DAMASCUS, Feb 1, (Agencies): Fresh bloodshed swept Syria on Wednesday after the West and the Arab League demanded immediate UN action to stop the regime’s “killing machine” but holdout Russia vowed to veto any “unacceptable” proposal.
Wrangling at the United Nations came as fierce clashes raged across Syria killing 59 people, mostly civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The Britain-based monitoring group said the heaviest toll was registered in the province of Damascus, where 24 civilians were killed.
Fifteen soldiers were reported killed in the central city of Homs and six army deserters in the capital itself.
There were also reports of fierce fighting between the army and dissidents in Damascus, Homs and Idlib provinces.
Syria’s Al-Watan newspaper gave a rundown of dozens of deaths in clashes in Homs and elsewhere in central Syria over the past two days.
It said 37 rebels were killed in the Homs district, four soldiers in an attack on a checkpoint in Bab Dreib and 15 rebels and two members of the security forces in clashes in Rastan, another central town.
Against that background, the rebel Free Syrian Army’s Turkey-based commander Colonel Riyadh al-Asaad told AFP that half of the country was now effectively a no-go zone for the security forces.
Activists said the unrest had killed nearly 200 people over the previous three days, while France said 6,000 people have lost their lives since the beginning of the uprising nearly 11 months ago.
The French figure comes after UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said last week that her organisation had stopped counting the dead because it is too difficult to get information.
In January, UN data showed more than 5,400 people killed in Syria since the uprising began in mid-March.
In New York, Western diplomats were to try again on Wednesday to persuade Russia to back a tough UN Security Council resolution condemning the violence, and UN ambassadors were expected to hold a two- to three-hour meeting, diplomats told AFP.
“We can hope that Russia has understood the message but for now there is no notable progress,” a diplomat told AFP, while noting “some slight signs” of flexibility from Moscow.
Earlier on Wednesday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov appeared to snuff out any hopes of a quick vote.
“Attempts are being made to find a text that is acceptable to all sides and would help find a political solution for the situation in Syria. Therefore there is going to be no vote in the next days,” he told Interfax news agency.
The draft resolution, introduced by Morocco, calls for the formation of a unity government leading to “transparent and free elections.”
It stresses that there will be no foreign military intervention in Syria as there was in Libya, which helped to topple Muammar Gaddafi.
In Rabat, Foreign Minister Youssef Amrani said on Wednesday that Morocco was “committed with all our partners to achieving a consensus on this resolution.
“What is important today is to stop the violence and support the Arab plan which will allow us to stabilise the country,” Amrani was quoted by the official MAP news agency as saying.
On Tuesday, Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al-Thani told the Security Council that Assad’s regime had “failed to make any sincere effort” to end the crisis and believed the only solution was “to kill its own people.”
“Bloodshed continued and the killing machine is still at work,” he said.
Russia, a long-standing ally of Assad and one of his top arms suppliers, has declared that the UN body does not have the authority to impose a resolution that calls for regime change in Syria, a position supported by China.
“If the text is unacceptable then we will vote against,” Russia’s UN envoy Vitaly Churkin was quoted as saying by the RIA Novosti news agency.
Russia would not approve a text it viewed as “incorrect” and would “lead to a deepening of the conflict”, he said.
But French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said in Paris that Russia had a “less negative” attitude towards a Security Council resolution.
“For the first time, the attitude of Russia and the BRICS (China, India and South Africa on the Security Council) is less negative,” Juppe told MPs.
Analysts warn that the conflict, between a guerrilla movement backed by growing numbers of army deserters and a regime increasingly bent on repression, has largely eclipsed the peaceful protests seen at the start of the uprising.
“It is the beginning of an all-out armed conflict,” said Joshua Landis, head of the Centre for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
“We are heading toward real chaos,” he added. “The Syrian public in general is beginning to (realise) that there isn’t a magic ending to this, there isn’t a regime collapse.”
In other developments, an Arab League official said a planned meeting to discuss the bloc’s suspended observer mission to Syria had been postponed from Feb 5 to Feb 11.
Meanwhile, Syrian troops battled army defectors in a string of towns in the mountains overlooking Damascus on Wednesday in a new assault to crush rebellious areas around the capital, activists said.
The battles in a mountain valley came after regime forces succeeded in largely retaking control of suburbs on the eastern side of the city in an offensive the past week that fueled some of the bloodiest days of the nearly 11-month-old uprising.
Activists say President Bashar Assad’s forces have intensified their crackdown in hopes of silencing protesters and the army dissidents who have joined them as the United Nations Security Council debates a draft resolution demanding that Assad step down.
At least six army defectors were killed in the fighting, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which said some of the regime forces battered the towns of Deir Qanoun and Ein al-Fija, causing an unconfirmed number of casualties.
Another activist group, the Local Coordination Committees, said at least 17 people were killed in the valley, including five military dissidents from the group known as the Free Syrian Army. It was impossible to reconcile the two group’s figures.
The fact that rebels made it to the doorstep of Damascus, the seat of Assad’s power, was a dangerous development for the regime. Rebel soldiers had grown bolder, setting up checkpoints and protecting protesters in suburbs surrounding Damascus.
But a military offensive largely succeeded in crushing the remaining resistance on the eastern side of the capital by Tuesday. The LCC said troops were raiding homes in some of those suburbs Wednesday, looking for activists.
Reign
Meantime, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s “reign of terror” will end and that the main question was how many people would die first.
Appearing before the UN Security Council to press Russia to support a UN resolution calling for Assad to go, Clinton said that Syria will become a more intractable problem the longer that Assad stays in power.
“We all know that change is coming to Syria. Despite its ruthless tactics, the Assad regime’s reign of terror will end and the people of Syria will have the chance to chart their own destiny,” Clinton said.
“The question for us is how many more innocent civilians will die before this country is able to move forward towards the kind of future it deserves,” she said.
But Clinton said UN action in Syria would not involve military intervention, unlike the NATO-led efforts that resulted in the ouster of Muammar Gaddafi.
“I know that some members here may be concerned that the Security Council is headed toward another Libya,” Clinton said. “That is a false analogy.”
The top diplomats from Britain, France and Arab League pressed the same point: The objective of the draft resolution was not military involvement and a continued delay would come at the cost of the lives of innocent civilians.
“We all have a choice: Stand with the people of Syria and the region or become complicit in the continuing violence there,” Clinton told council members.
“Despite its ruthless tactics, the Assad regime’s reign of terror will end and the people of Syria will have the chance to chart their own destiny,” she said. “The question for us is: How many more innocent civilians will die before this country is able to move forward toward the kind of future it deserves?”
Veto
In Moscow, Russia signalled on Wednesday it would veto a draft UN resolution calling on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down unless it explicitly ruled out military intervention to halt the bloodshed touched off by protests against his rule.
Moscow’s envoy to the European Union, Vladimir Chizhov, said there was no chance the Western-Arab draft text could be accepted unless it precisely rejected armed intervention.
The draft “is missing the most important thing: a clear clause ruling out the possibility that the resolution could be used to justify military intervention in Syrian affairs from outside. For this reason I see no chance this draft could be adopted,” Chizhov said.
Russia and China, both veto-wielding Security Council members, have resisted a Western push for a resolution condemning the Syrian government’s crackdown on unrest.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the resolution could not be used to authorise military intervention and his French counterpart Alain Juppe said such an idea was a myth.
But Chizhov’s remarks suggested Moscow, a close strategic ally and important arms supplier to Syria during its 42 years in the grip of the Assad family, would not accept such assurances.
Russia says the West exploited fuzzy wording in a March 2011 UN Security Council resolution on Libya to turn a mandate to protect civilians in the North African country’s popular uprising into a push for regime change, backed by NATO air strikes, that led to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.
Russia has also expressed concern that the draft’s threat of “further measures” against Syria could lead to sanctions, which it opposes. Its diplomats also want to remove the draft’s support for the Arab League’s plan for Assad to cede power.