
Veteran war correspondent Patrick Cockburn of The Independent has been in Damascus for 10 days and says he is “struck by the fact that the situation in areas of Syria I have visited is wholly different from the picture given to the world both by foreign leaders and by the foreign media.”
Last week NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that Syrian government was on the brink of collapse, and there have been multiple reports that terrorists are closing in on the capital .
But the “best informed Syrians and foreign diplomats” told Cockburn that recent attacks on the capital have been “thrown back by a government counteroffensive.
Cockburn drove north 100 miles to Homs and found that all but the Old City of Syria’s third largest city is in government control. And the director of the military hospital covering much of southern Syria told him that the number of wounded arriving every day “indicates sniping, assassinations and small-scale ambushes, but not a fight to the finish.”
Prepared by :M.D