By Zeina Karam

BEIRUT – Syria's embattled president is set to address the nation Monday for only the third time since the country's uprising began in March, in a key test of whether he will bend to opposition demands.
But the televised speech comes as more protesters insist they will accept nothing less than the downfall of a regime that has held power for more than 40 years. President Bashar Assad, now 45, inherited power in 2000 after his father's death.

The opposition estimates more than 1,400 Syrians have been killed and 10,000 detained as Assad's forces try to crush the protest movement that began in mid-March, inspired by the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.
Nearly 11,000 people have fled into neighboring Turkey in an embarrassing spectacle for one of the most tightly controlled countries in the Middle East.

Assad has made a series of overtures to try to ease the growing outrage, but they have only served to galvanize the demonstrations. Assad lifted the decades-old emergency laws that give the regime a free hand to arrest people without charge and granted Syrian nationality to thousands of Kurds, a long-ostracized minority. But the opposition dismissed the concessions as largely symbolic.

International pressure on the regime has been mounting steadily. Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague on Monday said Syria's leader must reform or go. Hague also said he hopes Turkey will play an influential role.
"I hope our Turkish colleagues will bring every possible pressure to bear on the Assad regime with a very clear message that they are losing legitimacy and that Assad should reform or step aside," Hague said as he arrived in Luxembourg for a meeting of European Union foreign ministers.
They are expected to discuss expanding sanctions on Syria, where the government is cracking down brutally on dissent.

The Syrian government claims the unrest is being driven by criminals, not true reform seekers.
On Monday, the government tried to back up that claim by taking journalists and foreign diplomats on a trip to a northern town where authorities say armed groups killed 120 security personnel two weeks ago.
The trip to Jisr al-Shughour in the restive Idlib province near the border with Turkey was organized jointly by the Syrian foreign ministry and the military. It included 70 Western and Arab diplomats, including U.S. ambassador Robert Ford.

Maj. Gen. Riad Haddad, head of the Syrian military's political department, told journalists on the trip that the military will continue to pursue gunmen "in every village where they are found, even near the Turkish border."
In addition to the refugees in Turkey, some 5,000 people who fled their homes are camped out on the Syrian side of the border and face dwindling resources.