Syrian forces sent shells crashing into a rebel district of Homs city for a seventh straight day of a deadly onslaught on Monday, monitors said, as Russia warned Damascus to act to avoid a civil war.
The assault came as Syrian opposition factions gathered in Istanbul in a bid to close ranks ahead of a Friends of Syria meeting in the same city on April 1, and Turkey closed its Damascus embassy.
The crisis was also discussed in Seoul at a meeting between US President Barack Obama and Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev. President Bashar al-Assad’s regime pressed on with its military campaign to crush opponents, however, activists and monitors said. Troops fired mortar rounds into Khaldiyeh, a rebel bastion in the flashpoint central city of Homs, setting houses ablaze, said the Local Coordination Committees. “The regime is trying to storm the neighbourhood,” said the LCC, an activist group that organises protests.
At least five people died in the assault, adding to the dozens already killed in the week-old bombardment of the district, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Activists fear a repeat of the month-long battering that killed hundreds in the Homs district of Baba Amr before the rebel Free Syrian Army withdrew and the military moved in on March 1. Two more people died elsewhere in Syria. Snipers killed one in northwestern Idlib province and an 18-year-old woman died in clashes in Harasta, Damascus province. Violence was also reported in the eastern hot spot of Deir Ezzor, in central Hama, in northwestern Idlib and in southern Daraa province, cradle of the one-year uprising against Assad’s regime.
The crackdown, which monitors say has seen more than 9,100 people killed, was one of the priority issues discussed between Obama and Medvedev at their meeting in South Korea. After the talks, Obama acknowledged there had been disagreements in the past few months between the United States and Russia, an ally of Assad’s regime. But he said both agreed “we should be supportive of Kofi Annan’s efforts to end some of the bloodshed that is taking place in Syria,” and that the goal was to have a “legitimate” government in Damascus.
Russia and China last week backed a UN Security Council peace plan for Syria put forward by Annan, the UN-Arab League envoy. Annan’s plan calls for a halt to fighting, with the government pulling troops and heavy weapons out of protest cities, a daily two-hour humanitarian pause to hostilities and access to all areas affected by the fighting. It also calls for the release of people detained in the uprising. Before flying to Seoul, Medvedev warned that Annan represented the last chance for avoiding a civil war in Syria.
Russia has been facing mounting Western and Arab calls to step up pressure and stop delivering arms to Assad’s regime. “This may be the last chance for Syria to avoid a protracted and bloody civil war,” Medvedev told Annan in Moscow. “We will be offering you our full support at any level at which we have a say,” he said. In Ankara, a diplomatic source said Turkey’s decision to close its mission in Damascus was linked to security conditions, adding that the consulate in the northern city of Aleppo would remain open. Norway said it was also shutting its Damascus mission for security reasons. On the ground, security forces launched dawn raids in the eastern hot spot of Deir Ezzor, in which 16 people were arrested, and operations were also staged in villages of Daraa province, said the LCC.
