Violence continues unabated in Syria, but the daily death toll continues to reflect more deaths of President Al-Assad’s troops than seen previously. On Sunday, out of 63 reported deaths, about half were soldiers. There are also new reports of Al-Assad’s soldiers defecting to the opposition and taking large quantities of arms and ammunition with them. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the group monitoring the violence, is calling last week one of the “bloodiest weeks” of the conflict that began a year ago last March. The week’s confirmed death toll was 550, pushing the over-all death count to more than 15,000.