Arabs in Syria to oversee plan

An Arab League advance team was headed to Syria yesterday to launch a hard-won observer mission to oversee a plan to end nine months of bloodshed after the opposition accused regime forces of “massacring” hundreds in two days.

Meanwhile, there was no let-up, with human rights activists reporting at least 21 more people killed and clashes between defectors and regular troops in flashpoints Homs and Idlib.

The mission is part of an Arab plan endorsed by Syria on November 2, which also calls for the withdrawal of the military from towns and residential districts, a halt to the violence and the release of detainees.

But Damascus managed to obtain key concessions to the initial plan for observers which, Syrian authorities said, was too vague and “did not take sufficient account of the national security” of the country.

Opposition leaders have charged that Syria’s agreement to the mission on Monday was a mere “ploy” to head off a threat by the Arab League to go the UN Security Council.

The opposition Syrian National Council charged on Wednesday that regime forces had killed 250 people in 48 hours in the run-up to the advance team’s arrival.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights released a grisly video to back its claim that security forces committed a massacre in the northwestern town of Kafer Awid in the Jebel al-Zawiyah mountains, Idlib province, on Tuesday.

The nine-minute video footage zooms in on the faces of at least 49 men, some of them completely disfigured, before panning out to what appears to be rows of additional corpses.

Yesterday, nine people died in the central city of Homs, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, adding the number could rise given the “high number of wounded in critical condition.”

In Idlib, security force gunfire killed four civilians, the Observatory said, with clashes underway between security forces and defectors in the town of Kharbet-Ghazale. “Twenty-five cars carrying security service agents,” had entered the area earlier.

An attack carried out by defectors in retaliation for the previous day’s killing of eight civilians, including a 10-year-old child, left one soldier and eight others wounded in the same province.