Panetta: Syria 'spinning out of control'

US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Wednesday the escalating crisis in Syria requires maximum pressure on the regime from the international community. "What is happening in Syria represents a real escalation in the fighting, and ... by ignoring appeals by the international community [for President Bashar Assad to step down], the violence there has only gotten worse and the loss of lives has only increased, which tells us that this is a situation that is rapidly spinning out of control," Panetta was quoted as saying in a Defense Department release. Syrian Defense Minister Dawoud Rajha and Deputy Dense Minister Gen. Assef Shawkat, a brother-in-law of Assad, were reportedly killed in a suicide bombing in Damascus Wednesday. Increased concern over Syria's stockpiles of chemical weapons adds urgency to the need for a peaceful transition of power, Panetta said during a joint news conference in Washington with British Secretary of State for Defense Philip Hammond. "We're all horrified by the level of loss of life, the atrocities against civilian populations being carried out in Syria," Hammond said. "There is a sense that the situation is deteriorating and is becoming more and more unpredictable." Panetta said the United States has made clear to the Assad regime "that they have a responsibility to safeguard their chemical sites and that we will hold them responsible should anything happen with regards to those sites. This is something that we and our allies are working very closely together [on] to ensure that they are fulfilling their responsibility to effectively secure these chemical sites," he said. "Despite the chaos in the country, these sites remain under tight control and that there is no proliferation of materials out of those sites, and certainly no use of them against the civilian population," Hammond added.