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鈥� A daily summary of global reports on security issues.

As the United Nations sounds the alarm about Syrian government forces using new tactics, the US is warning of impending massacres in several towns across the country.

The United Nations said that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime has in the last week begun using helicopter gunships to fire on towns from the air. It also voiced concerns about reports of government troops .

The New York Times reports that the turn to helicopters might be partially driven by the loss of tanks and other ground vehicles in clashes with rebel forces, who have been making territorial gains, seemingly driven by an influx of more sophisticated weapons and funds.聽According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,聽.

Syrian Army defections are also on the rise. The Los Angeles Times reports, citing an opposition member, writes that .

In a US State Department briefing yesterday, spokeswoman Victoria Nuland described the helicopter development as a "very serious escalation." She also said that聽UN monitors report that the regime 聽in Al Haffa, while bombardments of Deir al-Zour, Deraa, Homs, Hama, and the Damascus suburbs continue. The regime has blocked UN monitors from those areas, making it difficult to confirm who is behind the violence in those towns (previous massacres have been blamed on unofficial pro-government militia), she said.

The UN envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, has expressed concern that there are large numbers of civilians trapped in those areas. If a massacre does happen in any of those spots, , according to the Associated Press.

While Syrian commanders may be able to act with impunity now, given the relatively small number of UN monitors on the ground, Ms. Nuland warned that they should heed the lessons of Bosnia. "The international community can and does learn what units were responsible for crimes against humanity, and you will be held responsible for your actions," she said.

Nuland made clear at that the US has no plan for stopping the massacres, or intervening in Syria, despite its increasingly strident warnings or the threat of mass killing of civilians. That contrasts sharply with Libya, where the threat of massive civilian casualties prompted international intervention.

Nuland defended the US position by saying that foreign military intervention "may actually cause a greater explosion of violence," and that the best course of action was to bring to light the abuses of the Syrian regime. But she faced strong pushback from reporters who cited international regret after the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

QUESTION:聽I mean, I thought after Rwanda, it was 鈥淣ever again,鈥� ... I just don鈥檛 understand why it is that if you鈥檙e 鈥� if you know or have evidence that there鈥檚 about to be a massacre of potentially thousands of people, no one鈥檚 going to do anything to stop it except for ... to tell Assad not to do it.

MS. NULAND:聽Again, this is why we have the monitors there, so that they can play the role that they are --

QUESTION:聽See these people be killed?

MS. NULAND:聽-- designed to play to be able to get in there and stop this kind of thing from happening. But in the context of a regime that is refusing to meet its own commitments, that is refusing to cooperate even on the most basic level with what it has agreed to, we are, at this point, doing what we can to make it clear that this is an absolutely brutal, continued assault on individuals.

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QUESTION:聽But you鈥檝e just gotten up and said that there鈥檚 going to be a massacre someplace and no one鈥檚 going to do anything to stop it except for flail their arms and go running to Assad to tell him not to it when he hasn鈥檛 listened or done anything that you鈥檝e told him or asked him to do for the last 15 months.

MS. NULAND:聽Do you have a specific proposal in mind?

Pressed further about US opposition to intervention, Nuland reiterated concerns about fueling the war in Syria.

"The concern has been that putting foreign military forces into this situation, which is on the verge, as everybody has said, of becoming a civil war, will turn it into a proxy war. 鈥β燭here is a concern, obviously, that you could have some states supporting one side, other states supporting another side. Our goal here is to stop the violence, not to increase the military activity inside Syria. The goal is to stop the violence," she said.