Syria, accused by France of “crimes against humanity”, yesterday sent its security forces storming into a northwestern village where they killed three military defectors, rights activists said.

Pro-democracy activists, meanwhile, called for the United Nations to send international observers to Syria.

“The Syrian people calls on the United Nations to adopt a resolution to set up a permanent observer mission in Syria,” activists said on their Facebook page, “Syrian Revolution”.

“We demand access to the international media, we demand the protection of civilians,” they said, calling for fresh demonstrations for today, the Muslim day of rest and prayers.

In the latest military operation, “a force comprising seven armoured vehicles and 10 jeeps stormed the village of Ibleen in Jabal Al-Zawiyah (region) in search of people wanted by the security services”, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

“Heavy gunfire was heard as the forces stormed the village,” the Observatory said in a statement received by AFP in Cyprus.

The head of the Observatory, Rami Abdel Rahman, later told AFP the three killings occurred during a raid on the house in Ibleen of a brother of one of the defectors, Hussein Harmouche.

Two other deserters were arrested, Abdel Rahman said, reached by telephone from Nicosia.

Mr Harmouche, an officer, announced his defection in a June video widely distributed on the internet and broadcast on Arab satellite channels, giving as the reason his refusal “to fire on unarmed civilians.”

The United Nations says 2,200 people have been killed, most of them civilians, since democracy protests flared in Syria in mid-March.

The assault on Ibleen comes a day after regime forces, according to an updated toll by rights activists, killed another 31 ­people, 29 of them in a tank-backed raid on the flashpoint central city of Homs.

The brutal crackdown on protesters has been widely condemned by world powers, some of which have slapped sanctions on the Damascus regime.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe pulled no punches during talks on Wednesday in Moscow with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov.

“The Syrian regime has committed crimes against humanity,”Mr Juppe said.