Beirut: The United States chided Russia for sending missiles to the Syrian government as plans for a peace conference promoted by Washington and Moscow were hit by diplomatic rifts over its scope and purpose.
Sectarian bloodshed in neighbouring Iraq during Friday prayers, a hacking attack on a Western newspaper by sympathisers of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and defiant comments by a rebel commander filmed eating a slain soldier's flesh were all reminders of how the two-year-old civil war is metastising.
But the divisions among world powers that have prevented a coordinated resolution were also again on display, just 10 days after Russia and the United States agreed to bury differences and push for an urgent international conference to end the war.
The most senior US military officer, General Martin Dempsey, described Russia's recent delivery of anti-ship missiles to Assad as "ill-timed and very unfortunate" and risked prolonging a war which has already killed more than 80,000 Syrians and which the UN said had driven 1.5 million abroad....
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07:35 AM, May 18, 2013
