Assad dismisses calls to step down

Syrian President Bashar Assad scoffed at calls by the United States and other countries for him to step down, calling their statements worthless. "Such remarks should not be made about a president who was chosen by the Syrian people and who was not put in office by the West, a president who was not made in the United States," Assad said Sunday night on Syrian state television. The Syrian state news agency SANA published Assad's speech on its Web site Monday. Assad, despite the deaths of hundreds of civilians in anti-government protests, declared the situation in the country is better than ever. He said rebels attacked army, police and security posts and also were responsible for "assassination acts and ambushing military and civilian vehicles." "We are capable of dealing with all that and we have made security achievements recently, which have not been announced yet in order to ensure their success," he said. "There is nothing called the security solution or the security alternative… there is only the political solution … ." Assad appeared unfazed by calls in the West for military intervention. "Any military action against Syria will have much more implications than they can bear for many reasons," he said. A U.N. team inspected a Syrian city for atrocities Monday hours after the regime scrubbed blood off the streets to hide evidence, diplomats and residents said. The U.N. humanitarian fact-finding team arrived at the Mediterranean port city of Latakia following a large-scale security-force city cleanup, especially of the Ramel Palestinian refugee camp, which was heavily targeted by Syrian troops, the diplomats and residents said. "They are literally sweeping glass and stones up, and scrubbing blood off the streets," the Los Angeles Times and Britain's Daily Telegraph quoted a Western diplomat as saying. The cleanup sought to cover up evidence of atrocities by security forces and soldiers backed by hundreds of tanks, Mohamed Fizo, a member of the activist Local Coordination Committees, which tracks the uprising and organizes some protests, said. Residents of two other restive cities the U.N. team planned to visit -- Homs, Syria's third-largest city, and Hama, the fourth-largest -- said similar cleanups took place there Sunday to cover up evidence of the Assad regime's brutal attempts to crush the uprising. A Homs resident told The Guardian that even as the cleanup took place, snipers were on buildings, shooting was heard inside a hospital and tanks were poised outside the city. "The situation is terrible, even after Assad says there aren't tanks and after [U.S. President Barack] Obama tells him to step aside," the resident said. The U.N. team also planned to visit the southwestern city of Daraa, near Jordan, the uprising's starting point, and Jisr al-Shugur, under a security-force siege in June and the subject of bloody crackdowns since.