Speaking to reporters in Damascus, Maj. Gen. Robert Mood of Norway, who commands the United Nations monitors, told reporters on Thursday that “the escalation of violence, allow me to say to an unprecedented level, obstructed our ability to observe, verify, report as well as assist in local dialogue.” 
 
 It would be impossible to revive his mission without a cease-fire, General Mood said. But, in the third installment of an interview which Turkey’s Cumhuriyet newspaper has published this week, Mr. Assad showed no readiness to heed either cease-fire calls or a plan proposed by Kofi Annan, the special envoy on Syria, for a transitional government. 
 
 The series of excerpts from the interview, conducted last Sunday in Damascus, has provided a rare insight into Mr. Assad’s thinking both on his plight at home and on regional relationships, strained by the action of Syrian gunners who shot down a Turkish warplane over the Mediterranean last month. 
 
 Turkey's military said in a statement on Thursday that the bodies of the two pilots, found a day earlier at the bottom of the eastern Mediterranean 8.6 nautical miles from Syria's shoreline, were recovered and sent to the Turkish town of Malatya, home to their air base, where the doomed F-4 Phantom took off on its final mission June 22. A memorial service was planned there for Friday. 
 
 The military statement also included photographs of what were described as 31 pieces of their downed plane recovered in the search, which was aided by Robert Ballard, the American undersea explorer and his vessel, the Nautilus, perhaps best known for discovering the remains of the Titanic in 1985. 
 
 Turkey says Syria brought down the plane over international waters, but Syria says it was in Syrian airspace at the time. 
 
 In discussing the incident with Cumhuriyet, Mr. Assad also ranged over the broader issue of his survival through 16 months of uprising, his determination to put down the revolt and his insistence that he has the support of the bulk of Syrians. 
 
 Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. 
 
 “Everybody was calculating that I would fall in a small amount of time,” Mr. Assad told the newspaper. “They all miscalculated.” 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 His country, he said, was under attack by Islamist militants sponsored by Arab adversaries and faced the hostility of both the West and neighboring Turkey, a NATO member with whom Mr. Assad once had friendly relations. 
 
 “The big game targeting Syria is much bigger than we expected,” Mr. Assad said. “The aim is to break up Syria or trigger a civil war. The fight against terrorism will continue decisively in the face of this. And we will defeat terror.” 
 
 “The overwhelming majority of the people think like me on this subject,” he said. 
 
 Mr. Assad referred to the shah of Iran, who was overthrown by the Islamic revolution in 1979, but said his own position was different because he has popular support among Syrians. 
 
 The shah, he said, “led the most important country in the region, he had a powerful army and was supported by the whole world. So was he able to stand up against the people? No.” 
 
 “If I had been in the same situation, that is if I didn’t have the people behind me, I could not have resisted. I would have been overthrown. How come I’m still standing?,” Mr. Assad was quoted as saying. 
 
 In the first part of the interview published on Tuesday, Mr. Assad seemed to be seeking to repair regional tensions, saying he regretted the downing of the Turkish plane but repeating Syria’s version of what had happened. 
 
 But he sounded far less conciliatory in the second part on Wednesday, bitterly criticizing Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who is now a leading voice in the international calls for Mr. Assad to resign. 
 
 Asked if he had burned his bridges with Mr. Erdogan, Mr. Assad replied, “Yes, almost.” 
 
 Mr. Assad’s contention that outside terrorist agitators are responsible for the violence in Syria was partly corroborated on Tuesday by the claims of the Al Nusra Front, a shadowy group that aligns itself with Al Qaeda, that it was responsible for a number of attacks on pro-government targets in Syria last month, including the killing of seven people at a television station on June 27. 
 
 In Internet chatter reported by the SITE jihadist monitoring group in Washington, Al Nusra said its fighters had attacked the station to make the Assad government “taste from the cup of torture.” ||||| BAGHDAD Iraq has "solid information" that al Qaeda militants are crossing from Iraq into Syria to carry out attacks and has sent reinforcements to the border, the foreign minister said on Thursday. 
 
 Hoshiyar Zebari said al Qaeda "operational officers" appeared to be moving through old smuggling routes carrying weapons. 
 
 "We have solid information and intelligence that members of al Qaeda terrorist networks have gone in the other direction, to Syria, to help, to liaise, to carry out terrorist attacks," he told a news conference in Baghdad. 
 
 Syria says that a 16-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad is not a popular revolt but a "terrorist" conspiracy funded and directed from abroad, not least by the wealthy Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. 
 
 Assad, who belongs to the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam, also says much of the violence in Syria bears the fingerprints of al Qaeda and its Sunni Muslim Islamist ideology. 
 
 Iraq has reinforced security along its 680 km (422 miles) desert border with Syria, making it the most heavily guarded Iraqi frontier, Zebari said. 
 
 "Most of the suicide bombers, foreign fighters, elements of al Qaeda used to slip into Iraq from Syria. So they know the routes and the connections. It does not mean that these operations are done regularly in an organized way," he said. 
 
 "This is our main concern - about the spillover, about extremist groups taking root in neighboring countries, to have a base," Zebari added. 
 
 Al Qaeda operatives were communicating through underground networks of militants, he said. 
 
 U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said he believes al Qaeda was responsible for two suicide car bombs in Damascus in May that killed at least 55 people. 
 
 Iraq's al Qaeda wing has claimed some of the recent bombings against Shi'ites in Iraq as it tries to stoke tensions following the withdrawal of U.S. troops in December. 
 
 (Editing by Alessandra Rizzo) ||||| ISTANBUL Turkey scrambled fighters and briefly detained a Syrian passenger plane on Wednesday, suspecting it of carrying military equipment from Moscow, while Turkey's military chief warned of a more forceful response if shelling continued to spill over the border. 
 
 Military jets escorted the Damascus-bound Airbus A-320, carrying around 30 passengers, into the airport in Ankara hours after Turkey's chief of staff said his troops would respond with greater force if bombardments from Syria kept hitting Turkish territory, Turkish state-run television said. 
 
 "We are determined to control weapons transfers to a regime that carries out such brutal massacres against civilians. It is unacceptable that such a transfer is made using our airspace," Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said. 
 
 "Today we received information this plane was carrying cargo of a nature that could not possibly be in compliance with the rules of civil aviation," he said in Athens during an official visit, in comments broadcast live on Turkish television. 
 
 The Turkish authorities had seized some of the cargo, Davutoglu told reporters later in televised remarks. He said Turkey was within its rights to investigate planes suspected of carrying military materials but declined to say what was in the seized cargo. 
 
 The plane and its passengers later left the Turkish capital. 
 
 Turkey would continue to investigate Syrian civilian aircraft using its airspace, Davutoglu said. 
 
 He also said Syrian airspace was no longer safe and that Turkish passenger planes should not fly there. A Reuters witness at the border saw at least one passenger plane turn around as it approached Syria and head back into Turkey on Wednesday. 
 
 More than 18 months into the battle for Syria, an estimated 30,000 people are dead and the country is disintegrating. 
 
 Rebels are outgunned by the government but can still strike at will, and President Bashar al-Assad has assumed personal command of his forces, convinced he can prevail militarily. 
 
 Meanwhile, the conflict threatens to spill over Syria's borders and ignite a wider Middle Eastern war, drawing in neighboring states and pitting Sunni Muslim states against Syria's rulers and their allies including Shi'ite Iran. 
 
 Russia, from where the Syrian plane took off, is one of Assad's closest remaining allies and has blocked tougher U.N. resolutions against Damascus. 
 
 "Once a week a Syrian Airlines airplane flies from Moscow bound for Damascus," Interfax reported Vnukovo Airport spokeswoman Yelena Krylova as saying. "The plane took off normally, there were no incidents." 
 
 Interfax cited her as saying 25 people were on board the chartered plane and it left 20 minutes after its scheduled afternoon departure time. 
 
 Turkey's armed forces have bolstered their presence along the 900-km (560-mile) border and have been firing back over the past week in response to gunfire and shelling coming across from northern Syria, where Assad's forces have been battling rebels who control swathes of territory. 
 
 Several mortar bombs landed outside the Syrian border town of Azmarin and heavy machinegun fire could be heard as clashes between the Syrian army and rebels intensified. 
 
 Plumes of smoke rose into the sky and cries of "God is Greatest" rang out between the bursts of gunfire. 
 
 "We responded but if it continues we will respond with greater force," state television TRT quoted Turkey's Chief of Staff, General Necdet Ozel, as saying. 
 
 NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Tuesday the military alliance had plans in place to defend Turkey. 
 
 SANCTUARY 
 
 It is not clear whether the shells that have hit Turkish territory were aimed to strike there or were due to Syrian troops overshooting as they attacked rebel positions. Turkey has provided sanctuary for rebel officers and fighters. 
 
 General Ozel visited the family of five civilians killed last week by a Syrian mortar strike in the town of Akcakale, before flying to a military base further east. 
 
 Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, once an ally of Assad but now one of his harshest critics, said in Istanbul that Turkey's objective was to secure peace and stability in the region, not to interfere in Syria's domestic politics. 
 
 "We warned Assad. We reminded him of the reforms he should introduce ... unfortunately the Assad regime didn't keep its promises to the world and its own people," Erdogan said. 
 
 "Nobody should or can expect us to remain silent in the face of the violent oppression of people's rightful demands." 
 
 The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 70 people had been killed across Syria on Wednesday, including six rebels in the strategic town of Maarat al-Nuaman, on the north-south highway linking Aleppo to the capital Damascus. 
 
 Activists and rebels had said on Tuesday that the insurgents seized control of the town after a 48-hour battle but clashes continued in and around Maarat al-Nuaman on Wednesday. 
 
 SYRIANS FLEE ACROSS RIVER 
 
 Scores of Syrian civilians, many of them women with screaming children clinging to their necks, crossed a narrow river marking the border with Turkey as they fled the fighting in Azmarin and surrounding villages. 
 
 Residents from the Turkish village of Hacipasa helped pull them across in small metal boats. 
 
 "The firing started getting intense last night. Some people have been killed, some are lying wounded on the road," said a 55-year-old woman, Mune, who fled Azmarin and sat with several adults and about 20 children outside a house in Hacipasa. 
 
 "People want to escape but they can't. Many have settled in a field outside the town and are trying to come," she said, describing how she had helped ferry the children over another point in the river in a metal bowl used for wheat. 
 
 Doctors and volunteers set up makeshift first-aid points on both sides of the frontier. A Turkish ambulance and several minibuses and cars waited to take the more seriously wounded to the main city of Antakya or district hospitals. 
 
 "Don't take me across, take me back. I want to return and fight," said one man being carried on a stretcher, his T-shirt stained with blood. 
 
 A sharp rise in casualties in Syria in the past month indicates the growing intensity of the conflict, which spiraled from peaceful protests against Assad's rule in March 2011 into a full-scale civil war. 
 
 The Syrian government said on Wednesday that an appeal by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for a ceasefire was only acceptable if the rebel forces agreed to abide by it too. 
 
 "We requested the Secretary General to send delegates to the relevant countries, specifically Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, because those are the countries that finance, shelter, train and arm these armed groups, so that they can show their commitment to stopping these acts," a Foreign Ministry spokesman said. 
 
 The Swiss government on Wednesday toughened up rules to prevent weapons sold to one country being re-exported to areas of conflict after Swiss-made grenades turned up in Syria. 
 
 The move comes after an investigation found that the United Arab Emirates had given Jordan grenades sold by Switzerland in 2003 and 2004 which later were channeled to Syria. 
 
 U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Wednesday U.S. military planners were in Jordan to help the government grapple with Syrian refugees, bolster its military capabilities and prepare for any trouble with Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Seda Sezer in Istanbul, Gulsen Solaker in Ankara, Jonathon Burch in Hatay and Thomas Grove in Moscow; Writing by Andrew Roche; Editing by Michael Roddy)
– Syria is being flooded by al-Qaeda fighters crossing in from Iraq "to help, to liaise, to carry out terrorist attacks," according to "solid information and intelligence" obtained by the Iraqi government, reports Reuters. Further, Iraq's foreign minister today noted that the warning about the al-Qaeda flow is nothing new—Baghdad has apparently been telling Damascus about it for years, reports the AP. In other Syria news: Don't expect to see UN monitors back in Syria anytime soon. The New York Times reports that the officer in charge of the observers today explained that the violence had hit "unprecedented levels," and that until there is an actual cease-fire, it will be impossible to restart the mission, which was put on ice in mid-June. Following yesterday's news that the bodies of the pilots flying the Turkish jet downed by Syria had been found: Al-Jazeera adds that the US deep-sea exploration vessel that found them was the E/V Nautilus, owned by explorer Robert Ballard ... who discovered the Titanic's wreck in 1985. And WikiLeaks is once again making waves for something other than Julian Assange's legal mess: It today started releasing some 2.4 million Syrian emails.