Arab League gives Syria a Sunday ultimatum

Syrian demonstrators protest against President Bashar al-Assad in Khalidieh At least 25 people were reported killed in Syria on Saturday as violence intensified in the eighth month of an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, pushing the death toll close to 4,600, an activist group said, as a growing force of army defectors join the movement to oust the autocratic president.
Meanwhile the Arab League, which has deepened Assad’s isolation by announcing economic sanctions against Damascus, gave Syria until Sunday to sign an initiative to end the crackdown, Qatar’s foreign minister said.
Many of the Arab sanction went into effect immediately, including cutting off transactions with the Syrian central bank, halting Arab government funding for projects in Syria and freezing government assets. Flights between Syria and its Arab neighbors will stop Dec. 15.
The worst violence on Saturday took place in the restive northwestern city of Idlib.
In a three-hour, night-time battle near the Turkish border, seven members of the security forces, five army rebels and three civilians were killed, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said.
Elsewhere, security forces killed one civilian in the southern province of Daraa, six in the central region of Homs and three others in areas near Idlib, the observatory said.
The U.N.’s top human rights official said this week that Syria is in a state of civil war and that more than 4,000 people have been killed since March.
Until recently, most of the bloodshed in Syria was caused by security forces firing on mainly peaceful protesters, but there have been growing reports of army defectors and armed civilians fighting regime forces.
November was the deadliest month of the uprising, with at least 950 people killed in gun battles, raids and other violence, according to activist groups.
Syrian authorities say they are fighting foreign-backed “terrorist groups” trying to spark civil war who have killed some 1,100 soldiers and police since March.
An “Arab Spring” of revolts has reshaped the political landscape of the Middle East this year and toppled leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.
Syrian opposition groups say defectors from Syria’s conscript army are increasing attacks on government forces trying to suppress the revolt.
Syria faces deepening international and regional isolation, with the Arab League, the European Union and the United States piling on tougher and tougher sanctions.
Qatar’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, who has played a lead role in organizing Arab League sanctions, said the League gave Damascus one day to sign its initiative.
“If they want to come (and sign) tomorrow they can,” he said after a meeting in Doha of an Arab foreign ministers committee tasked with following up the crisis.
Arab League officials at Saturday’s meeting in Qatar said Syria has agreed to have its foreign minister discuss the proposed monitoring team with the league's secretary-general, Nabil Elaraby. But no date or venue for those talks were announced.
China and Russia oppose sanctions and last month scuppered Western efforts to pass a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Assad’s government.
The state news agency SANA gave a detailed account of operations by Syrian security forces, including clashes with “terrorists”, arrests and detonating and defusing bombs.
It said special forces caught dozens of wanted men in the area of Tel Kalakh who had been smuggling weapons, drugs and armed men from Lebanon into Syria. Special forces also captured 14 gunmen who, SANA said, had been killing and kidnapping civilians and soldiers.
According to the British-based SOHR activist group, nearly a quarter of those killed in the uprising are from the Syrian security forces.
Special forces killed one gunman in a clash in a rural part of Deraa province, and another in a clash in Idlib, SANA said.
SANA said engineers disabled two bombs in Hama but two others exploded, one when a security patrol was passing near a sports stadium, injuring two. In Latakia, a bomb in front of an electrical workshop started a fire in which two people died.
The head of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC), said the isolation of Syria was accelerating and he was pushing for more international intervention against Damascus and seeking Russian support.
Burhan Ghalioun told the Wall Street Journal he envisioned a post-Assad Syria distanced from anti-Western Iran, and would move closer to the Arab League and Gulf Arab states - countries that are Sunni-led and wary of Shiite Iran.
Syria has fostered close ties with Tehran since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. The United States accuses Damascus of helping Iran funnel weapons to Lebanon’s Hezbollah fighters.
“There will be no special relationship with Iran. This is the core issue - the military alliance,” Ghalioun told the U.S. paper, though he said he did not oppose economic ties.
Ghalioun said the opposition was still trying to persuade Moscow that steps such creating a buffer zone, a humanitarian corridor or a no-fly zone to protect civilians would not lead inevitably to armed intervention.
“This is different than the organized military intervention that happened in Iraq for regime change,” he said. “We count on Syrians to bring down the Syrian regime.”
Western powers have shown little appetite for armed intervention in Syria because of the complexity of its sectarian divisions and its links to unstable neighbors.