Syria’s capital of Damascus is seeing its heaviest violence in over six months as government forces and rebel fighters battle for control of a key highway. The fighting in Damascus comes as rebels have also launched offensives in several Syrian areas. Activists with the Local Coordination Committees say at least 77 people were killed nationwide on Sunday. At the United Nations, a spokesperson for the high commissioner for refugees said 5,000 Syrians are now fleeing the country each day.

Adrian Edwards: “Five thousand people are now crossing the border — borders of Syria into other countries every single day, so this is really a full-on crisis right at the moment. Today’s figure, there’s 787,000 Syrians are now registered or being assisted as refugees. If you go back to 19th of December, when we issued our Syria regional response plan, the figures then were 515,000. There’s been a huge increase. In January alone, we’re talking of a 25 percent increase in registered refugee numbers over a single month.”