Many Syrian civilians are fleeing their homes to escape widening fighting between security forces and rebels, the Red Cross said today, while major powers seemed unable to craft an alternative to envoy Kofi Annan’s failing
peace plan.
UN monitors tried again to reach the scene of a reported massacre that has underlined how little outside powers, divided and pursuing their own interests in the region, have been able to do to halt 15 months of carnage in Syria.
A day after one team was shot at and turned back, a member of the UN mission said another group of monitors was heading for the hamlet of Mazraat al-Qubeir, where opposition activists say 78 people were shot, stabbed or burned alive on Wednesday.
Some 300 UN observers are in Syria to monitor a truce between President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and rebels that Annan declared on April 12 but was never implemented. Now reduced to observing the violence, they have already verified one massacre in Houla, a town where 108 men, women and children were slain on May 25.
The Syrian authorities have condemned the killings in Houla and Mazraat al-Qubeir, blaming them on ‘terrorists’.
More and more civilians are fleeing their homes to escape fighting, while sick or wounded people are finding it hard to reach medical services or buy food, said a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva.
The situation is rather tense in terms of fighting in many, many areas of Syria,’ Hicham Hassan added.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the General Assembly on Thursday a civil war was imminent and that ‘terrorists are exploiting the chaos’ in Syria, adding that hopes of implementing Annan’s plan were fading.
Annan himself warned the UN Security Council that the crisis could soon fly out of control, diplomats said. Annan, Ban’s predecessor as UN secretary-general, called for ‘substantial pressure’ on Damascus to stop the violence.
Given the failure of Annan’s six-point plan, which called for talks on a political transition as well as a ceasefire and humanitarian access, there is little to check the violence, now often sectarian in nature, pitting Assad’s minority Alawites against the Sunni Muslim majority.
DEADLY VIOLENCE
Protests and strife erupted across Syria on Friday, a day after 31 people were killed and the state news agency announced the burials of 29 soldiers and security men killed by rebels.
A car bomb aimed at a bus carrying security men exploded in a Damascus suburb, killing at least two, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights watchdog said.
Another car bomb hit a police branch in the northwestern city of Idlib, killing at least five people, it said.
Syrian forces shelled and then tried to storm the rebel-held district of Khalidiya in the central city of Homs, the heart of the revolt against Assad, the British-based Observatory said.
Activists said the shelling of Khalidiya was the fiercest yet to hit Homs, with up to ten rockets a minute striking the neighbourhood. Videos uploaded to the internet showed columns of grey smoke rising into the air.
No death toll was available, but the Observatory said most residents had fled the area during previous bombardments.
In Deraa, the southern birthplace of the uprising, Syrian forces pounded rebel hideouts in the rugged Luja area, after many soldiers had defected, activists and residents said.
The Syrian people are bleeding,’ Ban said at the United Nations. ‘The danger of a civil war is imminent and real.’
—————————REUTERS
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