European leaders revisit British plan for direct assistance as rebels remain split over leader

Israel launched an airstrike into Syria, apparently targeting a suspected weapons site, US officials said.

President Barack Obama said he doesn't foresee any circumstance requiring the US to send ground troops into Syria, even as Washington pursues more evidence about the regime's purported use of chemical weapons.

The bodies of the Syrian boys and young men in jeans and casual shirts were strewn along a blood-stained pavement, dying apparently where they fell. Weeping women moved among the dead, and one of them screamed, "Where are you, people of the village?"

The United States is reconsidering its opposition to arming Syrian rebel groups, US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel said yesterday, as reports emerged of a fresh massacre of up to 50 women and children by government forces in Syria.

A Chinese New Zealander who went to Syria to join rebel fighters has been reunited with his wife in the US.

Anxious to keep Syria's civil war from spiralling into even worse problems, President Barack Obama said yesterday he worried about the country becoming a haven for extremists when - not if - President Bashar Assad was ousted from power.

The United States will give direct assistance to those fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for the first time in what was touted as a significant policy shift.

A massive car bomb has exploded near Syria's ruling party headquarters in Damascus, killing at least 53 people and scattering mangled bodies amid the smoldering wreckage.

The United Nations yesterday said it was struggling to cope with an "unrelenting flow" of families fleeing Syria, as the number of documented refugees topped 700,000.

The most frustrating part of covering the Lebanese civil war (1975-90) was that after a while there was nothing left to say. Syria is starting to feel just the same.

A baby boy joined the ranks of Syria's tens of thousands of war wounded when a missile fired by Bashar Assad's air force slammed into his family home and shrapnel pierced his skull.

A New Zealand Army officer serving as a United Nations military observer was detained and released by armed men in Syria on Monday.

Editorial: The situation in Syria is "bad and getting worse", according to a joint statement released yesterday after talks in Geneva between the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the Arab League.

A New Zealand man has joined rebels on the frontline of the fight against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and says he is ready to die for the cause.

Syria's neighbours are increasingly being drawn into the country's civil war in a variety of ways, whether militarily or due to an exodus of Syrians fleeing the fighting at home.