The time does not seem to be right for a settlement in Syria which the Syrian people will find acceptable. It seems that the hostilities in the country will not end in the immediate future. The situation might even get worse as the opposition has sent signals that it will never agree to let Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad stay in power. This is the situation as the Arab League meets on Sunday to receive the report of its committee which monitored the situation in Syria. There is no clue as to what the report will be, but it seems that the committee will provide no new ideas on how to resolve the Syrian conflict. Will Syria see more bloodshed in the coming days? Only Al-Assad can answer that question as the people around him do not seem to think that it is time to make sweeping changes in the troubled country. Pressure has mounted on the Arab League to seek the intervention of the United Nations to find ways to put an end to the bloody conflict. On Friday, thousands of people poured out of mosques in Syria after prayers calling for the ouster of the regime. They have also demanded that the regime release tens of thousands of people it has arrested since the protests erupted in March. Meanwhile, more defections from the Syrian military were reported last week. On Friday, dissident soldiers were reported to have killed a Syrian general after refusing his order to fire on civilians in the city of Hama, an opposition stronghold. It has become difficult to predict how the conflict will end considering that the support of Russia and China for the Al-Assad regime has complicated the situation. But if the defection continues, Al-Assad might end up paying a high price for his decision to hold on to power. The Arab League has done its best to find a win-win solution to put an end to the bloodshed, but Al-Assad seem to have chosen to fight it out to the end as did the late Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi. In the meantime, it is the innocent people of Syria who are suffering. __
