Syrian crisis reaches Damascus, scores killed

An unconfirmed picture of Syrians killed during the crisis Syrian security forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad clashed with rebel troops early Monday in the region between al-Mazza and Kafr Sousa in Damascus, after fighting in the capital left scores killed on Sunday.
Fierce fighting continued in Damascus for the second day in a row on Monday, with armoured vehicles reportedly entering the central neighbourhood of Midan - where government troops and the rebel Free Syrian Army are clashing. It is being described as the biggest military deployment in the capital since the beginning of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. Activists also reported clashes between the two sides in Kafr Souseh, Zahera and Tadoman in the capital. Fighting was also reported in other cities, including Aleppo, Hama and Idlib.
Major-General Adnan Sillu, the former head of Syria's chemical weapons programme, reportedly defected on Monday. Sillu is said to have taken up a post as head of the joint military leadership of the FSA.
Syria’s 16-month bloodbath crossed an important symbolic threshold Sunday as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) formally declared the conflict a civil war, a status with implications for potential war crimes prosecutions, The Associated Press reported.
The Red Cross statement came as United Nations observers gathered new details about what happened in a village where hundreds were reported killed in a regime assault. After a second visit to Tremsa on Sunday, the team said Syrian troops went door-to-door in the small farming community, checking residents’ IDs and then killing some and taking others away.
According to the UN, the attack appeared to target army defectors and activists.
“Pools of blood and brain matter were observed in a number of homes,” a UN statement said.
Syria denied UN claims that government forces had used heavy weapons such as tanks, artillery and helicopters during the attack Thursday.
Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi said the violence was not a massacre -- as activists and many foreign leaders have alleged -- but a military operation targeting armed fighters who had taken control of the village.
“What happened wasn’t an attack on civilians,” Makdissi told reporters Sunday in Damascus. He said 37 gunmen and two civilians were killed -- a far lower death toll than the one put forward by anti-regime activists, some of whom estimated the dead at more than 100.
“What has been said about the use of heavy weapons is baseless,” Makdissi added.
The UN has implicated President Assad’s forces in the assault. The head of the UN observer mission said Friday that monitors stationed near Tremsa saw the army using heavy weaponry and attack helicopters.
The fighting was the latest in the uprising against Assad, which activists say has killed more than 17,000 people.
Rima Flaihan, spokesperson of the Local Coordination Committees, told the Al Arabiya news network in a phone call that the Syrian regime is unable to quell the revolution, which has extended to all the neighbourhoods in Damascus and the Syrian governorates.
On Monday, UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon are headed respectively for Russia and China to press the two UN Security Council members to back tougher action against Assad’s regime. AFP reported.
The visits by Annan and Ban come at a crucial new stage in the conflict.
The Security Council has until Friday to renew the UN mission in Syria but is divided over Western calls to add sanctions.
“So divided that maybe Annan and Ban now have the most influence over Russia and China to get anything done,” said one senior UN council diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.
A draft statement which said the Syria government was in “violation” of its international commitments was circulated among the 15 Council nations on Friday, diplomats said.
Russia’s envoys said they could not agree. Russia has led the resistance and China has supported Russia’s stance.
The bloodshed appeared to be escalating. On Sunday, the ICRC said it now considers the Syrian conflict a civil war, meaning international humanitarian law applies throughout the country.
Also known as the rules of war, humanitarian law grants all parties in a conflict the right to use appropriate force to achieve their aims. The Geneva-based group’s assessment is an important reference for determining how much and what type of force can be used, and it can form the basis for war crimes prosecutions, especially if civilians are attacked or detained enemies are abused or killed.
“We are now talking about a non-international armed conflict in the country,” ICRC spokesman Hicham Hassan said, according to AP.
War crimes prosecutions would have been possible even without the Red Cross statement. But Sunday’s pronouncement adds weight to any prosecution argument that Syria is in a state of war -- a prerequisite for a war crimes case.
Previously, the Red Cross committee had restricted its assessment of the scope of the conflict to the hotspots of Idlib, Homs and Hama. But Hassan said the organisation concluded that the violence was widening.
“Hostilities have spread to other areas of the country,” Hassan said. “International humanitarian law applies to all areas where hostilities are taking place.”
Although the armed uprising in Syria began more than a year ago, the committee had hesitated to call it a civil war -- though others, including United Nations officials, have done so.
That is because the rules of war override -- and to some extent suspend -- the laws that apply in peacetime, including the universal right to life, right to free speech and right to peaceful assembly.
On Saturday, UN observers entered Tremsa, a community of 6000 to 10,000 people in a farming region along the Orontes River northwest of the city of Hama. They found pools of blood in homes, along with spent bullets, mortars and artillery shells. The evidence added to the emerging picture of what anti-regime activists have called one of the deadliest events of the uprising.
The integrated patrol, comprised of specialised civilian and military experts, observed over 50 houses that were burned and/or destroyed.
The consistent account relayed by 27 local villagers, interviewed by the UN team, indicated that attack commenced at 5am Thursday morning on July 12. It began with the shelling of the village followed by ground operations.
On the basis of some of the destruction observed in the town and the witness accounts, the attack appears targeted at army defectors and activists.
A Free Syrian Army leader, Saleh al-Subaai, was confirmed shot dead. A doctor and his children were killed when a mortar shell hit their home.
Dozens of bodies have already been buried in a mass grave or burned beyond recognition, and activists were struggling to determine the number of people killed. Estimates range from 200 to more than 250 dead, according to Al Arabiya.
Activists expect those figures to rise since hundreds of residents remain unaccounted for. Locals believe some bodies are still in nearby fields and others were probably dumped in the river.
Some of the evidence suggested that, rather than the outright shelling of civilians depicted by the opposition, the violence in Tremsa may have been a lopsided fight between the army pursuing the opposition and activists and locals trying to defend the village. Nearly all of the dead are men, including dozens of armed rebels.
Independent verification of the events is nearly impossible in Syria, one of the Middle East’s strictest police states, which bars most media from working independently within its borders. The observers are in the country as part of a faltering peace plan by Annan, who has been trying for months to negotiate a solution to Syria's crisis.
Although much of the international community has turned on Assad, Damascus still has some key allies -- including Russia and Iran. The Kremlin announced Sunday that Annan will meet President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday.
Also Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said Tehran is ready to invite Syrian opposition groups and government envoys for talks, the semi-official ISNA news agency reported.
Any proposal from Iran is likely to be rebuffed by rebel groups, which have rejected negotiations with Assad's government and have criticised Tehran for standing by its allies in Damascus. But the offer suggested Iran is seeking a more active role in mediation efforts after Annan’s visit last week to Tehran.