• Bashar al-Assad vows to fight on against 'terrorists'
• Amos arrives in Damascus to lobby for humanitarian access
• More reprisal killings alleged in Homs
11.47am: The UN has confirmed that the Amos is on her way to Homs, after meeting Syria's foreign minister Walid al-Moualem.
AP reports:
The UN humanitarian chief headed to the shattered central Syrian city of Homs where activists have accused regime forces of trying to cover up evidence of a monthlong military assault and alleged execution-style killings.
Valerie Amos arrived in Damascus earlier in the day and met the foreign minister before departing for Homs, said a UN spokesman in Syria, Khalid al-Masry.
Al-Masry said he did not know if Amos would visit Baba Amr.
Sami a Homs-based activist who tweets under the name @Samsomhoms and who we interviewed yesterday, has posted a series of pictures of the effects of the army's shelling in the Insha'at area.
11.12am: Moderate opponents of the Assad regime are being ignored, according to feature in the Global Mail.
It talks to three moderates in Damascus.
• Ghimar, a lawyer who works with an influential NGO on political reform in Damascus, said many Syrians trust neither the opposition Syrian National Council nor the Free Syrian Army.
• Elia Samaan of the opposition Syrian Social National Party, said:
Nobody can ignore that the regime has supporters, and they are a considerable part of the Syrian population. They are not being highlighted by the media, but in fact they exist. And we just cannot eliminate them by violence.
• Osama, an activist committed to non-violent opposition, said many like him have been forced out or into hiding.
Many of the calm, reasonable activists are either in jail or were killed in the early days of the uprising and many more are leaving the country.
10.52am: Valerie Amos is on her way to Homs with the Red Crescent, according to the BBC.
This has yet to be confirmed by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
10.24am: Valerie Amos has arrived in Damascus, according to AP.
9.25am: New video footage from Homs purports to show a ransacked and abandoned hospital in the Insha'at area of Homs. The area neighbours Baba Amr to the north.
Activist claim that hospitals have been raided in search of wounded protesters.
The footage was highlighted in a tweet by Nadim Houry deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "Where are the wounded?" he asks.
9.17am: China is bringing workers home from Syria in what Reuters sees as an apparent attempt to avoid a repeat of last year's eleventh-hour rescue of Chinese nationals from Libya.
China's commerce minister Chen Deming said only about 100 Chinese workers will be left behind to guard work camps and equipment.
Reuters reminds us that China was caught off guard last year when a civil war erupted in Libya. Nearly 36,000 of its nationals exited the country, some by hastily chartered ships, while others fled by foot or by bus into Egypt.
8.40am: (all times GMT) Welcome to Middle East Live. The UN's Valerie Amos is heading for Damascus to urge the Assad regime allow humanitarian access to devastated cities as Barack Obama rules unilateral US military action.
Here's a roundup in more detail:
Syria
• The UN's humanitarian chief Valerie Amos and the joint UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan are due to visit Syria this week in the latest international efforts aimed at ending the violence, al-Arabiya reports. Amos is due to arrive in Damascus today to try persuade the government of Bashar al-Assad to allow humanitarian access to areas devastated by army bombardment.
• The five permanent UN security council members and Morocco met behind closed doors to discuss a US drafted resolution urging an end to the Syrian government's crackdown on demonstrators, a text some Western envoys said was too weak, Reuters reports. The draft demands "unhindered humanitarian access" and "condemns the continued widespread, systematic, and gross violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms by the Syrian authorities and demands that the Syrian government immediately put an end to such violations."
• Syria continues to refuse to allow aid into the Baba Amr area of Homs amid mounting evidence of human rights abuses, including the torture of victims at a hospital inside the city. State television claimed residents were now slowly returning on foot to Baba Amr, but locals said the reports had been fabricated.
• Syrian authorities and anti-government activists accused each other of reprisal killings in the central city of Homs, the Los Angeles Times reports. The bodies of 18 Baba Amr residents, all members of the Sabouh family, were found stabbed to death after security forces raided homes in the neighbourhood, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. A pro-regime TV station aired graphic images of people who, it claimed, were the victims of the Free Syrian Army.
• A defiant President Bashar al-Assad said he was determined to go on fighting what he called "foreign-backed terrorism". He said: "The Syrian people, who have in the past managed to crush foreign plots … have again proven their ability to defend the nation and to build a new Syria through their determination to pursue reforms while confronting foreign-backed terrorism."
• Barack Obama has ruled out unilateral US military action in Syria, after a call by John McCain for air strikes. The president told a press conference:
For us to take military action unilaterally, as some have suggested, or to think that somehow there is some simple solution, I think is a mistake. What happened in Libya was we mobilized the international community, had a UN security council mandate, had the full cooperation of the region, Arab states, and we knew that we could execute very effectively in a relatively short period of time. This is a much more complicated situation ... Ultimately, this dictator will fall, as dictators in the past have fallen.
• US officials are finalising plans to aid both the internal and external Syrian opposition, according to Foreign Policy magazine. The plans stops short of providing any direct military assistance to the armed opposition, it says.
Then there are the terrifying mirrors of Srebrenica and Homs with which these reflections began; no Red Cross entry, no journalists, men and boys separated from women, the female refugees and their stories of slaughtered menfolk, men taken away in trucks. The failure of the "international community".
In fact, there are a lot of differences, too, enough to take our foot off the indignation pedal for moment. In Srebrenica, Christians were killing Muslims – because they were Muslims. In Homs, Muslims are killing Muslims, albeit that one side is biased towards Shia Alawites, the other towards Sunnis. The UN had granted Srebrenica "safe haven" status. Indeed, the Dutch UN battalion (albeit one of the world's more pathetic military units) was there at the time, watching the Serbs taking the men away. Neither the UN nor Nato had blessed Homs with such dodgy protection.
Recent historical examples in the region illustrate how difficult it is to unseat a ruling regime without the assistance of western firepower. In its absence, those seeking to topple Assad must thus consider how best to erode those pillars in a manner least damaging to Syria in the long run. For those wondering about Assad's next move, however, policymakers could do worse than look at the past Algerian, Iraqi and Syrian examples for a dictator's handbook on how to survive an uprising.
Libya
• Libyan tribal leaders have unilaterally declared nearly half of the oil-rich east of the country to be semi-autonomous in a move that opponents fear is the first step towards a carve-up of Libya six months after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. Thousands of tribal representatives, militia commanders and politicians told a conference in Benghazi that the new state, known as Barqa, would have its own parliament, police force and courts to run its own affairs and place its capital in Benghazi.
Comments