Elsewhere in the country, a new offensive has been launched in the far southern city of Daraa. The opposition termed it an “onslaught” on the scale of Homs, though indications are that it is targeting growing defections to the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

The latest upswing in violence comes as Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan heads to Russia to speak with President Dmitry Medvedev. Erdogan has been calling for international intervention against Syria, while Russia has been opposing such intervention and trying to negotiate a settlement.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed the reports of massive civilian casualties in Homs, saying there was no evidence of civilians being targeted by artillery fire. Since the Arab League has withdrawn all monitors from the nation, such evidence would indeed prove elusive.

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“We are not bound by EU or US decisions, so we will only block Iranian oil imports if the UN decides to impose such sanctions on Iran,” he said. Turkey receives approximately half of its oil imports from Iran.

The U.S. was successful in pressuring EU countries to inflict more economic pain on themselves by cutting off one of their main oil suppliers, Iran. Now Iran has threatened to cut off all oil exports to the EU, preempting the embargo that was set for six months in the future.

Turkey is an ally of Iran’s, having brokered a deal on a nuclear fuel swap with Iran that satisfied the Obama administration’s demands and was widely considered a diplomatic triumph. Until, that is, that the U.S. rejected it and chose a posture of sanctions and aggression instead. Turkish diplomats still hope to mend ties with Iran and the West.

Internecine strife arose recently because the current FSA leader, Col. Riyad al-Assad, is no longer the highest ranked military defector since Gen. Mustafa al-Sheik joined the organization two weeks ago. Gen. Sheik is calling for the creation of a “military council,” which he would head, to command the FSA. Col. Assad insists he will remain in command since he defected first.

While the Turkish Foreign Ministry’s existing support for Col. Assad would normally give him considerable leverage, the continued influx of defectors from Syria means that some are joining the Assad faction, while a number of them are joining Sheik. Beyond that, Turkey has closed Col. Assad’s bank account, suggesting they might be switching to the new, higher-ranking defector.

A protracted leadership battle could mean the establishment of two separate groups, both operating under the belief that they will eventually conquer and rule Syria. Though clearly much of the final decision will be based on which of the two gains NATO’s support, the prospect of mass defections from a force already made up of defectors could further complicate an already unwieldy situation.

The suspects were grabbed in dawn raids across the country that aimed at the offices and homes of members of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), the main party in parliament representing Turkey’s Kurdish minority. But the BDP accused the government of trying to crowd out Kurdish representation ahead of planned constitutional reforms.

These tactics come with renewed support from the U.S. government, after Turkey asked for stepped-up assistance in counterterrorism back in September. That request was followed up with a deal secured by the Obama administration to supply the Turkish government with unmanned aerial vehicles, or Predator drones.

Those drones may have been used in Turkish airstrikes in early January that killed 35 Kurdish civilians near the border with Iraq. Turkey has also been accused in recent months of using chemical warfare in its fight with the separatist militants in the Kurdistan’s Worker’s Party  (PKK), which would be a serious crime under international law.

According to Amnesty International, “anti-terrorism legislation [in Turkey] is particularly problematic in that it is used to bring a large number of prosecutions targeting legitimate free expression regarding the Kurdish issue in Turkey.” Amnesty’s Howard Eissenstat recently wrote that ”some 12,000 Turkish citizens have been arrested under terror statutes“ for what appear to be political crimes, “with nearly four thousand arrested in just the last thirty months.” Many of these arrests are of leading public intellectuals in Turkey, like Ragip Zarakolu, a human rights activist. He was arrested along with 43 other people on November 1 in Istanbul, apparently for making a political speech at a legal pro-Kurdish party event.

U.S. partnership with Turkey against the southeastern Kurds is not unprecedented. The two states cooperated in major atrocities against southeastern Turkey in the 1990′s, leaving the countryside devastated with tens of thousands killed and millions displaced.

A new report says that the surveillance has been going on for awhile, and that Turkey has caught Israeli drones flying over its southern provinces. They also say that PKK leaders have repeatedly visited Israel in recent months, presumably to get access to the data.

The consequences of the move are so far unclear, but Turkish officials believe that the data was used to help the PKK set up training camps in Northern Syria in places where the presence of border patrol isn’t as strong.

The revelation could have serious consequences for Israel’s already strained relationship with Turkey. So far Israeli officials haven’t addressed the latest claims, but in September Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman urged Israel to begin arming the PKK to “punish” Turkey for perceived diplomatic slights.

During the debate, Gov. Perry lashed Turkey, insisting that it was ruled by “Islamic terrorists” and calling for the US to withdraw all aid from them. He also added that it is “time for us to have a conversation about whether or not they belong to be in NATO.”

Perry went on to insist that the move would “send a powerful message to countries like Iran and Syria and Turkey.” Though Turkey’s current ruling party is more religious than is common in the historically secular nation, it has retained close military ties with the US and indeed all NATO member nations, and there hasn’t been any indication of diplomatic strain between the two.

Indeed, the closest America and Turkey have come to a diplomatic row came after Israeli commandos boarded a Turkish aid ship, the Mavi Marmara, and killed several Turkish aid workers, including a dual-citizen from the US and Turkey. While the Turkish government was outspoken in its criticism, US officials shrugged it off, with Vice President Joe Biden saying Israel had every right to attack the ship.

Turkey, needless to say, is surprised that it has wound up in Rick Perry’s equivalent of the “axis of evil” and is none too happy about it. The Turkish Foreign Ministry released a statement defending their role in NATO, and suggested that Gov. Perry’s low poll numbers underscored that “the US has no time to waste with candidates who do not even know their allies.”

This included a significant battle reported in the town of Zabadani, near the Lebanese border. The town was reportedly the site of a large number of FSA forces, and regime tanks arrived on the outskirts of town to clash with them.

The continued fighting between the pro-Assad military and the growing Turkey-backed FSA led Arab League chief Nabil elArabi to warn today that the nation appears to be sliding toward a full scale civil war.

The continued violence comes in spite of the presence of Arab League monitors, and indeed at least one of the monitors has quit, saying he doesn’t believe their presence is having an impact. Despite this, it does seem the conflict on the ground has moved increasingly away from regime attacks on civilians to a battle between two belligerent forces with the civilians trapped in the middle.

In many ways this mirrors what happened in Libya, where pro-democracy protesters were eventually sidelined as Western forces chose to back more belligerent opposition factions with an eye toward civil war. Turkey has been extremely open in backing the Free Syrian Army as well as some other “pro-intervention” opposition factions, while the protesters calling for free elections and reforms are increasingly an afterthought.

In many ways, it is the rising Western support for the FSA which has allowed the Assad regime to sideline the real calls for reform, painting the peaceful demonstrators with the same brush as defecting troops joining a NATO-backed insurgency.

Russia, a long time ally of Assad, sees the situation quickly deteriorating, and is predicting NATO will soon launch a direct military intervention, complete with a ground invasion by Turkish forces, comments from officials like Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan appear to support this as the preferred course of action, at least among some hawks in NATO.

If such a war does break out, it will simply polarize the nation even more, with battle lines drawn up between the Ba’athist regime and the NATO-backed rebel military. For the civilian population, this will mean all the hopes for reforms and free elections will be forgotten and the question will just be which military strongman emerges to rule the country.

“The situation that has emerged there is right now heading toward a religious, sectarian and racial civil war. This must be stopped,” insisted Erdogan, adding that he believed a civil war in Syria would “pose a threat to us.”

Turkey has been rumored for quite some time to be among the most eager nations to intervene militarily in Syria, with reports dating back to June that the Turkish government was considering sending troops to occupy northern Syria to create a “buffer zone.”

Of course the growing civil war in Syria has been fueled in no small part by Turkish meddling in the first place, with the Erdogan government giving safe haven to defector factions from the Syrian military that have been launching attacks on targets inside Syria, as well as propping up a Libya-style “transition council” based in Istanbul that has been pushing for international military intervention.

The Kurds were attacked while smuggling cigarettes and petrol from over the Iraqi border, something Turkish authorities have known about and allowed for some time. After the strikes, the government claims it mistook the smugglers for Kurdish rebel fighters.

“Everyone knew it,” Nusirevan Elci, the president of the bar association in Sirnak province said this week. “Most people here are saying that the smugglers were killed intentionally.” Mehmet Emin Dindar, a member of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, also said that smuggling was known about. “I wouldn’t even call it smuggling,” he said. “I would call it tax-free trade.”

Servet Encu, a survivor of the attack and one of the smugglers, told a delegation of NGOs that Turkish troops stopped the smugglers near the border hours before the strikes. ”Soldiers have stopped us before, but they always let us pass after a while. This time, they blocked our way completely and did not allow us to go on. When the bombing started, the soldiers got into their vehicles and left.”

The United States has been in increasing cooperation with the Turkish government on so-called counter-terrorism, namely the Kurdish rebels. In fact, U.S. drones were used in the attack.