By Erika Solomon
BEIRUT (Reuters) – Violence erupted in two Syrian provinces on Tuesday, with
a rights group reporting 10 civilians dead in an army mortar attack and 12 soldiers killed in a fire-fight with rebel gunmen
as U.N. monitors sought to shore up a shaky ceasefire.
The Britain-based Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the 13-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, said nine members of
one family died in mortar bomb blasts in a village in the northern province of Idlib.
An activist on the Turkish
border, Tareq Abdelhaq, said 35 people had been wounded and that some were being carried 25 km (15 miles) along mountain
tracks to receive emergency treatment in refugee camps dotted along the frontier.
“Some are being smuggled over the
border to Turkey. They had to carry the wounded and go through the mountains to avoid checkpoints on the road,” Abdelhaq
said. “One guy died on the way. He was 19 years old and had very bad injuries.”
In the eastern Deir al-Zor province,
troops hit back with mortar and heavy machinegun fire after losing a dozen of their own to insurgents, killing at least one
villager and destroying a school, the anti-Assad Observatory added.
The United Nations says Syrian forces have killed
more than 9,000 people since the uprising began in March 2011.
Its special envoy for children in war zones said more
than 34 children were believed to have been killed since the U.N.-backed ceasefire nominally came into force on April
12.
Like other Arab revolts against autocratic rulers, Syria’s uprising began with peaceful protests but a violent
government response has spawned an increasingly bloody insurgency.
The government says rebels have killed more than
2,600 soldiers and police, and the speaker of Syria’s parliament, Mahmoud al-Abrach, said that outside states backing the
insurgency bore responsibility for the bloodshed.
“The escalation is continuing and it must be stopped from the
outside – I mean those who are providing those groups with weapons and money,” he told Reuters Television in Damascus. “They
need to stop this.”
The ceasefire brokered by U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan briefly calmed but failed to halt the
conflict. Rebels, although low on funds and ammunition, seem to be stepping up a bombing campaign.
Explosions blew the
fronts off buildings in the north-western city of Idlib on Monday, killing nine people and wounding 100, including security
personnel, according to state television, which blamed the blasts on “terrorist” suicide bombers.
Damascus has accused
the United Nations of turning a blind eye to rebel ceasefire violations, although Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon condemned the
Idlib blasts and rocket fire on the central bank in the capital as “terrorist bomb attacks”.
CYCLE OF
VIOLENCE
The United Nations now has 30 truce monitors in Syria, a sprawling nation of 23 million people, and officials
in New York said they expected all members of the planned 300-member mission to be on the ground by the end of the
month.
Their commander, Norwegian Major General Robert Mood, has acknowledged his mission cannot solve Syria’s
fundamental problems but said the security situation was not impossible.
“We have seen this in many crises before that
if you simply keep adding to the violence with more bombs and weapons and more violence, it becomes a circle that is almost
impossible to break,” he told BBC radio. “We are not in that situation.”
Western governments have lost patience with
Assad, accusing him of breaking promises made to Annan that he would order troops and tanks back to their
barracks.
Paris has called for U.N. sanctions against Damascus, but the West can do little given the diplomatic cover
Syria enjoys at the Security Council from China and Russia. Moscow says the rebels are mainly to blame for the continued
violence.
Western states are wary of military intervention along the lines of last year’s air campaign that helped
topple Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi because of the greater diplomatic and military complexities of tackling Syria, as well as the
potential spillover effects on a volatile Middle Eastern neighbourhood.
(Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols at
the United Nations; Writing by Ed Cropley; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
