AMMAN (Reuters) – Fighting in Syria killed at least 32 people yesterday, activists said, and Saudi Arabia said stubborn violence was shredding the credibility of a UN-Arab League peace plan stipulating a truce and dialogue between President Bashar al-Assad and his foes.
Away from the battlegrounds, efforts to find a viable political alternative to Assad’s rule faltered when an exiled umbrella opposition group said it would boycott Arab-brokered talks to unite its splintered ranks.
The latest bloodshed centred in Rastan, where opposition sources said rebels killed 23 members of Assad’s security forces in fighting while heavy government shelling of the town killed nine people – further unravelling an April 12 ceasefire deal that is being overseen by international monitors.
Rastan, 180 km (110 miles) north of Damascus, has slipped in and out of government control during a 14-month-old uprising in which peaceful protest has given way to a sectarian-tinged insurgency that answers Assad’s violent bid to crush unrest.
“Shells and rockets have been hitting the town since three a.m. (midnight GMT) at a rate of one a minute. Rastan has been destroyed,” a member of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) in Rastan who declined to be named told Reuters by satellite phone.
He said that among those killed was Ahmad Ayoub, an FSA commander whose fighters were battling army forces he said were comprised of elite units and members of Military Intelligence.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said rebels destroyed three armoured personnel carriers and seized two others, capturing around 15 soldiers.
Syria’s state news agency said “terrorists” assassinated a military officer in Damascus and an intelligence officer in Deraa, where the uprising against Assad first took shape.
Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, who has previously called for arming the rebels, said yesterday that special UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan’s peace plan was losing meaning as bloodshed was raging on.
“Confidence in the efforts of the envoy of the United Nations and the Arab League has started to decrease quickly,” he told a news conference in the Saudi capital Riyadh.
SANA, the Syrian official news agency, also said Abdelaziz al-Hafl, a pro-Assad tribal notable in the oil-producing province of Deir al-Zor, was slain on Monday along with his son.
Opposition sources said Hafl was the 17th prominent Assad supporter killed in the eastern province in recent months.
A member of Hafl’s tribe said he had been repeatedly warned by insurgents to stop cooperating with the secret police, “but he did not heed the warnings and was bumped off today”.
There was no independent confirmation of any of the reports of fighting and killing from inside Syria, which has severely limited media access over the course of the uprising.
Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority is at the forefront of the revolt against the authoritarian Assad, whose minority Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam. Assad’s government says it is fighting a terrorist attempt to divide Syria.
The exile group that claims the right to speak for the political opposition to Assad, the Syrian National Council (SNC), said it would not join Arab League-brokered talks set for tomorrow and Thursday aimed at healing its divisions.
“The SNC will not be going to the meeting in Cairo because it (the Arab League) has not invited the group as an official body but as individual members,” Ahmed Ramadan told Reuters in Rome, where the group is trying to decide its leadership.
In a statement, the group rejected talks it said were aimed at negotiations with Assad, who it said must quit power: “No negotiations can be held properly unless their aim is the end of the dictatorship and moving the country to democratic rule.”
