“He doesn’t seem to have moved an inch since summer 2011,” said Yezid Sayigh, an analyst at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, noting that Mr. Assad gave “barely the slightest nod” to Mr. Brahimi’s proposals. 
 
 Coming after days of hints that Mr. Assad might at last be ready to negotiate, his defiant speech on Sunday promised trouble for both his friends and his enemies. Russia may find it harder to stave off international action against Syria, which it has done so far using its veto at the United Nations Security Council, as the chances for a political solution seem to recede. 
 
 Moreover, Mr. Assad’s defiance may prompt Mr. Brahimi to decline to continue his mission. That would present the “Friends of Syria,” the group of nations supporting the opposition — the United States and its Western allies, Turkey and some Arab countries — with an unpalatable choice: intervene more aggressively or risk allowing the conflict to drag on indefinitely. 
 
 “Assad is not letting the Friends of Syria off the hook by making it easy for them to declare victory and close the Syria file,” Mr. Sayigh said. “Now what will they do?” 
 
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 The United Nations estimates that more than 60,000 people have died in the civil war, which began as a peaceful protest movement and turned into an armed struggle after security forces fired on demonstrators. Rebels have made gains in the north and east and in the Damascus suburbs, but Mr. Assad’s government has pushed back with deadly air and artillery strikes, and appears to be confident that it can hold the capital. Neither side appears ready to give up the prospect of military victory, though analysts say neither side is close to achieving it. 
 
 Mr. Assad’s defiant stance on Sunday “means we’re in for a long fight,” said Joshua Landis, a scholar on Syria and Mr. Assad’s minority sect, the Alawites, at the University of Oklahoma. “This is a dark, dark tunnel. There is no good ending to this. Assad believes he is winning.” 
 
 Victoria Nuland, the spokeswoman for the State Department, said in a statement that Mr. Assad’s speech was “yet another attempt by the regime to cling to power, and does nothing to advance the Syrian people’s goal of a political transition.” She said that even as Mr. Assad “speaks of dialogue, the regime is deliberately stoking sectarian tensions and continuing to kill its own people.” 
 
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 Before the speech, Lebanese media outlets close to the Syrian government reported, citing unnamed sources, that Mr. Assad would be much more conciliatory, offering to share some power with the armed opposition. But if anyone close to Mr. Assad was pushing that view, it did not make it into the speech he delivered. 
 
 Instead, Mr. Assad repeated his longstanding assertions that the movement against him was driven by “murderous criminals” and terrorists financed by rivals such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia with American blessing. 
 
 “Who should we negotiate with — terrorists?” Mr. Assad said. “We will negotiate with their masters.” 
 
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 The main opposition body, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, issued a statement calling the speech “a pre-emptive strike against both Arab and international diplomatic solutions.” 
 
 There was little immediate reaction in Russia, where the speech came on the eve of the Orthodox celebration of Christmas on Monday. 
 
 But Boris Dolgov of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Eastern Studies said the speech reflected a new push by Russia and other nations to resolve the crisis. 
 
 Mr. Dolgov told the Voice of Russia radio station that Mr. Assad was correct to assert in his speech that the first step toward a resolution of the civil war must be the cessation of aid for armed rebel groups, adding that the current situation was “complex, but not a dead end.” 
 
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 In Midan, a contested neighborhood of southern Damascus, a shopkeeper said that Mr. Assad’s speech had dashed his hopes that the president would end the conflict. 
 
 “He divided Syrians in two camps, one with him who are patriots and one against him who are criminals, terrorists and radicals,” said the shopkeeper, who gave only a nickname, Abu Omar, for safety reasons. “He doesn’t see Syrians who are patriots but don’t like him, and want to have another president in democratic, fair elections.” 
 
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 Mr. Assad, whose family has ruled Syria for 42 years, said Sunday that he was open to dialogue with “those who have not sold Syria to foreigners,” most likely a reference to tolerated opposition groups that reject armed revolution, such the National Coordinating Body for Democratic Change. But his speech appeared unlikely to satisfy even those opponents, since it made no apology for the arrests of peaceful activists or for airstrikes that have destroyed neighborhoods. Nor did he acknowledge that his opponents sought anything but ruin for Syria. 
 
 “They killed the intellectuals in order to inflict ignorance on us,” Mr. Assad said of his opponents. “They deprived children from school in order to bring the country backward.” 
 
 Some armed rebel groups have used techniques that randomly target civilians, like car bombs, and there are foreign fighters among the rebels. But most of the armed movement is made up of Syrians who took up arms during the uprising or defected from the armed forces. 
 
 Mr. Assad thanked military officers and conscripts in the speech and vowed to stay by their side, seeking to dispel speculation that he would flee the country. 
 
 The audience of government officials and university students at the opera house chanted, “With our souls, with our blood, we defend you, Assad,” and vowed to be his “shabiha,” a term that has come to mean progovernment militias that have attacked demonstrators. 
 
 When the president finished speaking, scores of people rushed frantically to greet him, and his bodyguards formed a phalanx to slowly escort Mr. Assad through the crowd. 
 
 Several observers noted in social media postings that the opera house seemed a fitting setting for such a speech. 
 
 “It was operatic in its otherworldly fantasy, unrelated to realities outside the building,” Rami Khouri, the editor of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, wrote on Twitter. ||||| BEIRUT Fighting raged across Syria on Monday with clashes reported just a few miles from where President Bashar al-Assad had unveiled a "peace plan" that Syrians on both sides said would do nothing to end the country's 21-month-old uprising. 
 
 Hours after Assad addressed cheering loyalists at the Damascus Opera House on Sunday in his first public speech in months, fighting erupted near the road to the city's international airport, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. 
 
 The opposition-linked group said artillery hit the district of Aqraba, 3 miles from the Opera House. Fighting continued all night and into Monday around the capital, as well as in the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, it said. 
 
 In central Syria, the towns of Taybet Imam and Halfaya were bombarded with aerial strikes and artillery, said Abu Faisal, an activist speaking over the internet from Taybet Imam. 
 
 "Every four to five minutes, we hear the burst from a rocket. We cannot get any wounded out because we are essentially under siege by the shelling," he said, adding that many civilians had fled. Taybet Imam sits on an entrance to Syria's main north-south highway, close to the central city of Hama. 
 
 The government restricts access by international media and the accounts could not be verified. 
 
 Damascus residents said Assad's speech, which offered no concessions to his foes, was met with celebratory gunfire in pro-Assad neighborhoods. 
 
 But even there, some saw no sign peace was closer: a loyalist resident of southern Damascus reached by internet said the speech was eloquent but empty. 
 
 "It sounded more like gloating than making promises," said the woman, who gave only her first name, Aliaa. "I agree with the ideas but words are really just words until he takes some action. He needs to do something. But even so, everything he suggests now, it is too late, the rebels aren't going to stop." 
 
 "NO ONE CARES" 
 
 In the once-affluent district of Mezzeh, scene of several bomb attacks, an Assad critic said people had more pressing concerns than a TV speech. "Here, no one cares about this speech. They care about food and electricity." 
 
 Another said few people had watched the speech and that Assad's crackdown would not stop: "Military operations will continue in full swing, and he is staying." 
 
 France, the United States, Britain and Turkey all said Assad's speech, his first to an audience since June last year, showed he had lost touch with reality after unrest that the United Nations says has killed 60,000 people. 
 
 U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland had harsh words for Assad when she was asked whether the United States regarded him as a rational actor and whether he was "evil." 
 
 "I don't think anybody who is guilty of the kinds of crimes against your own people that he's guilty of could be considered rational," Nuland told reporters in Washington. "I personally consider what he's done evil." 
 
 Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan accused Assad on Monday of "directing state terrorism". 
 
 "Bashar al-Assad's speech is further evidence of just how far he has cut himself off from reality in order to justify his repression of the Syrian people," French Foreign Ministry spokesman Philippe Lalliot said. 
 
 The plan described by the Syrian leader as a new peace initiative proposed an army ceasefire only after rebels halt their operations and summoned Syrians to mobilize for a war to defend the state against "a puppet made by the West". 
 
 The United Nations said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was disappointed that Assad's speech rejected the idea of a transitional government to pave the way to new elections - a central plank of a peace plan promoted by international envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. 
 
 "NATIONAL PROGRAMME" 
 
 Syria's Prime Minister Wael al-Halki called on Monday for a special cabinet meeting to implement the "national program announced by President Bashar al-Assad yesterday to solve the crisis in Syria", the state news agency SANA said. 
 
 George Sabra, vice president of the opposition National Coalition, said the putative peace plan "did not even deserve to be called an initiative". 
 
 "We should see it rather as a declaration that he will continue his war against the Syrian people," he told Reuters. 
 
 Assad's ally Iran defended the speech as offering a "comprehensive political process". "This plan rejects violence and terrorism and any foreign interference," Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said. 
 
 There was no immediate response from Moscow, which has acted as Assad's main protector on the diplomatic stage. Russian state offices were quiet for the Orthodox Christmas holiday. 
 
 Syrian state television played up the speech, showing footage of convoys of cars driving through main streets in Damascus. People waving the Syrian flag leaned out of car windows and some braved the cold and rain to walk alongside. 
 
 "It was a victorious speech that respects the martyred Syrian soldiers," said one man on state TV, adding that his brother had been killed fighting the opposition. 
 
 After six months of advances, rebels now control wide areas of northern and eastern Syria, most of its border crossings with Turkey and a crescent of Damascus suburbs. 
 
 Assad's government is still firmly entrenched in the capital and controls most of the densely populated southwest, the Mediterranean coast, the main north-south highway and military bases countrywide. Its helicopters and jets are able to strike rebel-held areas with impunity. 
 
 U.S. military cargo planes carrying equipment and personnel arrived at the Incirlik air base in Turkey on Monday, part of a deployment of NATO Patriot anti-missiles to bolster security along Turkey's 900-km (560-mile) border with Syria. Dutch Patriot missile batteries bound for Turkey left an army base in the Netherlands. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Ayat Basma in Beirut, Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem, Vicky Buffery in Paris and Arshad Mohammed in Washington; writing by Peter Graff; editing by Philippa Fletcher and Giles Elgood)
– Syria's civil war raged on today, without the slightest pause of acknowledgement for yesterday's rare Bashar al-Assad speech. It was billed as the unveiling of a "peace plan," but Assad offered essentially no concessions and spent much of the speech justifying his bloody crackdown. And there may be repercussions: In it, he dismissed the work of UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, saying, "Everyone who comes to Syria knows that Syria accepts advice, but not orders," and the New York Times predicts such remarks might cause Brahimi to wash his hands of the conflict. That would present the US and other "Friends of Syria" with a quandary: Get more involved, or potentially watch the conflict continue indefinitely. And though celebratory gunfire rang out afterward, even some loyalists were unimpressed. "It sounded more like gloating than making promises," one Assad supporter tells Reuters. "Everything he suggests now, it is too late. The rebels aren't going to stop." Indeed, hours after the speech, fresh clashes broke out along the road to Damascus' international airport, and regime artillery reportedly hit a district just three miles from where Assad spoke. One Assad critic in a hard-hit district agreed that the speech meant little. "Here, no one cares about this speech. They care about food and electricity."