The Syrian opposition’s new leader said on Sunday that President Bashar al-Assad’s regime was on its “last legs,” even as Russia warned it would block any move at the UN to use force against its ally. Britain declined to rule out military intervention, despite the strong opposition of China and Russia, as the death toll from the more than 15-month uprising topped 14,100, according to a human rights watchdog.
“We are entering a sensitive phase. The regime is on its last legs,” Kurdish activist Abdel Basset Sayda told AFP shortly after he was named as the new leader of the opposition Syrian National Council. “The multiplying massacres and shellings show that it is struggling,” he added in allusion to a spate of mass killings of civilians, the most recent of which saw 20 people, most of them women and children, killed in the bombardment of a residential area of the southern city of Daraa on Saturday. Sayda was elected as the SNC’s new leader at a conference in Istanbul, replacing the opposition’s first leader, Paris-based academic Burhan Ghalioun, who stepped down last month in the face of mounting splits that were undermining the group’s credibility. Sayda, who has lived in exile in Sweden for two decades, is seen as a consensus candidate capable of reconciling the rival factions within the SNC and of broadening its appeal among Syria’s myriad of ethnic and confessional groups.
Syria resembles 1990s Bosnia: London
The situation in Syria resembles that of Bosnia in the 1990s, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Sunday. He said Syria seemed on the edge of collapse into sectarian civil war, as he refused to rule out the option of military intervention. “We don’t know how things are going to develop. Syria is on the edge of a collapse or of a sectarian civil war, and so I don’t think we can rule anything out,” Hague told Sky News television. “But it is not so much like Libya last year, where we had, of course, a successful intervention to save lives. “It is looking more like Bosnia in the 1990s, of being on the edge of a sectarian conflict in which neighbouring villages are attacking and killing each other,” Hague said.