International peace envoy Kofi Annan has called for the rapid deployment of 300 ceasefire monitors in Syria, branding violence levels “unacceptable” 12 days into a promised truce.
UN Security Council powers called on the UN to speed up the deployment of monitors, but a top UN official said it would take at least a month to get the first 100 in place.
Ban’s comments in New York came a day after nearly 60 people were killed across the country in violence that continued on Tuesday with a car bomb in the Marjeh district of Damascus that injured three.
Syrian state television blamed “terrorists,” the government term for rebels, for the blast.
It came as UN observers returned to the city of Hama’s Arbaeen neighborhood, which activists said suffered a “massacre” on Monday at the hands of regime troops.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 31 civilians were killed in the flash point central city, out of a total of 59 people, including five soldiers, killed in violence nationwide.
UN-Arab League envoy Annan said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has still not fulfilled a promise to end violence and that the situation was “bleak” and “unacceptable.”
The special envoy said he was “particularly alarmed” at reports that government forces had entered Hama after a visit by UN monitors and killed “a significant” number of people.
“If confirmed, this is totally unacceptable and reprehensible,” he told the UN Security Council.
The Syrian League for Human Rights said that among those killed in Hama on Monday were nine activists who were “summarily executed” by government forces a day after they met UN observers in the city.
Video footage posted online by activists showed a street in Hama’s Arbaeen neighborhood with large pools of blood and women weeping.
The council was told there are now 11 UN observers in place and the 30-strong advance party of the UN Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS) is expected to be on the ground by the end of the week, but UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said it would take a month to get the first 100 of the 300-member full force into Syria.
“All council members underscored the need for more rapid deployment of observers,” US ambassador Susan Rice told reporters.
“We simply urged them to maybe look for some unorthodox ways to maybe expedite the process,” Russia’s UN envoy Vitaly Churkin said
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday gave the go-ahead for the deployment of an enlarged team of 300 ceasefire monitors from next week, despite skepticism over the mission.
Ban insisted that the government ensure the protection of the unarmed observers and allow them to travel freely throughout the country.
Annan’s spokesman Ahmad Fawzi acknowledged the truce remained “extremely fragile” and urged the Syrian government to fully implement its end of the deal.
“This means withdrawal of all heavy armory from population centers,” he told UN broadcaster UNTV. “They are claiming that this has happened. Satellite imagery, however, and credible reports show that this has not fully happened, so this is unacceptable.”
Fawzi said UN observers on the ground had entered areas such as Hama and the battered city of Homs to the south and found that when they were there “the guns are silent,” but when they left “credible reports” indicated that the gunfire resumed.
Critics have said the UN mission is simply allowing the regime to buy time as it presses its crackdown against what began as a popular revolt, but has turned into an insurgency.
The opposition Syrian National Council called on Tuesday for Arab foreign ministers, who are due to meet today, to back a return to the UN Security Council for enforcement action against the regime.
“The regime is not respecting its commitments, so we must go to the Security Council to get a vote on a Chapter Seven resolution to set up secure zones in the country and be able to deliver humanitarian aid,” Syrian National Council leader Burhan Ghaliun told reporters after talks with Egyptian leaders in Cairo.
A Chapter Seven resolution, which can be imposed by the UN Security Council if member states think peace is threatened by an act of aggression, authorizes foreign powers to take measures — including military options.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion