syria's longtime vice-president said the army cannot defeat the rebels fighting to topple the regime, the first admission by a top government official that a victory by President Bashar Assad is unlikely, the Associated Press reports.
In an interview with Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar published on Monday, Farouk al-Sharaa offered the unusually bleak public assessment of the civil war.
"All these opposition forces can only conclude the battle to topple the regime if their goal is to push the country into chaos a cycle of violence that has no end," al-Sharaa said in the interview. "I don't see that what the security forces and army units are doing will lead to a definitive victory."
Syrian rebels have made significant tactical advances in the past weeks, capturing air bases and military installations near Syria's largest city of Aleppo and in the capital Damascus. On Sunday, an Islamist faction took an infantry base in Aleppo, a second army base that was captured from the troops in the northern city in a week.
Also, Western nations are talking of stepped up aid to the rebels. And there were mixed messages last week from Assad's key international ally Russia, which tried to backpedal after a top diplomat said Assad is losing control of his country.
Al-Alkhbar reported that al-Sharaa was speaking in Damascus.
The Syrian uprising started in March 2011 as peaceful protests but quickly turned into a civil war after the government's brutal crackdown on dissent. Activists say more than 40,000 people have been killed as the civil war took increasing sectarian overtones.
Most rebels are members of Syria's Sunni Muslim majority while the Assad regime is dominated by Alawites, an offshoot group of Shiite Islam.
Sources close to the Syrian government say Sharaa had pushed for dialogue with the opposition and objected to the military response to an uprising that began peacefully, Reuters reports.
In Damascus, residents said on Monday the army had told people to evacuate the Palestinian district of Yarmouk, suggesting an all-out military offensive on the southern district was imminent.
The centre of the city, largely insulated from the violence for 21 months, is now full of army and vigilante checkpoints and shakes to the sound of regular shelling, residents say.
Queues for bread form at bakeries hours before dawn, as people seek out dwindling supplies, power cuts are increasing and fears are growing that Damascus could descend into chaos.
In a veiled criticism of the crackdown, Sharaa said there was a difference between the state's duty to provide security to its citizens, and "pursuing a security solution to the crisis."
He said even Assad could not be certain where events in Syria were leading, but that anyone who met him would hear that "this is a long struggle…and he does not hide his desire to settle matters militarily to reach a final solution."
