Damascus

Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey D. Feltman told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs this afternoon that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad isn’t going to survive the 5-month long uprising against his regime. “He can’t win this,” said Feltman, head of the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs—which, barring any revisions or corrections coming from the White House, now seems to be the administration’s official assessment. Assad is going down.

Al Jazeera reports:

At least 11 people have been killed when Syrian forces backed by tanks stormed a town near the capital Damascus, Syrian human rights campaigners said.

“Sectarian violence in Syria raises fears,” screamed the headline of a Washington Post article on the murder Tuesday of 16 Syrians in the city of Homs, which lies 100 miles north of Damascus. Admitting that "confirming details" of what happened are hard to come by in a city under siege, the Post's Beirut-based correspondent Liz Sly nonetheless gives a dire reading of an impending civil war:

Journalist and Arab media specialist Hussain Abdul Hussain links to a remarkable film about the Syrian uprising, Syria’s Youth Revolutionaries:

The U.S. embassy isn’t the only diplomatic compound that’s been stormed in Damascus. The Qatari embassy was attacked twice, compelling Doha to withdraw their ambassador last week.

Less than a month ago, Senator John Kerry defended the Syrian regime, expressing optimism that it would reform on its own. Kerry said, as Josh Rogin reports at Foreign Policy:

With the news of Osama bin Laden’s death sating much of the world’s appetite for reports from the Middle East, the Syrian regime has used what is essentially a media blackout to move against the opposition. As the London-based pan-Arab daily Al Hayat reports:

One of the Senate's rising Republican stars is today backing calls for the Obama administration to withdraw the U.S. ambassador to Syria. "Clearly, we should be on the side of the Syrian people longing for freedom and challenging the regime's corrupt and repressive rule," writes Senator Marco Rubio.

Via Tom Gross: Here's gruesome (and extremely graphic) video from the massacre in Syria:

A Wall Street Journal editorial today makes the very valuable point that Syria is an enemy of the U.S. Given its role as a transit point for foreign fighters making their way into Iraq to kill American soldiers, its alliance with Hamas and Hezbollah, its alleged role in the assassination of Lebanese political officials and journalists, its support for terror in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories, America has no reason to help preserve that regime.

Article 7 of the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) defines "crimes against humanity" as "murder" and other "inhumane acts" committed "as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population."

In a move supposedly meant to placate protesters, Syria has abolished its 48-year-old ‘emergency’ rule law. But this isn’t a sign that the regime is totally giving in. (It seems instead that the regime just wants the world to think that it’s meeting the demands of the protesters, without actually reforming.) For the last few days and even longer so-called security forces have been firing upon peaceful protesters. In the city of Homs alone, 14 protesters were killed on Sunday (more have been killed since).