Renewed bloodshed in Syria on Thursday killed at least four people, putting to the test a hard-won ceasefire plan that was supposed to take effect at dawn.
The opposition said regime forces killed three civilians and arrested dozens more in defiance of its undertaking to peace envoy Kofi Annan to halt all military operations and withdraw troops from towns and cities. State television said that “armed terrorists” — its usual term for rebel fighters — killed one loyalist soldier and wounded 24, and accused the opposition of deliberately setting out to wreck the truce. Annan — peacemaker for both the Arab League and United Nations — was to give a 1330 GMT briefing by video conference to UN Security Council members on the two sides’ compliance with his plan to end bloodshed that the world body estimates has killed more than 9,000 people since March 2011. The opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) said the epicentre of Thursday’s bloodshed was the flashpoint central region of Hama, long a focus of dissent to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. “We have visual proofs, videos and photos that heavy weapons are still in populated areas, sometimes they just have been relocated,” said the council’s foreign affairs chief, Basma Qoudmani, demanding that regime forces not only cease fire but withdraw from protest centres.
Qoudmani called for peaceful demonstrations across Syria to test the government’s readiness to accept public shows of dissent. “The real test will be if there is shooting or not when people demonstrate,” she said. State media charged that it was the opposition who were jeopardising the long-awaited truce, accusing rebel fighters of bombing a bus ferrying troops to their base in Syria’s second-largest city Aleppo. “An armed terrorist group used an explosive device to target a bus transporting officers and non-commissioned officers to their unit in Aleppo. It killed a lieutenant colonel and wounded 24 other people” at 8:00 am (0500 GMT), the official SANA news agency reported.
State television said the armed groups were “intensifying criminal operations in an attempt to destabilise Syria and torpedo the (Annan) plan” which went into effect at 6:00 am (0300 GMT). Among Syria’s allies, China welcomed the regime’s decision to uphold a “comprehensive ceasefire” describing it as a step towards a political solution. Russia called for more time. Just hours before the deadline expired, the military unleashed a lethal offensive against protest centres, killing 25 civilians on Wednesday, including 10 in the rebel stronghold of Rastan, Britain-based monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said. US ambassador to the the United Nations Susan Rice said Assad’s regime had intensified violence since it first committed to Annan’s six-point plan on April 1. “Its commitments therefore have little, if any, credibility … given that track record,” Rice said.
Annan’s plan calls for the withdrawal of forces from urban areas, a halt to fighting, a daily two-hour humanitarian truce, the release of arbitrarily detained people, freedom of movement for journalists and the right to demonstrate. The SNC said both it and the rebel Free Syrian Army, a ragtag force of mainly army defectors, were committed to the truce but also voiced doubts about the regime’s commitment. SNC chief Burhan Ghalioun called on people to demonstrate “because the right to demonstrate is a principle point of the plan of Annan.” He urged the international community to “monitor its implementation in full, mainly the right to demonstrate… and to provide the means to protect the people if the regime violates the plan.” “International observers should be on the ground as soon as possible,” he said.
Ahead of the ceasefire, foreign ministers of the Group of Eight major industrial powers met in Washington for talks on Syria and other global crises, with both Britain and France pressing for monitors to verify any ceasefire. French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe called for the Security Council to seek a “robust observers force” that would verify compliance and “could move freely” without interference from Assad’s regime. Russia has been a leading supporter of Assad’s regime, and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she would press Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov over the conflict. Lavrov said some Arab and Western states had written off Annan’s peace plan as a failure even before it had gone into effect and called on them to use their influence with the rebels to avoid future unrest.
