UN to send monitors to Syria on Sunday as fighting rages

BEIRUT (Reuters) – The United Nations will send an advance team of observers to Syria today to start monitoring a shaky ceasefire, even as a surge in violence on the ground threatened to derail international efforts to end more than a year of bloodshed.
Russia and China joined the rest of the Security Council to authorise the deployment of up to 30 unarmed observers in the first resolution on Syria the 15-nation council managed to approve unanimously since the uprising erupted in March 2011.
A spokesman for international mediator Kofi Annan said yesterday an advance team of six monitors would arrive in Syria within 24 hours and deploy within 36 hours, with more to follow within days.
“I will make sure that this advance observer mission will be dispatched as soon as possible and try to make concrete proposals by the 18th of April for an official observer mission,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told United Nations radio separately in Geneva.
As Security Council members gathered to vote, fighting raged on inside Syria, with activists saying at least six people were killed in various incidents throughout the day.
In the opposition stronghold of Homs, activists reported the first shelling by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad since the UN and Arab League brokered ceasefire officially took effect three days ago.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said four people were killed during a funeral march in Aleppo, one by shelling in Homs and a sixth succumbed to wounds inflicted by torture in the central town of Rastan, straddling the Damascus-Aleppo road.
A video, shot in a destroyed part of what the cameraman said was the Homs neighbourhood of al-Qarabis, showed two tanks rushing through the streets to the sound of heavy gunfire and explosions.
“Look with your own eyes. Look, world. Watch what they are doing,” the man making the video screamed as a tank raised its turret.
Syria blames the violence on “terrorists” seeking to topple Assad and has repeatedly denied access to journalists, making it impossible to verify the reports independently.
The state news agency SANA said “armed terrorists” killed five people in ambushes around the country on Saturday, and kidnapped a parliamentary candidate from the north. An army colonel was also kidnapped in the central city of Hama.