The Syrian military has said it will "cut every evil hand that targets Syrian blood", and warned that recent attacks on elite security forces marked a dangerous escalation in the country's eight-month-old crisis. Six elite pilots and four technical officers were killed in an ambush on Thursday in Homs, the military said, in an unusually high-level strike.
"Our armed forces [will] continue to carry out our mission to defend the country's security, and we will hit back against anything that threatens us," the statement said. It is not clear who was behind the attacks. A largely peaceful uprising against the president, Bashar al-Assad, began in March and has become more violent as defectors from the army turn their guns on security forces and some protesters take up arms to protect themselves.