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’Massacre’ in Syria’s Homs spurs opposition call to action

13 March 2012 01:30 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. The bodies of 47 women and children, some with their throats slit, were found in the flashpoint Syrian city of Homs prompting the opposition to call Monday for foreign military intervention, APA reports quoting AFP.

The Syrian authorities accused "terrorist gangs" of carrying out the killings in a bid to intensify pressure on President Bashar al-Assad’s regime at a meeting at the United Nations on Monday of foreign ministers of the major powers.

At the meeting Western governments stepped up their pleas to Russia and China to end their blockage of action by the UN Security Council action over the Syrian government’s deadly assault on protest cities.

But Russia showed little sign that it would change its stance, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov slamming "risky recipes" which he said risked increasing conflict in the Middle East.

International peace envoy Kofi Annan, in Ankara after a weekend mission to Damascus, acknowledged that a settlement in Syria would "not be easy" but renewed his demand for an immediate halt to the "unacceptable" killings of civilians.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon called on Damascus to respond "within the next few days" to the set of concrete proposals which his predecessor handed to Assad in their talks on Saturday and Sunday.

The grisly murders in Syria’s third-largest city Homs came less than two weeks after regime troops stormed its rebellious Baba Amr neighbourhood, following a month-long bombardment in which activists say 700 people were killed.

Activist Hadi Abdallah told AFP the bodies of 26 children and 21 women, some with their throats slit and others bearing stab wounds, were found after a "massacre" in the Karm el-Zaytoun and Al-Adawiyeh neighbourhoods of the besieged central city.

"Some of the children had been hit with blunt objects on their heads, one little girl was mutilated and some women were raped before being killed," he said.

Activists posted videos online that showed graphic images of charred bodies and children with mutilated and bloodied faces.

The Local Coordination Committees, which organise protests on the ground, called for a day of nationwide strikes on Tuesday in mourning for the dead.

Syrian state television also aired gruesome footage showing homes with white walls splattered with blood, bodies of women and children piled on top of each other, and several men, with bullet wounds to the head, lying facing down in a disused building, their hands tied behind their backs.

Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said news of the killings in Homs had prompted hundreds of families to .

Syrian state TV said the weekend killings were a clear ploy by "armed terrorist gangs" to grab the spotlight ahead of the meeting of major powers in New York.

"We are used to them committing more crimes before meetings of the UN Security Council," it said.

But at a meeting in Istanbul, the opposition Syrian National Council called for "urgent Arab and international military intervention."

Reading from a prepared text, senior SNC official Georges Sabra called for the creation of a "no-fly zone" over all of Syria and "strikes" against the Syrian armed forces.

At the UN Security Council meeting in New York, there was no sign of any narrowing of the rift between Western governments and Beijing and Moscow on how to respond to the crisis.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said: "It is unacceptable that our council be stopped from assuming its responsibilities.

"After months of blocking, I appeal to China and Russia to hear the voices of the Arabs and the world conscience and join us."

But Lavrov maintained his argument against "unilateral" UN action, and repeated Russia’s condemnation of NATO’s air strikes in Libya to justify its opposition to the West’s campaign on Syria.

Change in the Arab world "must not be achieved by misleading the international community or manipulating the Security Council," Lavrov said.

"There is no doubt whatsoever that the Syrian authorities bear a huge share of responsibility for the situation," Lavrov said, but he added that the government was now fighting armed groups, not just unarmed protesters.

The UN chief called for the major powers to unite behind Annan’s peace mission as joint envoy of the world body and the Arab League.

"I appeal to the Security Council to unite strongly behind ending the violence and supporting Mr. Annan’s mission to help Syria pull back from the brink of a deeper catastrophe," Ban said.

In Ankara, Annan acknowledged that the situation in Syria was "complex" but he was confident that talks for a settlement of the year-old crisis, which human rights monitors say has claimed more 8,500 lives, would eventually succeed.

"We will launch a political process and we will reach a settlement," Anatolia news agency quoted him as saying.

As the Britain-based Observatory reported 22 dead in new violence on Monday, the head of a UN human rights probe said that civilians trapped by the fighting in besieged protest cities were facing a "desperate situation."

"The intensification of armed confrontations has widened the trail of suffering," the president of the UN Human Rights Council inquiry Paulo Pinheiro said.

"Unimpeded humanitarian access should be granted as a rule, rather than an exception."