By Mick Krever, CNN

“If you really want to end the bloodshed over [in Syria], I guess there’s two ways,” Former American General Wesley Clark told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday.

“You could let him finish the job,” Clark said, creating millions more refugees, expanding the violence and sectarian warfare, and giving Iran more power, as he put it. “It’s a very short-sighted way to think you can stabilize the situation.”

The other way, Clark contended, is to “put the pressure on Assad.”

Clark has some experience forcing a strongman’s hand.

FULL POST

By Mick Krever, CNN

General Salim Idriss, chief of staff of the opposition Free Syria Army, hopes that promised American weapons will be enough to bolster his troops.

“It is very important now to strengthen the moderate FSA fighters,” Idriss told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday. FULL POST

Reporter Ali Hashem just left the flashpoint city of Qusayr and spoke to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour as he reached the Syria-Lebanon border.

“It's just a city of rubble,” Hashem told Amanpour. “I wasn't able even to find one place that wasn't destroyed.”

There are no opposition fighters left in Qusayr, according to Hashem.

“There is nothing that reflects that they are any kind of pockets of resistance in the city anymore,” he said. “There are no civilians in this city anymore.”

In the video above you can see Amanpour interview with Hashem and his full account of the devastation left in Qusayr.

Photojournalist Robert King has been covering the Syrian war and has even spent time in the flash-point city of Qusayr over the past year.

Most recently he's been in Aleppo, where he met with opposition snipers who've made it their job to try to pick off and kill Assad's forces.

"Residents of Aleppo [are] still cautiously carrying on their day-to-day lives the best they can in the midst of a war zone," King says. "But now that the battle has largely transformed into one fought by the snipers, the simple act of crossing the road can be deadly."

By Samuel Burke, CNN

Eighty thousand people have been killed in Syria’s grinding civil war; so too have scores of journalists, who have given their lives covering the carnage.

Among them, the legendary reporter Marie Colvin, who was killed telling us about the terrible plight of civilians during the siege of Homs last year.

Matching the pictures to Colvin's words was British photographer Paul Conroy. He was with her when she was killed, just hours after she called in one of her final reports to CNN.  FULL POST

CNN's Christiane Amanpour speaks to a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who has made it his mission to tell the story of Syria's internally displaced.

CNN's Christiane Amanpour looks at how human rights activists are documenting war crimes in Syria.