anti-Assad Observatory added.

The United Nations says Syrian forces have killed more than 9,000 people since the uprising began in March 2011.

Like other Arab revolts against autocratic rulers, it began with peaceful mass protests but a violent government response has spawned an increasingly bloody insurgency. Damascus says rebels have killed more than 2,600 soldiers and police.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian rebels fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad say they are shifting tactics towards homemade bombs, hoping to even the odds between their outgunned forces and his powerful army.

A series of deadly blasts in the past week suggests they are getting better at it.

Suicide bombs, booby-trapped cars and roadside explosions, including blasts in Idlib on Monday and the capital Damascus last week, have rocked the Arab state. The attacks threaten to sour the UN-brokered two-week truce and have killed many from Assad’s security agencies.

“We are starting to get smarter about tactics and use bombs because people are just too poor and we don’t have enough rifles,” a rebel fighter from the north of Idlib province said last week as he took a break across the border in Turkey.

“It is just no match for the army,” said the man, who spoke on condition of anonymity, “So we are trying to focus on the ways we can fight.”

Details of what disparate groups are doing inside Syria are sketchy because the government bars most independent media.

The bombings have produced an array of theories, including that some may be self-inflicted wounds by security agents out to discredit the rebels, or that they show the rise of al Qaeda-linked Syrian Islamists, of whose expertise there is no doubt after their years of activity across the border in Iraq.

ANTAKYA, Turkey (Reuters) – Rebel fighter Mustafa and his trio of burly men look out of place at a trendy Turkish cafe near the Syrian border, dressed in tattered jeans and silently puffing on cigarettes as they scoop into tall ice-cream sundaes.

Their battleground is across the frontier in Syria, where they are fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad. But like many rebels in northern Syria, they are so desperate for weapons and money, they are searching for new donors in Turkey.

“When it comes to getting weapons, every group knows they are on their own,” says the 25-year-old with a patchy beard. “It’s a fight for resources.”

Nominally Mustafa’s rebels fight for the Free Syrian Army (FSA), but the FSA, lacking international recognition or direct state funding, is a often just a convenient label for a host of local armed groups competing fiercely for scarce financing.

So fiercely, they sometimes turn their guns on each other.

“Everyone needs weapons. There is tension. There is anger and yes, sometimes there is fighting if rebels in one town seem to have an unfair share of weapons,” said Mustafa, who comes from Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib, which borders Turkey and has been a hotbed of resistance to Assad.

Such mistrust is compounded by the competing agendas of outside parties who are further fragmenting the rebel movement.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Seven people were killed and 20 wounded, including members of the security forces, in a suicide bombing in the central Damascus district of Midan on Friday, Syria’s state news agency SANA said.

Opposition activists said the explosion occurred as worshippers were coming out of the Zeen al-Abadeen mosque.

“About 30 minutes ago, I heard a really heavy blast. It felt like I was shaking and I think everyone in Damascus must have heard it,” said Mar Ram, an activist living in Midan, a focus of regular protests against President Bashar al-Assad.

“We’ve been hearing a lot of blasts in Damascus recently, action is picking up and it seems the (rebels) and Assad’s forces are starting to battle it out in Damascus as well.”

Pro-government television channel Ikhabria said its reporters heard gunfire while filming the damage. It showed one person in military fatigues being carried away from the site of the blast, and body parts scattered on a street.

Activists said that the explosion targeted a bus full of loyalists militiamen who had been brought to the area to quell dissident protests.

“I think this was the regime because it was near a mosque and people go out to protest on Fridays and they want to scare people off,” said Ram.