Pressure mounted on the Arab League Friday to seek UN intervention in the face of growing exasperation that the bloc’s hard-won observer mission in Syria has failed to staunch 10 months of killing. Meanwhile, thousands of people poured out of mosques after Friday prayers to call for the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, after choosing “Prisoners of the Revolution” as the slogan for this week’s main protests. They are demanding that the government deliver on its promise to the Arab League to release tens of thousands of people arrested since protests first erupted in March.
As protests began in Aleppo, Latakia and Idlib, the Syrian Organisation for Human Rights said security forces were out in force. The Britain-based group said there were clashes in Aleppo between security forces and dissidents and that demonstrators in Idlib had been fired on. The widely criticised League mission hangs in the balance as its head, General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, prepares to report to Arab foreign ministers, who will decide on Sunday whether to extend it for a second month. Human Rights Watch said there was no sign of any let-up in the regime’s crackdown despite the observers’ presence, with activists reporting 506 civilians killed and another 490 detained since the monitors deployed on December 26. The head of the opposition Syrian National Council, Burhan Ghaliun, headed to Cairo to lobby the Arab ministers to refer the observer mission’s findings to the UN Security Council for tough action.
Ghaliun planned to “ask the head of the Arab League and Arab foreign ministers to transfer the file on Syria to the UN Security Council with a view to securing a decision to establish a buffer zone and a no-fly zone” in Syria, an SNC statement said. The group, which has been strongly critical of the observer mission, said it would demand that Dabi pull no punches in his findings on the Damascus regime’s compliance with the Arab League agreement. “The SNC delegation will insist that the report contain a clear text concerning the ‘genocide’ and ‘war crimes’ carried out by the (Syrian) regime against unarmed civilians,” the statement said.
