Bashar al-Assad (AFP/Getty Images)

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Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton insisted yesterday that Syria’s brutal dictator has got to go — as the United Nations said its unarmed peace monitors were fired upon while trying to reach the site of the latest massacre.

Bashar al-Assad “must transfer power and depart Syria,” Clinton said in Istanbul, Turkey, after a late-night strategy session with Arab and Western powers to end the Syrian nightmare.

“Assad has doubled down on his brutality and duplicity, and Syria will not, cannot be peaceful, stable or certainly democratic until Assad goes,” Clinton said.

Her comments came as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said his monitors came under small-arms fire yesterday as they tried to reach the village of Kubeir.

Survivors and rights activists said pro-regime militiamen killed nearly 80 people, including women and children, who were shot, hacked and burned in their homes in the central Sunni village.

Ban called the new atrocity “shocking and sickening.”

A survivor of the Kumeir attack, Leith Al-Hamwy, said he hid in a nearby olive grove, but his mother and six siblings, the youngest 10-year-old twins, were killed.

“When I came out of hiding and went inside the houses, I saw bodies everywhere. Entire families either shot or killed with sharp sticks and knives,” he said.

The slaughter in Kumeir comes after the massacre of more than 100 in the town of Houla. The UN’s peace envoy, Kofi Annan, said the escalating attacks could plunge Syra into “all-out civil war.”

Damascus’ main position group in exile, the Syrian National Council, also said 78 people were killed in Mazraat al-Qubair.

“The crisis is escalating,” Annan told the UN General Assembly. “The violence is getting worse. The abuses are continuing. The country is becoming more polarized and more radicalized.”

The Obama administration is trying to rally international support for an exit plan like the one that succeeded in replacing Yemen’s dictator.

Clinton sent her special representative on Syria, Fred Hoff, to Moscow yesterday to sound out the Russians, a senior State Department official said.

“She made clear that we want to work with Russia, but that we’ve got to have a common vision,” the official added.

But Russia and China have formed a united front to block any moves to remove Assad from power.

With AP