Syrian forces were accused on Wednesday of summarily executing 15 civilians, as members of a UN team of observers were evacuated from a shelled town the day after a bomb blast hit their convoy.
However, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad accused the West of ignoring violence by “terrorists” and said he would demand an explanation from UN envoy Kofi Annan when he visits Damascus later this month.
“After regime forces raided the neighborhood of Shammas [in the central city of Homs], 15 civilians were found summarily executed,” Rami Abdel Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, in what he called a massacre.
The overnight killings came a day after the Observatory accused troops of another massacre in the town of Khan Sheikhun, in the northwestern province of Idlib, when they opened fire on a funeral procession and reportedly killed 20 people.
During Tuesday’s funeral, a convoy of UN observers was struck by a homemade bomb, damaging three vehicles, but causing no casualties.
Because of blast damage to their car, six members of the team were forced to spend the night in Khan Sheikhun, which came under heavy regime shelling, an activist said.
Annan’s office said the UN mission had picked up the six military observers and they were now back at their team site in the central city of Hama.
It was the second roadside bombing involving the military observers’ vehicles in less than a week, after six Syrian soldiers escorting a convoy were wounded in a May 9 bombing in Daraa.
The UN, which accuses both sides of violating an April 12 ceasefire, reaffirmed its condemnation of any violence against the monitors.
Meanwhile Syrian representatives stayed away from a UN Committee Against Torture meeting in Geneva that raised allegations of systematic and brutal abuses in the violence-wracked nation.
Committee chairman Claudio Grossman had written to Syrian authorities to question them about reports of torture in the country where a bloody crackdown on protesters was unleashed in March last year.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak urged the international community to increase pressure on the embattled regime of al-Assad, whom he said was “doomed.”
Al-Assad’s departure would be a “major blow” to Iran as well as Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, he told CNN.
However, al-Assad, in an interview with Russian state news channel Rossia-24, accused the West of ignoring the real situation in his country.
He said that since the arrival of the UN observers there had been an increase in “terrorist attacks” despite a reduction in “direct confrontation” between government forces and their foes.
“The West only talks about violence, violence on the government side. There is not a word about the terrorists. We are still waiting,” he said. “I will ask him [Annan] what this is about” when he next visits Syria.
Al-Assad denounced the armed opposition as a gang of “criminals” who he said contained religious extremists, including members of al-Qaeda. He also said many “foreign mercenaries” from Arab states fighting for the rebels had been killed.
Turning to legislative elections held on May 7, al-Assad said they showed that the Syrian people “are until now supporting the policy of reform” and “support the institutions of the state.”
However, voter turnout was only 51.26 percent and, so far, only limited results have been released.
The state news agency SANA reported that 250 people detained in relation to the revolt in Syria, but “whose hands were not bloodied” were released on Wednesday.
According to the Syrian Observatory, about 25,000 people are currently detained in Syria. Annan’s peace plan calls for the release of those detained in relation to the uprising.
Meanwhile, Annan himself urged Syria to stop delaying an agreement on allowing UN access to more than 1 million Syrians in need of assistance, saying the process had been “very slow.”
More than 12,000 people, a majority of them civilians, have died since the uprising against al-Assad erupted, according to the Observatory, including more than 900 killed since the truce came into effect.
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Syria’s rebels have seen an influx of arms including anti-tank weaponry, in an effort coordinated with the help of the US.
Officials in US President Barack Obama’s administration said it is not directly supplying the weapons or providing funding, with Gulf states paying for the new arms, the newspaper said.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the