Syria’s government made diplomatic gestures on Monday toward seeking an end to the uprising that has convulsed the country, agreeing for the first time to allow visits by the top United Nationsrelief official and by the newly designated envoy who represents both the United Nations and Arab League. But activists said that Syrian security forces did not let up in their ferocious campaign to crush opposition in the most restive areas.
Activists said the Syrian armed forces sent troops into Dara’a, the southern town where the protests began a year ago, and that artillery units bombarded the town of Rastan in central Syria, not far from Homs, an epicenter of the uprising that has been devastated by more than month of shelling and gunfire.
Activists said the Syrian armed forces sent troops into Dara’a, the southern town where the protests began a year ago, and that artillery units bombarded the town of Rastan in central Syria, not far from Homs, an epicenter of the uprising that has been devastated by more than month of shelling and gunfire.
The Syrian diplomatic gestures came as new reports emerged of Syrian civilians fleeing into neighboring Lebanon to escape the stepped-up military action. The United Nations refugee agency said that 2,000 Syrian refugees had crossed the border into Lebanon since the weekend. The Associated Press, in a dispatch from Qaa, a border town in northeast Lebanon, said the fleeing Syrians, including families with small children, left their homes hastily with a few bags of belongings because of the army’s shelling of their communities.
China, one of the Syrian government’s few remaining international supporters, announced on Monday that it was sending its own special representative to Damascus in the hope of halting the conflict, which has caused a new rift between China and the Arab countries that have been pushing for stronger action against the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.
Valerie Amos, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, said in a statement that Mr. Assad’s government had given her permission to visit Syria for three days starting Wednesday. The Syrian government had refused for a month to allow Ms. Amos to visit.
At the same time, Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general who was appointed last week as a special representative to Syria for the United Nations and the Arab League, announced that he too would visit Damascus starting on Saturday. His mission, he said, is “to seek an urgent end to all violence and human rights violations, and to initiate the effort to promote a peaceful solution to the Syrian crisis.” The Syrian Arab News Agency, the state-run news service, said Syria “welcomes the visit.”
Thousands of Syrians, mostly civilians, have been killed by security forces since the uprising started last March as a peaceful protest against Mr. Assad’s autocratic rule, energized by the Arab Spring democracy revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.
Since then the uprising has come to resemble a civil war, with armed opponents of Mr. Assad, many of them defectors from the army, organizing themselves to fight back. Mr. Assad’s opponents remain a fractious group and lack a cohesive leadership, further hampering their efforts.
Mr. Assad has rejected criticism of his tactics and vowed to crush the protesters, whom he has described as terrorist gangs financed by hostile foreign powers. His attempts to defeat them escalated sharply a month ago, when an Arab League peace proposal to the Security Council that called on him to step aside was vetoed by Russia and China. Mr. Assad appeared to interpret that veto as a green light to use more lethal force.
Much of the military’s campaign had focused on Homs in the center of the country, where rights activists have said hundreds of people have been killed in one neighborhood alone. Although rebel fighters vacated the neighborhood, Baba Amr, last Thursday, the government has refused to allow Red Cross relief teams in.
Reuters quoted a resident of Dara’a as saying by telephone that hundreds of soldiers and security operatives had begun fanning out in Dara’a on a scale not seen for months. The Local Coordination Committees, a Syrian opposition group, said that military forces had assaulted some Dara’a neighborhoods in the middle of the night and that at least two people were killed.
In Rastan, at least seven people have been killed by Syrian artillery since Sunday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based activist group with a network of contacts inside Syria. These casualty tolls are impossible to corroborate because the Syrian government has restricted press access in much of the country.
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