(Reuters) – Syrian rebels
killed 23 government soldiers on Monday, activists said, and efforts to find a viable political
alternative to Bashar al-Assad faltered when an opposition group said it would boycott Arab-backed
talks to unite its splintered ranks.
The latest bloodshed centered in the town of Rastan,
where opposition sources said President Assad’s forces killed nine other people, further unraveling a
month-old U.N. ceasefire pact 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.
Opposition activists said the 23 soldiers were killed during
clashes at dawn that followed heavy army shelling of Rastan.
“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 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
armored personnel carriers and seized two others, capturing around 15 soldiers.
The Syrian
official news agency SANA said Abdelaziz al-Hafl, a tribal notable in the oil-producing province of
Deir al-Zor, was assassinated on Monday along with his son.
Opposition sources said Hafl was the
17th pro-Assad figure slain 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.
OPPOSITION GROUP DEBATES
LEADERSHIP
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 Wednesday
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.
Political jockeying within the SNC has prevented it from gaining full international
recognition as the sole representative of the anti-Assad movement. Executive members told Reuters they
may choose a new president or restructure the council in a bid to garner broader support.
The
United States, Europe and Gulf Arab states want Assad to step down but his ally Russia has blocked more robust action
against Syria in the U.N. Security Council while backing U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan’s peace
plan.
Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov defended Russia’s weapons deliveries to Syria in
the face of Western criticism, saying government forces need to defend themselves against rebels
receiving arms from abroad.
In Brussels, the European Union said in a statement that it had
extended sanctions against Syria, freezing the assets of two companies it said gave financial support
to Assad’s government, and imposing travel bans on three people.
But Western powers have shown
no appetite to repeat the military intervention that helped Libyan rebels topple dictator Muammar
Gaddafi last year, and Moscow says arming Assad’s opponents would only lead to years of inconclusive
bloodletting.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said last week there was only a narrow window
of opportunity to avert full-scale civil war in Syria, which straddles a crossroads of Middle East
conflict bordering Turkey, Jordan, Israel, Iraq and
Lebanon.
Syria’s 23-million population comprises a mix of sects and ethnic groups whose
tensions resonate in neighboring countries.
Those tensions have flared in the last two days in
the Lebanese port city of Tripoli, where medical sources said on Monday that running battles between
Alawite supporters of Assad and Sunni fighters left two dead and 20 wounded.
Tension in Tripoli
had been on the rise since last week when Sunni Islamists – broadly sympathetic to Syria’s rebels and
at times supporting them logistically – held a sit-in to protest the arrest of a man who Lebanese
authorities said had been in contact with an unnamed “terrorist organization”.
Judicial sources
in Lebanon – where Syria has sway over the intelligence and security organs dating to the Lebanese
civil war and its aftermath – said on Wednesday that Shadi al-Moulawi had been charged with belonging
to an armed “terrorist” group.
(Additional reporting by Oliver
Holmes in Rome, Sebastian Moffett in Brussels and Steve Gutterman in Moscow; Writing by Joseph
Logan; Editing by Mark
Heinrich)
