UN Security Council meeting New York / Damascus – Agencies The United Nations Security Council held its session on Tuesday to discuss a joint European-Arab resolution calling for Bashar Al-Assad to hand power to his deputy as a prelude to political transition. During the session, the Arab League Secretary General Nabil Al-Arabi called for taking rapid action to end violence, while Qatar\'s prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al-Thani, accused Al-Assad of killing Syrian people, and Syria\'s envoy to the UN said the country is victim of a systematic campaign to distort facts.
Nabil Al-Arabi also asked the council for a \"rapid and decisive action\" on a resolution to endorse the league\'s demand for Assad to delegate powers to his deputy and defuse the 10-month uprising against his family\'s dynastic rule.
Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim warned the 15-nation league that Syria\'s \"killing machine is still at work.\"
Meanwhile, Syria\'s envoy to the UN said the country is the victim of a systematic campaign to distort facts. The Arab League, he said, is interfering with Syrian affairs and has ignored reports from observers inside the country.
\"Syria is going through decisive challenges in its history,\" Ambassador Bashar Jaafari said. \"We want this stage to be assessed by the will of our people, not by the will of anyone else.\"
\"That organisation (the Arab League) is not speaking on behalf of all Arabs right now. Without Syria, there is no Arab League,\" he said.
He sparred verbally with Sheikh Hamad, whose country has harshly criticised Syria and last year backed Western action in Libya to helped rebels take power. \"Is Qatar a member of NATO or of the Arab League?\" Jaafari asked in a very sarcastic tone.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton strongly backed the Arab League call for rapid Security Council action and warned that the violence is pushing Syria to the brink of civil war.
\"We all have a choice: stand with the people of Syria and the region or become accomplice of the ongoing violence there,\" she told the council, adding that the violence was \"increasingly likely to spiral out of control.\"
At the same time, Arab and Western nations tried to allay Russian fears by making clear that they were trying to avoid a Libyan-style foreign role in the Syrian crisis.
\"We are not calling for a military intervention,\" Sheikh Hamad said. \"We are supporting the exertion of concrete economic pressure on the Syrian regime, so that it understands it is an imperative to meet the demands of its people.\"
The British Foreign Secretary William Hague told the council the resolution \"does not call for military action and could not be used to authorize it.\"
For his part, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe urged the Council to end its “scandalous silence” over bloodshed in Syria by supporting a resolution calling on President Assad to quit.
“We are gathered here today to end the scandalous silence of this Council,” Juppe said. “We are gathered today in order for the Security Council to assume its responsibilities towards a suffering people.”
Juppe said that the Arab League would take the lead in the proposed peace plan under which Assad would step down ahead of talks on the country’s political future.
“It’s for the Arab League to implement it,” Juppe said. “Our responsibility is to help them by sending the Syrian regime a clear message that the international community is united behind Arab efforts.”
The fate of the resolution depends on whether Russia, one of Assad\'s few remaining allies, can be persuaded not to veto the European-Arab draft resolution as Moscow and Beijing did to a European text in October that would have condemned Damascus and threatened it with sanctions.
Russia’s envoy to the European Union  Vitaly Churkin said on Wednesday he believes a Western-Arab draft UN Security Council resolution cannot pass without language clearly ruling out potential military intervention, the Interfax news agency reported.
The draft “is missing the most important thing: a clear clause ruling out the possibility that the resolution could be used to justify military intervention in Syrian affairs from outside. For this reason I see no chance this draft could be adopted,” Chizhov said, according to Interfax.
Diplomats have been haggling for days to find a text Moscow will not block, with a main sticking point being the degree to which it expresses support for the Arab plan for Assad to give up powers, UN diplomats said.
Diplomats are expected to debate once again Wednesday about how to handle the mounting crisis in Syria.
On the battlefront, activists in eastern districts of Damascus said troops fired in the air as they advanced beyond areas from which the defector Free Syrian Army withdrew, capping three days of fighting activists said had killed at least 100 people. Tanks also swarmed into the area.
\"The suburbs are under an unannounced curfew. A small grocery shop opened this morning and soldiers came and beat the owner and forced him to shut down,\" said an activist in the Ain Tarma neighbourhood.
Others said residents of some eastern districts were allowed by advancing troops to flee their neighbourhoods, but security forces in the district of Irbin had rounded up young men at gunpoint and detained them.
Events on the ground are difficult to confirm as the Syrian government restricts access to journalists.
The activist group the Local Co-ordination Committees in Syria claims 25 people have been killed in Damascus suburbs and dozens more died in other parts of the country, mostly in raids in and around the central city of Homs, which has seen some of the heaviest attacks by Assad\'s forces.
The victims include five members of Free Syrian Army in the Damascus suburb of Wadi Barada, according to the group\'s Facebook page.
It also names four people killed in Al-Gharba Al-Sharqiah in the southern province of Deraa. However, the reports cannot be independently verified.
The uprising against Assad - one of the most violent revolts of the \"Arab Spring\" - has entered a new phase in the recent weeks, with an insurgency whose leadership is based in Turkey daring to show its face at the outskirts of the capital.
A last-ditch bid by Moscow to broker talks between Assad\'s government and rebels foundered when the opposition refused to attend, recalling the ongoing killing, torture and imprisonment of the president\'s opponents.
Assad\'s forces appear to have decisively beaten back an attempt by the opposition to assert themselves near Damascus.
An activist said armed defectors mounted scattered attacks on government troops who advanced through the district of Saqba, held by the rebels a few days earlier.
Rebel forays near the capital follow a negotiated victory in Zabadani - a town of 40,000 in mountains near the border with Lebanon - where government forces pulled back under a ceasefire.
Some rebel commanders have spoken of creating \"liberated\" territories to force diplomatic action.
The security forces entered Al-Adawiya district in Homs, driving out Free Syrian Army rebels. Residents said tank bombardments and gunfire could be heard across the city in one of the heaviest barrages in weeks. Activists reported dozens of casualties and field hospitals full of wounded.
Witnesses who spoke to Al Arabiya TV, which aired live footage of the military operations in Bab Amro, spoke of massive destruction, indiscriminate killing and dire living conditions of residents.
One witness said that Assad’s forces have driven out families, suspected of supporting the opposition, from their homes, which were then torched or destroyed.
At least a family of six and a young girl, who was hit by gunfire from a checkpoint in the Karm Al-Zeitun district of Homs were killed, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Another civilian was killed by gunfire in Karm Al-Zeitun, and one in the neighbourhood of Al-Khalidiyeh, also in Homs.
Meanwhile, China and Russia have reiterated their opposition to the use of force to resolve the crisis in Syria, where escalating violence has killed thousands of civilians who oppose President Bashar Al-Assad.