Syria's Assad opponents step up pressure

The political and military opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad announced Monday they have set up a hotline to coordinate their action, as foreign and internal pressure mounts on his regime. A rights group, meanwhile, said security forces killed at least five civilians in the flashpoint central region of Homs and carried out night-time arrests of students at Aleppo University in the north of the country. The Syrian National Council, an umbrella group, said in a statement the decision was taken in talks on Saturday night with the Free Syrian Army (FSA), formed of deserters from the military. A liaison office was set up and "a hotline to follow internal political developments on the ground," it said. The statement said further meetings would be held involving military experts "to strengthen the capacity of the FSA against regime forces and to protect civilian regions which the regime wants to raid or pillage." The talks on Saturday also focused on efforts to "restructure FSA units and create a modern and flexible structure ... to allow for rapid deployment" and cope with the daily inflow of deserting officers and soldiers. The FSA claims to have gathered some 40,000 fighters under its command since an anti-regime revolt broke out in Syria in mid-March. A government crackdown on dissent has since cost more than 5,000 lives, according to a UN estimate. Dozens of people have died in FSA attacks on the regular army. A media advisor to a top Syrian army defector, General Mostafa Ahmad al-Sheikh, said last week that a special council is being set up to oversee all military operations. The council will "help organise defections within the army and will be in contact with officers in the regular army to encourage large-scale rather than individual defections," he said. In fresh violence on Monday, five people including a woman were killed and nine others wounded as armed members of the shabiha pro-regime militia shot up a bakery in Homs and burnt it down, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. It said security forces fired off mortars at Baliun village in Jabal al-Zawiya where hundreds of deserters had gathered. In Aleppo, security forces arrested nine students in a raid on the university of Syria's second largest city, said the Britain-based Observatory in statements received in Nicosia. As Damascus announced a general amnesty which the opposition dismissed as a sham on Sunday, UN chief Ban Ki-moon urged Assad to stop killing his own people. "Today, I say again to President Assad of Syria: stop the violence. Stop killing your people. The path of repression is a dead end," Ban said in a keynote address at a conference in Beirut on democracy in the Arab world. Ban's comments came after Assad announced the amnesty. "President Assad issued a decree stipulating a general amnesty for crimes committed during the events between March 15, 2011 and January 15, 2012," the official SANA news agency reported. It said the amnesty, the third of its kind, covered infringements of the law on peaceful demonstrations, the possession of unlawful weapons and army desertion. But the opposition Muslim Brotherhood dismissed the amnesty as "neither serious nor credible." "The regime is trying to make its unrealistic plans for reconciliation and national dialogue credible, and it is in this context that it is making such announcements, for propaganda purposes," the group said. Releasing prisoners is one of the key conditions of an Arab League roadmap approved by Syria in November to end the country's crisis. The emir of Qatar said in an interview with US network CBS that he favoured dispatching Arab troops to Syria to "stop the killing," a proposal described by former Arab League chief Amr Mussa as "very important." Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani's interview with "60 Minutes" is the first public call by an Arab leader for an Arab military presence in Syria. The emir's comments, whose wealthy nation once enjoyed cordial ties with Damascus, come with the Arab League set to review the work of its much-criticised Syria monitoring mission later this month. The Syrian Observatory said 11 civilians were killed by security forces on Sunday and that 19 soldiers were abducted by deserters who ambushed their convoy in the southern province of Daraa.