Syrian opposition wants to arm civilians

Syria's most prominent opposition bloc, the Syrian National Council, has said it wants to arm civilians and defected soldiers fighting the Syrian army. Most nations who oppose President Bashar Al-Assad's crackdown on the pro-democracy protest however fear intervening militarily. France's foreign minister, Alain Juppe, said Thursday that arming the opposition risked pushing the country into a catastrophic civil war. "The Syrian people are deeply divided, and if we give arms to a certain faction of the Syrian opposition, we would make a civil war among Christians, Alawites, Sunnis and Shias,'' Juppe said on France-Culture radio. The government's military offensive has forced thousands of Syrians to flee the country, most of them to neighbouring Lebanon and Turkey. The UN's refugee agency says that about 230,000 Syrians have fled their homes, of whom almost 30,000 have left the country. Turkey is hosting more than 14,000 Syrian refugees, including seven defected generals, a foreign ministry spokesman said on Thursday. Roughly 1,000 Syrians had arrived in the past 24 hours, he said. The UN estimates that over 8,000 people have died in the uprising that began a year ago.