Clinton accuses Russia of selling attack helicopters to Syria The Obama administration on Tuesday accused Russia of planning to supply new attack helicopters to Syria, a move that U.S. officials warned would dramatically escalate the crisis and belie Moscow's claim that it is not supporting President Bashar al-Assad's violent crackdown on dissent. Russia, a longtime ally and supplier of arms to the Syrian government, has acknowledged that it is continuing to honor contractual military shipments to Damascus, while stressing that it is not providing weapons that could be used against opponents of the government. But in an unusually direct rebuke, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday dismissed such assertions as "patently untrue." A glimpse into how people (and monkeys) around the world are cooling off this summer.. Will Englund In the home of the Russian Orthodox patriarch, an attempt to tackle corruption is gunned down with reformer mayor. "We have confronted the Russians about stopping their continued arms shipments to Syria," she said. The shipments, while legal, set the stage for a new diplomatic confrontation with the Obama administration at a time when Washington and its European and Arab allies have been struggling to persuade Russia to step up diplomatic pressure on Assad to bring an end to nearly 15 months of bloodshed. The shipments - which U.S. officials said were thought to be en route to Damascus - would also arrive at a time when the Syrian government is escalating its use of force against opposition strongholds, including the use of existing reserves of Russian-built attack helicopters. Underlining growing concerns, the United Nations" top peacekeeping official on Tuesday acknowledged for the first time that Syria is in the midst of a civil war. "Clearly what is happening is that the government of Syria lost some large chunks of territory, several cities, to the opposition and wants to retake control," the official, Herve Ladsous, told the Reuters and Agence France-Presse news agencies in an interview. Asked whether the conflict could be characterized as a "full-scale civil war," he answered: "Yes, I think we can say that." U.S. and U.N. officials have said that the violence in Syria is increasingly taking on the specter of a sectarian conflict, with government-backed Shiite militiamen from the minority Alawite sect battling with anti-government forces drawn from the Sunni majority. The violence is also increasingly threatening the 300 or so U.N. monitors in the country. On Tuesday, a team of observers trying to reach a northern town engulfed by fighting for the past week were turned back by angry crowds throwing stones and metal rods. Three of their vehicles were fired upon, but the United Nations said later in a statement that the source of the gunfire was unclear. Observers had been trying to reach the town, Haffeh, since Thursday, three days after government troops launched a major offensive aimed at driving out rebels from the Free Syrian Army. The town lies on the edge of the heartland of Assad's Alawite sect and is surrounded by Alawite villages, raising fears that Haffeh's residents could be targeted in a massacre if government troops succeed in crushing the rebels. Dozens of people are dying daily in attacks on protesters and in the shelling of towns and cities across Syria as the government battles to assert its control over the many areas that have fallen under the sway of the rebels.