Hillary Clinton warned that the Assad regime may be about to turn its forces against Aleppo, Syria's largest city. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images
The US has accused Russia of risking a dramatic escalation of the conflict in Syria by shipping attack helicopters to the regime in Damascus.
Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, went on to allege that Moscow is lying about weapons deliveries to Syria by falsely claiming they are not being used to suppress the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.
"We have confronted the Russians about stopping their continued arms shipments to Syria," said Clinton. "They have, from time to time, said that we shouldn't worry, [that] everything they're shipping is unrelated to [Syria's] actions internally. That's patently untrue, and we are concerned about the latest information we have that there are attack helicopters on the way from Russia to Syria which will escalate the conflict quite dramatically."
A Pentagon spokesman, Captain John Kirby, said he could not confirm Clinton's assertion but added that the Syrian regime is already using attack helicopters against the opposition. However the state department said that its information is about new deliveries on their way to Syria.
Moscow has been a longstanding supplier of weapons to the Assad regime and Syria hosts Russia's only naval base in the Mediterranean.
Clinton, speaking to a forum in Washington, added that intelligence also indicated that the Assad regime may be about to turn its forces against Syria's largest city, Aleppo, close to the northwestern border with Turkey.
"There seems to be a massing of Syrian forces around Aleppo which we've got information about over the last 24 or 48 hours. That could very well be a red line for the Turks in terms of their strategic or national interests," she said.
Earlier this week, the US said it feared a "potential massacre" in al-Haffa, a besieged opposition stronghold near Aleppo, on the heels of mass killings in Qubeir and Houla which it has blamed on the Assad regime.
Clinton's warning came shortly after a senior UN peacekeeping official described the conflict in Syria as a civil war. It is the first time the UN has characterised the uprising that way.
The UN under-secretary general for peacekeeping operations, Hervé Ladsous, also said that attack helicopters are now in use alongside other large weapons.
"Clearly what is happening is that the government of Syria lost some large chunks of territories and several cities to the opposition and wants to retake control of these areas. So now we have confirmed reports not only of the use of tanks and artillery, but also attack helicopters," he told Reuters.
Clinton gave tepid support to the efforts of the former UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, to put together a group of countries to work out a roadmap for a transition of power in Syria. So far Annan's efforts to quell the conflict have foundered.
Russia is part of the group and Clinton was sceptical of Moscow's claim that it is not wedded to Assad as Syria's leader.
"Russia has increasingly said it was not defending Assad but it worried about what came after Assad, and that it would on political transition. But there are always a lot of caveats that they then interpose," she said.
"We have a timeline in mind to see if this effort of Kofi's can be successful. The outer limit of that is mid-July when the security council has to decide whether or not to extend the mission. Certainly if there is no discernible movement by then it will be very difficult to extend a mission that is increasingly dangerous for the observers on the ground."
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