Israel on Tuesday called on the UN Security Council to act over Syrian military attacks after an Israeli patrol was hit in the buffer zone between the two in the Golan Heights.

An Israeli military patrol was hit by gunfire from Syria on Monday while in the Golan, and Israel’s UN ambassador Ron Prosor said his country viewed the heightened tensions with “utmost concern.”

Prosor said Syrian tanks remain in the Golan in “grave violation” of a 1974 agreement on security in the buffer zone. He said there had been a string of violations of the accord in recent months.

“This represents a dangerous escalation that could have far-reaching implications for the security and stability of our region,” Prosor said in a letter to the Security Council.

“Israel has shown maximum restraint. However, Israel views the continued violations of the Separation of Forces agreement by the Syrian military forces with the utmost concern,” the ambassador added.

“The international community and the Security Council should address this alarming development without delay to prevent further escalation,” Prosor said.

A military spokesman said an Israeli vehicle was hit by stray bullets on Monday while it was near the Golan central demarcation line. There were no injuries.

Israel’s armed forces chief, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, said Sunday his country could become involved in the Syrian conflict, as fighting between the army and rebels raged near Israeli positions on the strategic heights.

Syria remains formally at war with Israel, which captured part of the Golan Heights in a 1967 war and annexed it in 1981 in a move the international community does not recognize.

Since the 1974 agreement between the two countries was reached, a 1,200-strong unarmed UN force has patrolled the Golan buffer zone.

-AFP

The British and French Foreign Ministers highlighted Thursday the major obstacles to creating safe zones for refugees from Syria’s civil war, but said they are ruling out no measure yet.

Speaking ahead of a UN Security Council meeting on the growing humanitarian crisis, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague also announced greater aid for international relief efforts.

Turkey, which faces a growing influx of refugees, has urged world powers to consider setting up safe zones to protect Syrian civilians, but Hague said such a plan would imply foreign military intervention.

“We are excluding no option for the future. We do not know how this crisis will develop,” Hague told a joint press conference with Fabius, warning of “considerable difficulties” in winning international consensus.

“It is steadily getting worse. We are ruling nothing out, we have contingency planning for a wide range of scenarios,” Hague said.

“But we also have to be clear that anything like a safe zone requires military intervention and that of course is something that has to be weighed very carefully.”

Hague and Fabius said the UN Security Council – bitterly divided over the Syria conflict – would be unlikely to give its crucial agreement to any military operation to protect a safe zone.

Russia and China have vetoed three resolutions which could have led to economic sanctions against President Bashar al-Assad over the conflict and totally rejected any military intervention.

Fabius gave a similar message but said the conflict was almost certain to worsen and said “then we will have to look at the different solutions.”

Britain will give an extra three million pounds [4.75 million dollars] and France five million euros [6.2 million dollars] to aid efforts inside Syria and in camps in neighboring countries, the ministers said.

A UN appeal for $373 million for relief operations for Syria and refugee camps outside the country has raised barely $196 million.

Fabius and Hague said other countries had to step up financial assistance to the United Nations and other aid groups.

-AFP

(Reuters) - Egypt called on Thursday for intervention to halt bloodshed in Syria, telling a meeting of 120 nations it was their duty to stand against the “oppressive regime” of Bashar al-Assad, prompting a Syrian walkout.

President Mohamed Mursi, elected two months ago after a popular uprising toppled Egypt’s long-standing leader Hosni Mubarak, said Assad had lost legitimacy in his fight to crush a 17-month-old revolt in which 20,000 people have been killed.

Mursi’s scathing speech to a summit of non-aligned leaders, hosted by Assad’s Shi’ite ally Iran, prompted Syria’s foreign minister to accuse the moderate Sunni Islamist leader of inciting further bloodshed in Syria.

The political broadside against the Syrian president came as rebels said they shot down a fighter plane in northern Syria, where his air force has been bombarding opposition-held towns in a fierce counter-offensive against insurgents.

It was the latest strike by Assad’s foes on the air power he has increasingly relied on to crush the uprising. Rebels said this week they attacked a northern military air base and shot down a helicopter that was bombarding a district of Damascus.

“The bloodshed in Syria is our responsibility on all our shoulders and we have to know that the bloodshed cannot stop without effective interference from all of us,” Mursi said.

“We all have to announce our full solidarity with the struggle of those seeking freedom and justice in Syria, and translate this sympathy into a clear political vision that supports a peaceful transition to a democratic system of rule that reflects the demands of the Syrian people for freedom.”

His comments prompted Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem to storm out of the meeting, complaining that Mursi was inciting fighters to “continue shedding Syrian blood”, Syrian state television said.

ASSAD SAYS NEEDS TIME

Assad, in his first television interview since rebels took their fight into the heart of Damascus and the country’s biggest city, Aleppo, said on Wednesday his fight to put down the uprising was going well but needed more time.

“Everyone wants this battle to be completed in days or weeks but this isn’t reasonable, because we are in the middle of a regional and international struggle and it needs time to be resolved,” he said.

Mainly peaceful protests were met with force by Assad’s military, and the uprising has degenerated into a civil war with sectarian overtones and regional dimensions. The mainly Sunni Muslim rebels are backed by regional Sunni powers, particularly Gulf Arab states and Turkey.

Assad, whose Alawite community is an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam, has support from Iran, a rival of Gulf Arab states and Western powers. Lebanon’s Shi’ite militia Hezbollah has also shown solidarity with the Syrian president.

The role of regional powers has assumed greater significance because of deadlock at U.N. Security Council, where diplomatic stalemate has marginalized the major powers.

U.S., Russian and Chinese ministers are not expected to attend Thursday’s U.N. Security Council meeting on Syria, underlining the fact that both Assad’s critics and backers on the council see little prospect of it taking any action.

“We wanted a resolution on humanitarian issues, but we faced a double refusal,” said a French diplomat, whose country will chair the meeting in New York.

“The United States and Britain believe we have reached the end of what can be achieved at the Security Council, and Moscow and Beijing said that such a resolution would have been biased.”

Nearly a year and a half after the uprising erupted, Assad’s political foes are equally divided.

A member of the Syrian National Council, which once hoped to win international endorsement as the country’s leadership-in-waiting, resigned this week complaining it was not doing enough to back the revolt and must be replaced by a new political authority.

“My sense was that the SNC was not up to facing the increasing challenges on the ground,” Basma Kodmani, the latest council member to break from the SNC, told Reuters.

PLANE “SHOT DOWN”

The Syrian Martyrs Brigade said on Thursday it brought down a plane near the town of al-Thayabiya. Video footage on Al Arabiya television showed what appeared to be smoke in the sky and a person parachuting down. An army helicopter hovered over the area, apparently in search of the pilot.

“The brigade has started targeting the regime’s air assets, including military airports,” a member of the group said from Idlib, declining to give further details.

As well as targeting rebels, Assad’s jets and artillery have also struck at least 10 bakeries in Aleppo province in the last three weeks, killing dozens of people as they waited in line to buy bread, the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said.

It said the attacks were either deliberate or done without care to avoid the hundreds of civilians forced to queue outside a dwindling number of bakeries in Syria’s biggest city, a front line in the civil war.

One attack two weeks ago killed around 60 people and wounded more than 70, it said.

The fighting around Aleppo, Damascus and the southern province of Deraa, where protests against Assad first erupted in March 2011, has prompted waves of refugees to flood into neighbouring Turkey and Jordan.

Turkey urged the United Nations to protect displaced Syrians inside their own country, to take the pressure off its crowded refugee camps, and France said it was studying the issue of buffer zones in Syria, an idea Assad dismissed as unrealistic.

14/08/2012

DAMASCUS (AFP) - Grisly footage of apparent atrocities in Syria triggered outrage Monday, as regime forces bombarded rebel strongholds around Damascus and launched a mass raid in the historic heart of the capital.

The graphic videos posted on YouTube showed what appeared to be rebels callously throwing bodies off a post office building in a city near the northern metropolis of Aleppo, while another showed a man, blindfolded and bound, as his throat was savagely cut.

Fighting was also raging in the northern metropolis of Aleppo, where security forces were advancing on an opposition-held district but where all communications have reportedly been cut.

With the international community deadlocked over how to end 17 months of bloodshed, the opposition umbrella group the Syrian National Council appealed for the establishment of no-fly zones.

And in a new blow for embattled President Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s top representative at the UN Human Rights Council said he has defected, the latest in a line of senior officials to flee the regime.

International concern is mounting over how to end a conflict that has triggered a major humanitarian crisis and sent hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing, with at least 100 people being killed daily.

Foreign ministers of Muslim states hold talks in Saudi Arabia Monday while the UN Security Council — which has so far failed to reach a consensus on how to stop the bloodshed — meets on Thursday to debate the future of its mission.

In one shocking amateur video posted Monday, several bodies were seen crumpled on the ground outside a post office building in Al-Bab city before another three are hurled from the rooftop as the crowd cries “This is a shabiha,” referring to the pro-government militia.

In another, a group of men forced a blindfolded man, with his hands tied behind his back, down to the ground in Aleppo while an assailant forced what appeared to be a small knife repeatedly across his throat as his blood spurted.

“If these videos are confirmed, such atrocities harm the revolution. They only benefit the regime and the enemies of the revolution,” Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

Both sides in the increasingly vicious conflict have been accused of human rights violations as reports of cold-blooded killings mount, although the authenticity of the latest videos could not be verified.

Also Monday, security forces arrested residents in a major operation in the heart of Damascus, including the historic Old City, while shells slammed into rebel strongholds around the capital from before dawn, according to the Britain-based Observatory.

It was biggest operation of its kind in the city since the launch of the uprising against Assad, the Observatory said.

It said 21 people had been arrested and that security forces also swept into a graveyard “under the pretext of searching for weapons”, while other activists said the troops had broken down the doors of shops closed in a show of defiance against the regime.

The Observatory said 50 people had been killed on Monday, including 28 civilians in violence across the country.

In Aleppo Monday, government troops were advancing on the southwestern rebel stronghold of Sukari, security sources in Damascus said. The Observatory meanwhile said opposition fighters attacked a key air force intelligence branch in the western Zahraa district.

Fighting also broke out in the southwestern district of Salaheddin, which rebels fled last week but has seen continued clashes since, it said.

The fate of Aleppo — Syria’s largest city — is seen as potential turning point in the conflict whose outcome will have major repercussions for Syria’s neighbours and the military and geopolitical balance of power in the region

More than 21,000 people have been killed across Syria since Assad’s regime launched its brutal crackdown on dissent, with fighting escalating after the failure of former envoy Kofi Annan’s peace plan.

Abdel Basset Sayda, who heads the opposition Syrian National Council, told AFP that the rebels wanted “two no-fly zones, one in the north, close to the Turkish border, and another in the south, close to the border with Jordan,” in addition to “safe places for refugees and humanitarian corridors.”

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held talks in Turkey at the weekend, after Washington imposed a new round of sanctions on Syria, saying their “number one goal” was to hasten the end of Assad’s regime.

Foreign ministers of Muslim states were meeting Monday in Jeddah ahead of an Islamic summit Tuesday hosted by regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia on the Syria crisis.

UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos said she will visit Syria and Lebanon from Tuesday.

Thibault Camus/AP - French President Francois Hollande delivers a speech at the beginning of a social conference with unions and employers in Paris, France on July 9, 2012. Hollande is under attack from political opponents over his perceived lack of leadership on Syria.

10/08/2012

Lakhdar Brahimi has served as a UN special envoy in Iraq after the US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein [Reuters]

10/08/2012

Diplomats have said  Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign affairs minister, is a strong candidate to replace Kofi Annan as the United Nations’ peace envoy to Syria.

Brahimi’s possible appointment could be announced as early as next week, but the diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said late on Thursday that there could be last-minute changes if a key government has concerns about the choice.

The former Algerian foreign affairs minister has a long history as a diplomatic troubleshooter, and will if appointed face tough challenges in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad is using his security forces to try to crush a 17-month-old uprising.

Brahimi, 78, has served as a UN special envoy in a series of challenging circumstances, including in Iraq after the US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, and in Afghanistan both before and after the end of Taliban rule. He was posted in South Africa as it emerged from the apartheid era.

Syria, however, may present an unusually vexing assignment, in part because international action to try to end the violence has been stymied by the disagreements between the five veto-holding permanent members of the UN Security Council.

While the security council united in April to approve the deployment of 300 monitors to Syria to observe a failed ceasefire as part of Annan’s peace plan, Russia and China vetoed three other resolutions that criticized Syria and threatened sanctions against Damascus.

‘Finger-pointing’ 

Annan, a former UN secretary-general and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said last week he would step down as the special envoy because he was unable to do his job with the UN Security Council hopelessly deadlocked over Syria.

In announcing his resignation, Annan explicitly blamed “finger-pointing and name-calling” at the Security Council for his decision to quit, but suggested his successor may have better luck.

In accepting Annan’s resignation, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon thanked him for having taken on “this most difficult and potentially thankless of assignments”.

A spokesman for Ban, who is expected to formally name Annan’s successor, was not immediately available for comment.

Reuters/Mohamed Azakir

08/08/2012

26/07/2012

It has become clear to many officials in Moscow that the Assad regime cannot restore the pre-rebellion status quo in Syria, forcing them to consider backing away from a longtime client.

The phone line from Moscow to Syria is shaky, giving off static and a faint echo, and it does not help that Russian official Andrei Klimov sounds exhausted. He is cagey about his exact location in Syria, saying only that he is “a few kilometers away from the action.” That could mean any of a number of towns and cities where armed revolutionaries have been fighting the forces of President Bashar Assad for almost a year and a half. In that time, thousands of Syrian civilians have been killed, and dozens of Russian diplomats, officials and military strategists have been flying in and out of Damascus on various pretexts — as election observers, as peace-brokers or morale-boosters for the regime. Some Russians even ostensibly enter Syria as holiday makers. “Let’s just say I’m here for myself, in a personal capacity” says Klimov, who is the vice chairman of the foreign affairs committee in Russia’s parliament. Perhaps, but the purpose of his trip this week was also to figure out the regime’s options in the conflict, and Russia’s. “There don’t seem to be any good ones,” Klimov says.

Any hopes that Assad’s forces could bludgeon the rebellion into submission have started to look delusional. Even Russia, one of Assad’s oldest and most stubborn allies, is becoming resigned to his downfall. “I don’t think anyone in the world, including Assad himself, seriously believes that he will be able to control the country for years to come,” says Klimov. “In my view, the ideal situation is if Assad gives control over to someone else, who can maintain the secular nature of the regime and make sure Syria will not become a troublemaker in the region.”

(PHOTOS: The Syrian Arms Race: Photographs by Yuri Kozyrev)

If the Kremlin agrees with this assessment, it has not yet made public that conclusion. President Vladimir Putin has stuck consistently to the view that both sides of the conflict need to negotiate a resolution on their own, and he even suggested on July 23 that forcing Assad to step down would only make matters worse. “The opposition and the current leadership could simply switch sides, with one taking control and the other becoming the opposition, and the civil war will continue for nobody knows how long,” he told a joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti.

But a little further down the diplomatic hierarchy, the last few months have brought a significant change in tone. Just take Vitaly Churkin, Russian ambassador to the U.N., who in February had mounted a rousing defense of Russia’s refusal to turn its back on the Syrian government. “If you are our ally, we are not going to turn around overnight and say, ‘Well, you know, we’ve had good relations with you over the years, but now, thanks, no thanks, deal with your problems, we are not going to do anything about it,’” Churkin had told U.S. talk show host Charlie Rose. That was a veiled rebuke of Washington’s refusal to prop up its longstanding ally, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, during the revolution that overthrew him last year. “It’s not our style,” Churkin said at the time. But on Tuesday, July 24, he spoke to Charlie Rose again, and the host pressed him on whether the Russian-Syrian “friendship” had changed in the last six months. This time, Churkin gave a deep sigh before answering. Assad “is not our nephew, you know,” he said. “He’s not related to us, and we’re not attached to his regime in any particular way.”

Like a delinquent younger brother, Syria has nonetheless been causing Russia a great deal of embarrassment. Rarely can a senior Russian official make a public appearances these days, especially in the West, without being grilled on the massacre of civilians in Syria, on Russian arms sales to Assad, or on Russia’s repeated veto of U.N. sanctions against the regime. During a brief press conference on Monday, two of the four questions for Putin were about Syria, and he was visibly annoyed at having to repeat himself, giving his answers in a blunt staccato. On Tuesday, Moscow again had to distance itself from Syrian blunders, after Syria’s foreign ministry spokesman suggested the regime might use chemical weapons, prohibited under international humanitarian law, if it faced attack from abroad. On its website, the Russian Foreign Ministry then gave Damascus a curt reminder to “unwaveringly uphold its international obligations.”

(MORE: After Assad: What’s Next for the Future of Syria?)

Some Russian military officials have also been annoyed by what they see as Assad’s indecisiveness in fighting the rebels. Konstantin Sivkov, a military hawk who served as a strategist for the Russian General Staff between 1995 and 2007, visited Syria in May, ostensibly to monitor the parliamentary elections but mostly to meet with officials. Sivkov was surprised, he says, with how “gentle” Assad has been in crushing the revolution. “Believe me, some of our guys have told Bashar to adopt much harsher methods, carpet bombing, total destruction,” Sivkov told TIME after returning to Moscow. “If that approach was chosen in Syria, there would be no rebels left after one week, and everyone would be happy.”

Instead, Moscow has been put in the awkward position of having to invite the rebels over for talks, which gave perhaps the clearest signal that Russia is looking beyond Assad’s rule. On June 11, a delegation from the Syrian National Council had an audience with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who tried to convince them to negotiate with Assad. But the SNC delegates also felt as if the Russians were sizing them up. “They are looking for partners in the opposition,” Bassma Kodmani, the SNC’s foreign affairs officer told TIME afterward. One of the senior Russian diplomats even tried to express some sympathy with the rebel cause, says Monzer Makhous, an SNC member who took part in the talks. “During one of the breaks, he leaned over to me and said, ‘We know Assad is like Stalin, we know,’” Makhous recalls. To him that only meant one thing: “Some of them are ready, even eager, to abandon him.”

(VIDEO: A Syrian Soldier Claims to Have Witnessed Atrocities)

At the very least, Russia is tired of being looked upon as Assad’s protector. When rumors emerged in the Western press last week that Assad and his family might flee to Moscow, the Russian reaction was furious. “That is not on the table,” U.N. ambassador Churkin fumed on Wednesday during the interview with Rose. Russia has in the past given asylum to the families of embattled despots such as former Serbia president Slobodan Milosevic or former Kyrgyz strongman Askar Akaev, but the Assads are clearly too toxic to receive any such invitations.

Asked whether Russia might take him in, Klimov, the parliamentarian, finally raises his voice over the telephone line from Syria. “Why not Australia,” he demands. “Why don’t they give their fair contribution to the cause of international peace?” Russia has enough image problems as it is, Klimov says, and granting asylum to Assad’s family now “would be piled on top of Russia’s list of supposed sins.” On top of that, anyone that succeeds Assad “will despise Russia 100 times more if we give [him] safe haven,” adds Klimov.

So, much like the rest of the world, Russia is left to hope against hope that Assad will simply agree to step down. That does not mean, however, that Russia will join the rest of the world in pressuring to do so. The only one who can make such a drastic shift in Russian policy is Putin, and he has not caught the changing winds climbing up through his hierarchy. Last week, Russia and China used their veto power in the U.N. Security Council to block sanctions against Assad for the third time. This brought down another wave of condemnation from the West, but Putin did not give an inch in his rhetoric. “At home, this stand-off with the West is great for his image,” says Nikolay Zlobin, head of the Russia and Eurasia Project at the World Security Institute in Washington. Putin’s core electorate still reveres him as a one-man counterweight to the arrogance of the U.S., Zlobin says, and Putin is prepared to suffer a lot more isolation to maintain that image at home. But putting aside domestic Russian politics, “the hope is that some power vacuum will emerge [in Syria] into which Russia might squeeze,” says Zlobin. “So far, that strategy hasn’t worked out so well.” Not for Russia, and certainly not for Syria.

MOSCOW, July 18, 2012: Russian leader Vladimir Putin and US President Barack Obama were unable to resolve their differences on Syria in a phone talk Wednesday following a Damascus bomb attack, the Kremlin said.

“Differences in approaches remain that concern practical steps in achieving a settlement,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.

A bomb struck at the heart of Syria’s senior command Wednesday, killing at least three of President Bashar al-Assad’s top brass in an attack claimed by rebels, amid fighting in the capital city.

The first such deadly attack against Assad’s inner core came ahead of a showdown Thursday between the West and Russia over a UN Security Council resolution calling for sanctions against Damascus.

Russia has threatened to veto the measure and proposed its own draft that does not provide for punitive measures against its Soviet-era ally while extending a current UN monitoring mission there by another three months.

Western powers had refused to back Russia’s initial proposal or an amended version submitted by Moscow at the United Nations on Tuesday.

The Kremlin spokesman provided few details of the phone call except to say that it was initiated by Obama and included a “detailed discussion of Syria in which the recent escalation was noted”.

Peskov said the conversation showed that the two leaders “have a coinciding view of the general satiation in Syria (and agree) on the end goal of reaching a settlement.”

But the spokesman made no mention of Russia’s refusal to back firmer action against Assad or of Obama’s insistence of imposing sanctions against his regime should it fail to comply with the most urgent points of a peace plan drafted by mediator Kofi Annan.

BEIJING (AFP) - UN chief Ban Ki-moon held talks Wednesday with Chinese President Hu Jintao as he seeks to press Beijing to back tougher action to stop violence in Syria hours ahead of a key Security Council vote.

Ban has already urged China to use its influence to back a peace plan by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan, who is calling on the Security Council to order “consequences” for any failure to carry out his six-point plan.

But it will be a difficult task for the UN secretary general to persuade Beijing to back a Western resolution renewing the UN mission in the country that calls for sanctions if the regime does not pull back heavy weapons.

China, one of five veto-wielding members of the Security Council, has twice joined with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s main ally Russia in blocking resolutions critical of Damascus and has repeatedly warned against outside intervention in Syria.

“The life of Syria’s current political leadership can only be determined by the Syrian people,” said the People’s Daily, mouthpiece of the Communist Party, in an editorial on Tuesday.

“This is an internal matter and the international community should respect that.”

Russia has branded as “blackmail” the bid to link renewal of the UN mission to the threat of sanctions, and has pledged to veto the resolution calling for sanctions.

It proposed a new draft on Tuesday which was rejected by Britain, France, the United States, Germany and Portugal, diplomats said. The Russian draft would renew the mission for three months, but would not back it up with international action.

“Barring a last minute surprise, we should now go for a vote on Wednesday and we expect a veto by Russia and China,” said the UN envoy of a Western nation.

The current 90-day UN mission in Syria ends on Friday and if no resolution is passed by then, it would have to shut down this weekend, according to diplomats.

Following talks with Hu, Ban will also meet Vice President Xi Jinping — set to become China’s president next year — as well as top foreign policy advisor Dai Bingguo and Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, diplomats said.

Ban, who is officially in Beijing for a China-Africa summit, has said that international inaction on Syria would be giving “a licence for further massacres”.

In Syria on Tuesday, troops blasted Damascus neighbourhoods with helicopter gunships and tank fire, witnesses said, after rebels announced an escalation of their battle for control of the capital.

Fighting between Assad’s forces and rebels of the Free Syrian Army has raged in Damascus since Sunday, with some activists saying it marked a “turning point” in the 16-month revolt against the regime.

Annan and Ban have both called for the Security Council to impose “consequences” if Assad and the Syrian opposition fail to carry out Annan’s peace plan.

Russia insists that diplomatic pressure is enough. According to diplomats, President Vladimir Putin spoke with China’s Hu at the weekend and the two agreed to oppose sanctions.

Russian president Vladimir Putin (left) greets UN envoy Kofi Annan at the start of a meeting concerning a peace plan for Syria at the Kremlin in Moscow yesterday. Clashes in Damascus between rebels and state forces raged for a third day, in the fiercest fighting to hit Syria’s seat of power since the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad began 17 months ago.Photograph: Sergei Karpukhin

MICHAEL JANSEN

UN HUMANITARIAN chief Valerie Amos yesterday warned combatants involved in the Syrian conflict to avoid loss of civilian life or face prosecution for war crimes as fierce fighting continued for the third day in Damascus.

Baroness Amos observed: “As the International Committee of the Red Cross has now described the situation as an armed conflict, international humanitarian law applies across Syria in areas where there is fighting.”

Shooting was reported in the capital near the central bank in Seven Springs Square, often the site of pro-regime demonstrations, and at the headquarters of the ruling Baath party in the al-Mazra’ah area. Firing erupted on Baghdad Avenue, and rebels claim to have shot down one of the helicopters overhead.

The army was said to have deployed artillery against rebel strongholds in the capital’s outskirts where dissidents established a presence many months ago. The escalation followed the declaration on Monday night by the rebel Free Syrian Army of “Damascus Volcano”, an all-out offensive against government troops. Rebel spokesman Col Qassim Saadeddine announced, “The battle for Damascus has begun.” A diplomat in Damascus said this operation has started ahead of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan when anti-regime protesters can be expected to take to the streets.

This battle commenced on the southern edge of the capital and has spread to the northeast and centre. A main focus has been the Midan district, where troops have surrounded rebels and refuse to allow them to retreat to less densely populated areas. Shooting has been heard in Palestinian camps where rebels retreating from the besieged Tadamon quarter have sought refuge.

The rebels also announced they launched attacks on government troops in traditional hot spots Homs, Hama and Idlib, and threatened to block main internal and international routes. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, an influential component of the ex-patriate Syrian National Council, urged Syrians to seize “this historic moment” by giving support to the rebels. “Prepare to become soldiers in this decisive battle. You will secure victory with your own two hands,” stated the movement, outlawed in Syria since 1963.

The opening of the offensive has been timed to coincide with the UN Security Council’s consideration of a draft resolution, proposed by Britain, the US, France and Germany. It would extend the deployment of the UN monitoring mission in Syria for 45 days and place implementation of the peace plan proposed by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan under chapter seven of the UN charter which authorises military action as well as sanctions if threats are posed to international peace and security.

Although the US says it favours sanctions not military action, Moscow distrusts Washington which used a similar resolution to lead Nato intervention in the Libyan conflict. During talks in Moscow with Mr Annan, Russian president Vladimir Putin pledged to “do everything” to support the Annan peace plan but would not back the western draft. Mr Annan, who warned the “crisis is in a key turning point”, said he hoped discussions would continue and send a message to Syria. Ahead of this encounter, Moscow declared its intention to veto the resolution. Russia has circulated its own draft extending the mandate of the monitors.

In spite of a last-minute appeal from UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, China is likely to support Russia in the vote, scheduled for today. China’s People’s Daily editorialised, “The life of Syria’s current political leadership can only be determined by the Syrian people.”