Reuters reports: U.N. monitors came under fire in Syria on Thursday while trying to investigate reports of a new massacre that raised the pressure on world powers struggling to halt the carnage and save a peace plan from collapse.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described as “unspeakable barbarity” the reported killing of at least 78 villagers by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and warned that a civil war was imminent.

Speaking at a special session of the U.N. General Assembly on Syria, international envoy Kofi Annan acknowledged his U.N.-Arab League peace plan was not working and said there must be “consequences” for those who do not comply.

Ban said hopes for consolidating the peace plan were fading and Annan himself warned the U.N. Security Council that the crisis in Syria could soon spiral out of control, diplomats said. Annan, Ban’s predecessor as U.N. secretary-general, called for “substantial pressure” on Damascus to stop the violence.

Tony Karon writes: Senator John McCain may be cranking up the political heat on the Obama Administration over Syria amid reports of a new massacre at Hama, but don’t expect Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to berate Kofi Annan over the failure of his peace plan when she meets the U.N. special envoy in Washington on Friday. Clinton knows better than the pundits and politicians bashing Annan that his mission is not an obstacle to more decisive action — it’s a product of the limited leverage and poor options available to Western powers to bring about regime change in Syria. The Administration is sticking with Annan’s failing plan because the alternatives seem even worse. Still, it’s also a safe bet that Clinton won’t like the special envoy’s message about what needs to be done to implement a viable negotiated solution.

Annan is more acutely aware than any of his critics why neither Syria’s regime nor its opponents have implemented the six-point peace plan to which they signed on in April. There’s no real “or else” option because the Western powers are unable or unwilling to go to war in Syria. The fact that Russia and China will block any U.N. authorization for foreign military intervention provides a convenient excuse for avoiding military action, but that camouflages a deeper apprehension among Western powers about being sucked into a potential quagmire in the Levant.

Annan’s mission, then, wasn’t to deliver ultimatums to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, but to find ways to bridge the vast chasm between the Western and Arab powers aligned with Syria’s opposition, and those like Russia, China and Iran either actively or passively backing the regime. And despite the rhetoric in Washington, it ought to be noted that the State Department sharply criticized the recent announcement by the rebel Free Syrian Army that it would no longer abide by Annan’s cease-fire plan. Still overwhelmingly outgunned by the regime, the rebels appear to be hoping that, sooner or later, the regime will unleash a bloodbath so appalling, it will force Western governments to use their own military power to finish off Assad. That’s an expectation the U.S. is clearly seeking to discourage. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Syria’s government was accused on Wednesday of carrying out a new massacre in a small village near the central city of Hama, with an opposition group claiming 100 people, including many women and children, had been killed.

“We have 100 deaths in the village of al-Qubair, among them 20 women and 20 children,” said Mohammed Sermini, spokesman for the Syrian National Council, who accused the regime of being behind the incident.

The news looked certain to fuel a bitter debate about the increasingly bloody Syrian crisis and to underline the limits of what a deeply divided international community can achieve.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said the massacre was carried out at a farm by pro-regime shabiha militiamen armed with guns and knives after regular troops had shelled the area.

Reports and images of the incident spread rapidly on Twitter and other social networks but were impossible to verify independently given the lack of media access to much of Syria.

The Telegraph reports: The door to Dr Mousab Azzawi’s clinic, on the Mediterranean coast of Syria, was always open to anyone who needed help. But, operating in the heartland of the feared Shabiha militia, there were some patients the doctor would have preferred not to treat.

“They were like monsters,” said Dr Azzawi, who worked in Latakia. “They had huge muscles, big bellies, big beards. They were all very tall and frightening, and took steroids to pump up their bodies.

“I had to talk to them like children, because the Shabiha likes people with low intelligence. But that is what makes them so terrifying – the combination of brute strength and blind allegiance to the regime.”

As President Bashar al-Assad’s country continues its savage slide towards full-blown civil war, the violent, dark and secretive world of the Shabiha is coming out into the open.

Nine days ago, 108 people were butchered by the Shabiha in the town of Houla. The pro-Assad thugs went through the village, house to house, and slit the throats of anyone they came across – including 49 children. Exactly a week later, the Shabiha pulled 12 factory workers off a bus in the town of Qusayr, 40 miles to the south; tied their hands behind their backs, and shot them in the head.

Rami Khouri writes: It must be depressing for Kofi Annan, the United Nations-Arab League envoy to Syria, to hear at every turn that the “Annan plan” for resolving the conflict is dead, and that country will soon plunge into a full-fledged sectarian civil war. My impression is that Annan is resolute, and is just now nearing the make-or-break point of his difficult mission. He has sketched out a path of critical steps – including local, regional and global actors – needed to avert all-out war and instead peacefully negotiate future governance arrangements.

I get this impression from talks this week with authoritative sources close to the Annan mission, who underscore the urgency of action to damp down the use of violence across Syria, to start implementing the plan’s points, and to rebuild enough trust for a political negotiation.

Beyond the escalating violence, an added element of urgency is that the international community may not see this as an open-ended process, but might pull the plug soon if violence continues, I was told. Therefore the urgency now is to get all parties to start complying with the six points of the Annan plan, including a cease-fire, release of prisoners and pullback of heavy weapons from urban areas.

This clearly requires pressure from outside parties, which is why the Annan team is exploring possible ways to bring “intense external pressure” on President Bashar Assad’s regime to start complying with the cease-fire terms.

That pressure must come primarily from Russia, but the Annan team is also in touch regularly with others who support Syria, such as Iran and China. The hope is that if the key external parties – in this case the United States and Russia – can reach minimum agreement with others in the international community on the importance of collective action to nudge the parties to comply with the Annan plan, Syria might be spared a devastating explosion of violence that engulfs the whole country and perhaps spills over to neighboring countries. [Continue reading…]

Patrick Cockburn writes: Damascus feels like a city expecting the worst to happen and seeing no way to avoid it. War is spreading across the country and is unlikely to spare the capital. Rebels speak of stepping up attacks in the city and could easily do so in the next few weeks.

I spent the last week in Damascus and the atmosphere reminds me of Beirut in 1975 at the start of the 15-year civil war. Again and again in conversations, people realistically laid out for me the nasty things that are all too likely to happen, but few were able to produce plausible ideas on how disaster might be averted.

“I wish people abroad would stop talking about a civil war starting here because it is still the people against the government,” said one committed member of the opposition as we sat in a café in Damascus (everybody I spoke to has to be nameless, for obvious reasons). She believed that it was only the heavy presence of the security forces that were suppressing mass popular protest in the days after the Houla massacre.

She may have been right, but in practice not a lot was happening. There was less traffic on the streets and foreign TV stations made much play of YouTube postings showing merchants shutting their shops in protest at the Houla slaughter. But, driving around Damascus, the strike’s success was difficult to judge since so many shops and restaurants are shut anyway because of the lack of tourists and the impact of sanctions.

The rebels could probably start a campaign of bombings and selective assassinations fairly easily in Damascus. This is not a sign that they are militarily strong, but it would be easy for a movement lacking arms and experienced fighters to spread instability by these means. The rebels can do this using as bases strongholds in and around the city such as Douma, which they more or less control.

None of this is good news for the people of Damascus since government retaliation and collective punishments are likely to be savage and sustained. It is depressing that Damascus, one of the more beautiful cities in the world, is on the edge of becoming the victim of the same sort of hatred, fear and destruction that have convulsed Beirut, Baghdad and Belfast over the past 50 years.

Sectarianism is deepening. Christians are fearful and are all too aware of what happened to their co-religionists in Iraq after 2003. Opposition members in Damascus often blandly blame the rise in sectarian fears on the authorities. “The government is just trying to frighten people,” said one Christian human rights activist. “People here have never had a problem with each other.” He pointed out that the French had tried to secure their imperial rule by exploiting communal and religious differences, but they had failed. [Continue reading…]

The Observer reports: A senior Syrian military officer has described how he defected to opposition forces after witnessing hundreds of pro-regime militiamen carry out the now infamous massacre of more than 100 civilians in the town of Houla one week ago.

The account of Major Jihad Raslan comes as the United Nations’ special envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, yesterday warned of an increasing risk of imminent war in Syria. “The spectre of an all-out war with an alarming sectarian dimension grows by the day,” Annan told an Arab League gathering.

His concerns follow warnings delivered on Friday by the United States, Britain and the UN Human Rights Council, which voted overwhelmingly to condemn the Syrian regime for the Houla killings.

The killing of so many civilians, among them 49 children and at least 20 women, continues to galvanise international anger against regime officials and their loyalist militias, which have widely been blamed for what took place.

Raslan served until last Saturday in the Syrian Air Force in the strategically vital port city of Tartous. He had been in Houla on leave when the town was shelled just after 1pm last Friday, then invaded by a civilian militia, known as the Shabiha, in the worst single atrocity of the Syrian uprising.

The officer’s account to the Observer of what took place is among the most important of the testimonies to have emerged since the massacre, the aftermath of which appears to be causing fresh turmoil inside Syria 16 months after the first stirrings of revolt inspired by the Arab spring.

Raslan said he was in his house, around 300 metres from the site of the first massacre in the village of Taldous, when several hundred men whom he knew to be Shabiha members rode into town in cars and army trucks and on motorbikes.

“A lot of them were bald and many had beards,” he said. “Many wore white sports shoes and army pants. They were shouting: ‘Shabiha forever, for your eyes, Assad.’ It was very obvious who they were.

“We used to be told that armed groups killed people and the Free Syria Army burned down houses,” he said. “They lied to us. Now I saw what they did with my own eyes.”

He said the killings in his area were over in around 15 minutes. However, the rampage in other parts of Houla continued until the early hours of Saturday, according to eye-witnesses and survivors.

“Those victims who were slaughtered are people that I knew well,” Raslan said. “These children I knew well, personally. I ate with their families. I had social ties with them. The regime cannot lie about these people, who they were and what they did to them. It was a brutal act by the regime against people who were with the revolution,” he said.

Raslan said that he served on a missile base in Tartous, removed from the grinding everyday savagery of Syria’s uprising. “I knew they had been lying, but I had not been exposed to the effects of it. This was the first time I had seen anything like this.”

Reuters reports: President Barack Obama is gambling that his administration’s failure to act forcefully to stem the bloody crisis in Syria won’t become an election-year liability – and that looks for now like a good bet, with Americans weary of war and focused on the struggling U.S. economy.

A weekend massacre of civilians in Syria has again laid bare the lack of appetite on the part of Washington and many of its allies for military action against Syrian President Bashar al Assad.

It has also given presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney a new opening to try to paint Obama as soft on U.S. foes and timid in asserting American global leadership.

But with most Americans opposed to another large-scale U.S. military commitment overseas and the Syria crisis barely registering for many U.S. voters, Obama’s aides and supporters believe he can weather attacks on the issue.

Polls in recent months have shown between two-thirds and three-quarters of voters opposed to U.S. intervention. Not even human rights groups are demanding major military action.

And Republicans themselves are divided on the right course of action in Syria and how much political capital Washington should invest there.

“Americans are war-weary, Americans are focused on our own economy, Americans want us to invest in our future,” Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Udall said in a conference call with reporters during a trip to the Middle East. “I don’t think this is at the top of Americans’ list of concerns.”

Reuters reports: The gunmen arrived shortly before dusk, some in uniform and some in plain clothes, before herding whole families into rooms and killing them in cold blood, according to survivors.

“They entered our homes … men wearing fatigues herding us like sheep in the room and started spraying bullets at us,” said an apparently injured woman in a video released by activists.

“My father died and my brother, my mother’s only son. Seven sisters were killed,” the woman said, lying next to another injured woman and near a baby with a chest wound.

The United Nations says 108 people were killed in the May 25 massacre, nearly half of them children, outraging a world long numbed by 14 months of relentless bloodshed since the start of a popular uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The events are disputed. The West blames Assad’s forces, while Syria accuses its opponents, whom it refers to as Islamist “terrorists”.

But video footage and accounts of activists, survivors, rights groups and United Nations observers in Syria, provide a harrowing narrative of the violence in the Houla region, about 20 km (13 miles) northwest of the city of Homs.

Crucially, the U.N. monitors say the evidence appears to contradict the government’s denial that its forces and allied militia were behind the slayings.

Activists and survivors said soldiers and pro-Assad “shabbiha” militiamen from the president’s minority Alawite sect carried out the onslaught on the Sunni Muslim villagers.

The Guardian reports: Russia has made clear that it will block UN support for foreign military intervention in Syria, scotching slim hopes that the massacre of more than 100 people at Houla would break the impasse in the international response to the continuing violence.

Moscow’s crucial support for Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, has not changed after confirmation from a UN human rights body that 108 people, including 49 children under the age of 10, were killed in the weekend incident near Homs, mostly in summary killings by the feared shabiha militia, linked to the Assad regime.

“We have always said that we are categorically against any intervention in the Syrian conflict from the outside, as this would only worsen the situation and would lead to unpredictable consequences both for Syria itself and the region on the whole,” said Gennady Gatilov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister.

UN security council pressure on Syria was “premature,” Gatilov said, adding that Russia would use its veto to block any initiatives on foreign military interference.

Al Arabiya reports: Fewer than 20 of the 108 people confirmed as having been killed in the “appalling massacre” in the Syrian town of al-Houla died from artillery and tank fire, the United Nations human rights office said on Tuesday, as each of France and Australia announced expelling the Syrian envoys over the massacre.

Survivors have told U.N. investigators that most of the other victims died in two bouts of summary executions carried out by pro-government Shabbiha militia in the nearby village of Taldaou, U.N. rights spokesman Rupert Colville said, according to Reuters.

“I believe at this point, and I would stress we are at very preliminary stages, that under 20 of the 108 can be attributed to artillery and tank fire,” he told a news briefing in Geneva, adding that 49 children and 34 women were among the victims.

Colville told reporters that most of the other victims were summarily executed in two separate incidents. He said the conclusions of the U.N. monitors are corroborated by other sources, The Associated Press reported.

Bloomberg reports: Western governments today announced the expulsion of top Syrian diplomats as United Nations envoy Kofi Annan met President Bashar al-Assad to express horror at the massacre of more than 100 people in Houla.

French President Francois Hollande said the Syrian ambassador was to be expelled, hours after Australia announced a similar move, citing the May 25 killings in Houla. Britain is sending home the most senior Syrian diplomat in London, the Press Association reported, while Germany and Italy are planning the same step, Sueddeutsche Zeitung said. Spain is withdrawing the credentials of the Syrian ambassador, DPA reported, while Canada said all remaining diplomats are being told to leave.

The Guardian reports: An 11-year old boy has described how he smeared himself in the blood of his slain brother and played dead as loyalist gunmen burst into his home and killed six members of his family during the start of a massacre in Houla, central Syria.

The young survivor’s chilling account emerged as Russia continued to blame both Syrian troops and opposition militias for the weekend rampage in the town that left at least 116 people dead and prompted fresh outrage against the regime’s crackdown.

It comes on the eve of Kofi Annan’s scheduled meeting on Tuesday in Damascus with Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, which is seen as the last hope of salvaging the UN special envoy’s failed peace plan.

Speaking to the Guardian, the young survivor said government troops arrived in his district at around 3am on Saturday, several hours after shells started falling on Houla.

“They came in armoured vehicles and there were some tanks,” said the boy. “They shot five bullets through the door of our house. They said they wanted Aref and Shawki, my father and my brother. They then asked about my uncle, Abu Haidar. They also knew his name.”

Shivering with fear, the boy stood towards the back of the entrance to his family home as gunmen then shot dead every family member in front of him.

“My mum yelled at them,” said the boy. “She asked: ‘What do you want from my husband and son?’ A bald man with a beard shot her with a machine gun from the neck down. Then they killed my sister, Rasha, with the same gun. She was five years old. Then they shot my brother Nader in the head and in the back. I saw his soul leave his body in front of me.

“They shot at me, but the bullet passed me and I wasn’t hit. I was shaking so much I thought they would notice me. I put blood on my face to make them think I’m dead.”

The Guardian reports: A senior commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards has admitted that Iranian forces are operating in Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Ismail Gha’ani, the deputy head of Iran’s Quds force, the arm of the Revolutionary Guards tasked with overseas operations, said in an interview with the semi-official Isna news agency: “If the Islamic republic was not present in Syria, the massacre of people would have happened on a much larger scale.”

Isna published the interview at the weekend but subsequently removed it from its website.

It quoted Gha’ani as saying: “Before our presence in Syria, too many people were killed by the opposition but with the physical and non-physical presence of the Islamic republic, big massacres in Syria were prevented.”

Donatella Rovera is Amnesty International’s senior crisis researcher with experience in the field in Syria.

“Why is the world not doing anything to help us? We demonstrated peacefully and from the first day we were beaten and shot at. Then the army came into our villages and fired at us with tanks and helicopters and burned and destroyed our homes. Is the world just going to keep watching and do nothing until we’ve all been killed?”

This was the recurring theme during my week in the Jabal al-Zawiyah area (northwest of Hama) investigating human rights abuses.

Everywhere I went people told me about relatives being dragged away and shot dead, and everywhere I saw houses and shops which had been deliberately burned down.

“These grave and large scale abuses – extrajudicial executions, deliberate and wanton destruction of property, indiscriminate attacks and torture of detainees – constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes.”

Civilian casualties are rife and detainees are routinely tortured – in some cases to death – by the various Syrian security and military agencies. Indiscriminate shooting and shelling from army positions into villages continues.

These are not isolated incidents. They are part of a much wider pattern across the country, very similar to what I found further north, in Idlib city and surrounding areas, where I carried out field investigations at the end of last month.

It is shocking that to date the international community has spectacularly failed to take any effective steps to ensure protection for the spiralling numbers of ordinary people caught up in the violence or to hold the Syrian authorities accountable.

Such inaction has no doubt emboldened the perpetrators. It also fuels increasing resentment among the population who feel abandoned by the international community.

Jonathan Miller writes: New evidence has emerged that members of Bashar al-Assad’s family and inner circle are directly ordering the commission of crimes against humanity in Syria. Experts in international law consider it “preposterous and completely implausible” that the president himself would be unaware of the systematic and widespread killing and torture.

Defectors from Syrian intelligence and security agencies, used by the regime to crush the revolt, claim that Assad’s cousin issued shoot-to-kill orders against civilian protesters in Dera’a, the cradle of the insurrection. Kill quotas were reportedly issued to snipers tasked with assassinating pro-democracy activists.

They allege that Assad’s brother Maher, a senior army commander, was among senior figures operating out of a secret command centre in Dera’a when orders were issued to contain a protest march by all means necessary. More than 100 civilians were shot dead. In addition, Maher is accused of ordering the indiscriminate mass punishment of the entire male population of a troublesome town, al-Moudamya, last year.

The defectors’ testimony, to be broadcast by Channel 4 Dispatches on Monday night, has added resonance after a weekend when arguably the ugliest atrocity of the 15-month confrontation was perpetrated at Houla. Though the regime blamed rebels, western powers are adamant that regime tanks were responsible.

In the documentary, The Real Mr & Mrs Assad, there is footage not seen before in the UK of the president saying: “Every mistake [that] happens in this government, you are responsible, not somebody else. Not the minister. Not the prime minister. At the end you should be responsible.” In more recent months, Assad has repeatedly denied any role in the killings.

“No one is authorised to give orders to the security forces except for him,” said the exiled former Syrian vice-president Abdul Halim Khaddam, who fell out with Assad in 2005, having served under him and his father. Speaking in Paris, where he lives, Khaddam said: “Will anyone believe that 300,000 soldiers can come out of their barracks to slaughter citizens due to an initiative by their officers? These orders are issued by the president of the state.” [Continue reading…]

Patrick Cockburn writes: Parts of Syria are convulsed by civil war, while in other areas life continues almost as normal. At the same moment as more than 30 children had their throats cut and dozens of civilians were killed by shelling in Houla in central Syria on Friday, people in Damascus were picnicking on the slopes of Mount Qassioun, overlooking the capital.

Fighting can be intense, but it is also sporadic, even in highly contested areas. Over the past week, insurgents, many of them defectors from the army, have been fighting to capture Rastan, a strategically placed town on the road running north from Homs. During the same period, militants in the small city of Douma, an opposition stronghold on the outskirts of Damascus, were involved in UN mediation over access to hospitals, the release of detainees and the restoration of services. Soldiers manning sand-bagged checkpoints surrounding Douma’s narrow streets, where shops and markets were reopening, looked bored and relaxed.

Kofi Annan, the UN-Arab League envoy, returns to Damascus in the next couple of days to attempt to give more substance to the so-called ceasefire that began on 12 April. This now looks like a critical visit, as the Houla slaughter makes Syria once again the centre of international attention and a possible target for some form of foreign intervention.

The ceasefire was only sporadically implemented from the beginning. The government has always had more interest in its successful implementation, which would stabilise its authority, than the insurgents, who need to keep the pot of rebellion boiling. The UN monitoring team says that during the ceasefire “the level of offensive military operations by the government significantly decreased” while there has been “an increase in militant attacks and targeted killings”. But any credit the Syrian government might be hoping for in showing restraint will disappear if the latest atrocities are confirmed.

Not that anybody in Syria expects a quick solution to the crisis in which a mosaic of different interests and factions are battling to control the country. “My picture of Syrian society is that 30 per cent of people are militantly against the government, 30 per cent are for them, and 40 per cent don’t like anybody very much,” said a Christian in Damascus. A diplomat said people are much more polarised than six months ago into pro-government, anti-government and “what I term the anti-anti government, the people who dislike the regime, but equally fear the opposition”. The government has been exploiting this by targeting its non-violent opponents “so they can say it is a choice between us and guys with long beards. People want change, but they are frightened it might be for the worse”. [Continue reading…]