Heavy gunfire killed 20 people in Syria’s besieged city of Homs on Monday as newly arriving Arab League observers were urged to head immediately to one of the country’s most serious hot spots. An initial group of 50 observers was to land in Syria later Monday to oversee a deal aimed at ending a bloody crackdown on anti-regime dissent, which has showed no signs of abating since erupting in March. “Rocket fire and heavy machineguns in the Baba Amro quarter killed at least 14 people and wounded dozens,” the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in a statement received by AFP in Nicosia.
“The situation is frightening and the shelling is the most intense of the past three days,” it said. Six civilians died in other parts of the central Syrian city, while another three, including a 14-year-old boy, were shot dead when security forces opened fire on a demonstration in Khattab in neighbouring Hama province.
On Sunday, the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) said Homs was under siege and facing an “invasion” from some 4,000 troops deployed near the city that has become a focal point of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. “The observers must head immediately to the martyrs’ district of Baba Amro to stop the assassinations and meet with the Syrian people so that they witness the crimes being perpetrated by the Syrian regime” the Observatory said on Monday.
That demand was echoed by France.
“The Damascus authorities must imperatively, in accordance with the Arab League plan, allow observers access this afternoon to the city of Homs, where the violence is particularly bloody,” foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said. Syrian foreign ministry spokesman Jihad Makdisi said the observer “mission has freedom of movement in line with the protocol” Syria signed with the Arab League last week. Under that deal, the observers are to be banned only from sensitive military installations.
Ironically, the Observatory said the authorities had changed road signs in another hot spot, Idlib province, to confuse the observers, and urged them to make contact with human rights activists on the ground. An advance team of Arab monitors arrived on Thursday to pave the way for the observer mission to oversee the deal aimed at ending the crackdown, which the UN estimates has killed more than 5,000 people since March.
Opposition groups have said the observers must stop their work if they are blocked by the authorities from travelling to places like Homs. “We hold the Arab League and the international community accountable for the massacres and bloodshed committed by the regime in Syria,” the SNC said.
General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, a veteran Sudanese military intelligence officer who is heading the observer mission, arrived in Damascus on Sunday evening, a source told AFP.
In a meeting with AFP in Khartoum last week, the 63-year-old Dabi distributed a curriculum vitae that outlined a hardcore military background, including three years as chief of military operations against the insurgency in what is now South Sudan.
