The gruesome civil war in Syria that pits government forces against rebels continues to rage across the country. Here are the latest key developments:

Deputy PM: Al-Assad's resignation not an acceptable condition for dialogue

Any suggestions of President Bashar al-Assad resigning could be discussed only after a dialogue with Syrian rebels begins, Deputy Prime Minister Qadri Jamil said Tuesday, according to Russia's state-run RIA Novosti news agency.

Setting his resignation "as a condition before dialogue means that there will be no dialogue," Jamil said during a visit to Russia, according to the report.

He added that "the entire Syrian people should be asked" about such a possibility. "If this issue is being imposed on us from abroad, it is a very dangerous precedent in international relations," he said, according to RIA Novosti.

Syrian state-run news agency SANA quoted Jamil as saying that Syria "has kept its eyes set on achieving the national reconciliation in Syria."

Jamil and a delegation are now in Moscow. Russia has major trade deals with Syria and, along with China, has blocked repeated efforts in the U.N. Security Council to pass resolutions that many other countries argued could have pressured the Syrian regime to halt its violent crackdown on the opposition.

On the ground: 230 killed

At least 230 people were killed Tuesday, including 104 in Damascus and its suburbs and 42 in Aleppo, the opposition Local Coordination Committees of Syria said.

Syria, on state-run media, said its forces "continued cleaning Aleppo's neighborhoods from the mercenary terrorists."

The Damascus suburb of Modamiyeh sustained a bloody assault by regime forces Tuesday, with troops storming the city from four directions amid heavy gunfire and shelling, the LCC said. Huge explosions and mortar shelling continue to rock the city, where regime fire killed several people Tuesday, the group said.

Syria said its forces battled terrorists in Homs and elsewhere.

A Japanese journalist was killed Monday during a gun battle in Aleppo, Syria's largest city and commercial hub.

Mika Yamamoto, who worked for the independent Japan Press news agency, was reporting on the rebel Free Syrian Army, the Japanese Foreign Ministry said.

"I have seen the news on the television. I really did not want to believe it," her father, Koji Yamamoto, told the Japanese news agency Asahi on Tuesday. "She always thought of children and women under the fire of conflict and kept saying it's her mandate to tell the stories of those people to the world."

At least 20 other journalists have been killed in Syria during the conflict, according to the nonprofit group Committee to Protect Journalists. Seventeen of the 20 are believed to be work-related deaths; in three cases, it is unclear whether the journalist was killed as a result of his or her work, the group says.

On Monday, two other journalists went missing and may have been arrested by the Syrian army. They work for Alhurra TV, a U.S.-based Arabic language station.

"A Japanese female journalist was killed by the regime forces, who also attacked (an) Alhurra TV crew and captured the reporter and his Turkish cameraman," a man identified as Capt. Ahmed Ghazala of the Free Syrian Army said in an amateur video that Alhurra aired.

Alhurra TV said that it has not been able to reach its crew in Aleppo since Monday and that it was trying to verify reports the team was arrested by the Syrian army.

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