Fierce clashes erupted in Syria on Thursday, with a busload of fleeing civilians among those killed, as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s foes branded as toothless a UN Security Council call for peace.
The army attacked a string of towns, while rebel fighters struck military posts in several provinces, and announced a command structure to coordinate hit-and-run strikes in and around Damascus.
A bus, with women and children on board, was shot up close to the town of Sermin in the northwestern province of Idlib, near the Turkish border, and 10 people died, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Opposition activist Milad Fadl, contacted in Beirut, said the civilians were headed for Turkey to escape when regime forces opened fire.
In the evening, government troops launched an assault on the town of Binesh near the Turkish border. The shelling started at 9:30pm, with tanks deployed in Idlib City opening fire, a reporter said.
Thousands began fleeing toward the nearby towns of Taftanaz, al-Maara and Sardana, while shells hit many houses on the outskirts of Binesh and rebels took position to try to prevent the town from being taking over.
Earlier, a rebel commander said that Binesh “will become an inferno” if government troops launch an assault on the town east of Idlib.
“It will be like a volcano that has erupted that no one can stop,” Abu Salmu said, recalling how rebels and townspeople repulsed an attack four months ago after days of house-to-house combat that killed 16.
The escalation came just hours after the UN Security Council adopted a statement urging al-Assad and the opposition to implement “fully and immediately” a peace plan by international envoy Kofi Annan.
Annan’s plan calls for al-Assad to pull troops and heavy weapons out of protest cities, a daily two-hour humanitarian pause to hostilities, access to all areas affected by the fighting and a UN-supervised halt to all clashes.
Monitors say more than 9,100 people have been killed in the unrest that started with peaceful protests before turning into an armed revolt, faced with a brutal crackdown which has cost dozens of lives each day.
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