What's Next for Syria?

As expected, Kofi Annan’s six-point plan for ending the violence in Syria has failed. Bashar al-Assad’s regime took the opportunity of an internationally certified timetable to escalate attacks against civilian areas in Syria, bringing the death toll for the last ten days to as high as 1,000, according to local activists. The northern town of Taftanaz in the north-Syrian province of Idlib was heavily damaged last week with artillery and helicopter gunships, which also fired on the suburbs of Syria’s main industrial city, Aleppo. Fleeing residents in the north have spoken of mass graves. Human Rights Watch released a report documenting 85 cases of the regime engaging in extrajudicial killings of unarmed civilians, many of whom were killed in March just as the ink was drying on Annan’s six points. True, after the 6 a.m. deadline for a cease-fire passed on April 12, the regime stopped its artillery shelling of most restive areas. However, talk of the cease-fire “holding” seems highly misleading, as 26 people were still killed by regime forces Thursday, according to the London-based Syrian Network for Human Rights. These includetwo infants who were shot by snipers.