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. 
 
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 “Everybody was calculating that I would fall in a small amount of time,” Mr. Assad told the newspaper. “They all miscalculated.” 
 
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 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) ||||| Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister, has spoken about his country's tense relations with Damascus ahead of a special meeting of NATO allies to discuss the shooting down by Syria of a Turkish warplane last week. 
 
 Ambassadors to the military alliance will meet in Brussels on Tuesday at Ankara's request, in an incident which Turkey has branded an "act of aggression". 
 
 Condeming the government of Bashar al-Assad in his weekly address to parliament, Erdogan said: "The United Nations and Kofi Annan gave him [Assad] a plan, but he did not take it seriously. 
 
 "The Syrian regime has no more legitimacy, that is clear. Women, children, the elderly, have been killed relentlessly by this tyranny." 
 
 However, Erdogan also stated that: "Syria's borders can never prevent the brotherhood between Syria and Turkey." 
 
 Historic meeting 
 
 It is only the second time in NATO's 63-year history that it will convene under Article 4 of its charter, which provides for consultations when a member state feels its territorial integrity, political independence or security is under threat. 
 
 The only other time NATO has convened under Article 4 was in 2003 to discuss the Iraq war, again at the request of Turkey. 
 
 Turkey rejected assertions from Damascus that its forces had no option but to fire on the F-4 jet as it flew over Syrian waters close to the coast on Friday. 
 
 In a letter to the UN Security Council, Turkey condemned the "hostile act by the Syrian authorities against Turkey's national security", saying it posed "a serious threat to peace and security in the region". 
 
 The Security Council will also hold consultations on Syria at 14:00 GMT on Tuesday. 
 
 'Second attack' 
 
 Bulent Arinc, Turkey's deputy prime minister, said on Monday that Syrian troops had also opened fire on a rescue plane searching for the pilots who were shot down on Friday. 
 
 "One of our CASA planes took off with a rescue team. Unfortunately, shots from the ground targeted our plane," Arinc said during a news conference, 
 
 "Our foreign ministry and our military command notified Syrian authorities and this harrassment ceased immediately." 
 
 He added that Syria's actions "would not go unpunished". 
 
 The incident has further heightened tensions between Turkey and Syria already strained to near breaking point over the 16-month uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's rule. 
 
 European Union foreign ministers called on Monday for Turkey to show restraint, saying they would increase pressure on Assad. 
 
 "Military intervention in Syria is out of the question," Dutch Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal said. 
 
 
 
 'Act of defence' 
 
 Syria's description of the event on Monday as an act of self-defence, though tempered with commitment to a "neighbourly relationship", seemed likely to further anger Ankara. 
 
 "The plane disappeared and then reappeared in Syrian airspace, flying at 100 metres altitude and about 1-2kms from the Syrian coast," Jihad Makdissi, Syrian foreign ministry spokesman, told a Damascus news conference. 
 
 "We had to react immediately, even if the plane was Syrian we would have shot it down. 
 
 "The Syrian response was an act of defence of our sovereignty carried out by anti-aircraft machinegun which has a maximum range of 2.5 km." 
 
 Syria warned Turkey and NATO against retaliating. 
 
 "NATO is supposed to be there to strengthen countries," said Makdissi. "If their meeting is for hostile reasons [they should know that] Syrian land and waters are sacred." 
 
 The unarmed reconnaissance jet had briefly entered Syrian airspace as it approached land after patrolling the eastern Mediterranean, Arinc said, but was warned by Turkish radar controllers and immediately left and turned again out to sea. 
 
 It then made another approach to land when it was shot down 13 miles off the coast in international airspace, he said, out of the reach of Syria's anti-aircraft guns. 
 
 "According to the data in our hands, it points to our plane being shot by a laser or heat-guided surface-to-air missile," he said. 
 
 "The fact our plane was not given an early radar warning, suggests it was not a radar-guided missile." 
 
 By invoking Article 4 of the NATO charter, rather than Article 5 which calls for military action, Turkey has signalled it wants action against Syria short of armed intervention. 
 
 Deserters 
 
 The Anadolu agency said on Monday that the group, which included a general and two colonels, crossed into Turkey overnight and that they were being hosted at a refugee camp near the border. 
 
 The defection brought to 13 the number of generals seeking refuge in Turkey since the revolt against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime erupted 16 months ago. 
 
 Thousands of soldiers have abandoned the army, but most are low-level conscripts. The Free Syrian Army, the loosely-linked group of rebel forces, is made up largely of defectors. 
 
 Meanwhile, in shell-shattered districts of Homs, the heart of the uprising against Assad and the city where the latest defectors were reported to have come from, rebels battled troops as aid workerstried to evacuate civilians. 
 
 The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said it was again trying to arrange a safe evacuation of trapped civilians from Homs. 
 
 But anti-government activists reported heavy shelling on central districts, including Jouret al-Shiyah and al-Qarabis. 
 
 Video showed detonations and machine gun bursts from the skeletal remains of abandoned apartment blocks. 
 
 Amateur video obtained by the Reuters news agency reportedly showed rebel fighters in control of a Syrian military base in the northern town of Daret Ezzah in Aleppo province. Al Jazeera was not able independently verify the pictures. 
 
 A spokesman for the fighters said they were only able to capture the air defence base after heavy fighting and with the help of defectors. 
 
 The activist Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Assad's troops had carried out raids and arrests in areas still under army control. 
 
 Heavy fighting between government forces and rebel fighters was also reported in the opposition centres of Idlib, Deir Al Zor and Deraa, the birthplace of the uprising. 
 
 The UN has said more than 10,000 people have been killed by government forces, while Syria has said at least 2,600 members of the military and security forces have been killed by what it calls foreign-backed "terrorists".
– 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.