Recent days have seen the conflict-torn country uprising transformed from an insurgency in remote provinces into a battle for control of the two main cities, Aleppo and the capital, Damascus, where fighting erupted last week.

President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have launched massive counter assaults in the two cities. They appear to have beaten rebels back from neighborhoods in the capital and are turning towards Aleppo, a commercial hub in the north with the government deploying fighter jets and helicopters to beat back the rebels.

A spokesman for rebel Free Syrian Army said troops had been moved from the northwestern province of Idlib to fight in Aleppo.

“A large number of troops is being redeployed from Jabal al-Zawiyah to Aleppo, which is strategically more important for the regime than Idlib,” Colonel Abdel Jabbar al-Oqaidi, the FSA’s Military Council spokesman in the city told the AFP news agency on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the head of the Syrian embassy in Cyprus, Lamia Hariri, has defected to Qatar, Al Jazeera reported

Hariri becomes the second Syrian diplomat to leave her post, after Nawaf Fares, the ambassador to Iraq, defected earlier in July. He was also reported to be in Qatar.

Meanwhile, Cyprus is prepared for the worst-case scenario and is ready to evacuate up to 200,000 foreign nationals from Syria, Interior Minister Eleni Mavrou said yesterday.

The Syrian observatory for Human Rights reported that 160 Syrians have been killed on Tuesday. Government forces were also seeking to quell a mutiny in the city’s central prison, where eight people were killed, the Observatory said.

The rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) described the mutiny as “the first step towards the liberation” of Aleppo.

The offensive in Aleppo came as the FSA warned that President Bashar Assad’s regime had moved chemical weapons to airports near Syria’s borders.

Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdisi said Monday that such weapons stocks which are secured and directly monitored by the Syrian Armed Forces and would only be used in the case of external aggression on the country.

His comments sparked international condemnation.

“The world is watching, and they will be held accountable to the US and the international community should they make the tragic mistake of using those weapons, ” US president Barack Obama said.

Syrian state television downplayed Makdisi’s comments, saying on Tuesday that Syria would “never use chemical and biological weapons … and if such weapons exist, it is natural for them to be stored and secured.”