Turkey Warns Syria to Stop Crackdown

By ANTHONY SHADID
NYT

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Turkey’s foreign minister demanded Monday that the Syrian government end its crackdown on a five-month-old uprising “immediately and unconditionally,” warning that unspecified steps would be taken otherwise.

The comments by the minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, who visited the Syrian capital, Damascus, just last week, were the latest addition to a semantic exercise in diplomatic ambiguity, as the United States, European countries, Turkey and Syria’s Arab neighbors have sought to condemn the violence while leaving President Bashar al-Assad the chance to begin reform.

So far, the Syrian government has ignored the condemnations. Just days after the visit by Mr. Davutoglu, who by his own count has visited Syria more than 60 times, the government sent its military and security forces into the port of Latakia, the third city to fall target to a withering crackdown that activists say has killed 260 people this month.

Since the beginning of August, government forces have retaken control of Hama, in central Syria, and Deir al-Zour, in the east, both of which witnessed demonstrations numbering in the hundreds of thousands earlier this summer.

(More here.)