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.”

If confirmed this would be the first Syrian ambassador to defect from the regime of Bashar al-Assad since the violence began in mid-march last year. Until now, only an army general, and defense official have defected.

Fares’ defection comes five days after Manaf Tlass, son of former Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass, and once a close friend of Syrian President Bashar Assad defected and took refuge in Paris.

According to remarks by the Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh on the news of the defection he said he was not aware about this development, according to Al Jazeera.

Nawaf Faras has served as the Syrian ambassador in Baghdad since September 2008.

Earlier, in a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Assad’s top opponent and new Kurdish leader of the Syrian National Council, Abdel Basset Sayda said that “the events in Syria are not disagreements between the opposition and the government but a revolution,” comparing the events in his country to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Sayda sought to persuade Russia to stop supporting for the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, saying there was no hope of a political transition.

Russia is the main ally of Assad and has fiercely resisted international action against the Damascus government by rejecting two rounds of UN Security Council sanctions as well as calls for the use of armed force.

On Tuesday, Russia dispatched a destroyer-class warship to Syria, a source in the Russian Navy told Reuters, and another military source was quoted as saying four more Russian ships were en route to the violence-torn country.