Posted on February 9, 2012 - by Venik

Syria: UN offers help as Homs assault continues – live updates

• UN offers to join the Arab League monitoring mission
• More killed on the sixth day of the assault on Homs
• Pentagon draws up contingency plans

9.31am: A Syrian journalist, Mazhar Tayyara, is reportedly among those killed in Homs.

The New York based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says:

Tayyara, known as “Omar the Syrian,” was reporting from the Homs neighborhood of Al-Khaldiyeh [on Saturday] when government forces shelled the district, the news website Citizenside reported. The journalist began helping people injured from the blasts when “a second volley of shells fell and he was hit,” Tayyara’s friend told AFP. The journalist sustained multiple severe injuries and died in the hospital within hours, news reports said.

The CPJ has documented the deaths of three other journalists in Syria during the last four months. In November, cameraman Ferzat Jerban was found in Homs with his eyes gouged out. Basil al-Sayed, a videographer, was shot and killed at a Homs checkpoint in late December, and French journalist Gilles Jacquier was killed in January while covering a pro-regime rally in Homs.

9.20am: More video from Baba Amr shows the already bomb-torn neighbourhood being pounded by shell after shell on Wednesday.

The video cannot be independently verified but it what it shows would be impossible to fake.

Activist Omar Shakir, who claims to be in Homs, tweeted this image:

#Syria #Homs #UN #Assadcrimes #Babaamr where are the #UN twitter.com/OmarShakir91/s…

— Omar shakir (@OmarShakir91) February 9, 2012

Syrian-American Dima Moussa, spokesperson Revolutionary Council of Homs, has a new unverified update on today’s death toll.

We have at least 31 confirmed martyrs in #Homs today, most of them from #BabaAmr. It’s not even noon yet. #Syria

— Dima Moussa (@dimam78) February 9, 2012

9.06am: China’s foreign ministry has said a Syrian opposition delegation visited the country this week and met a deputy foreign minister, Zhai Jun, Reuters reports.

It was the first contact reported by China in the wake of escalating violence in Syria and Beijing’s veto in the UN of a draft resolution on the country.

China’s communist rulers have always resented the advent of ‘humanitarian intervention’, writes Steve Tsang director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham.

After all, if the western powers can impose regime change on authoritarian states on humanitarian grounds, why would this stop at China’s borders? But, until now, there was little that China’s leaders could do about it. Now, with the costs of the West’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, to a lesser extent, in Libya) compounded by its major economies’ weakness, China’s leaders appear to see an opportunity to push back.

With Russia on its side, the Chinese government can take a stand without appearing isolated. And, while a long-term strategic alliance between Russia and China may not be in the offing, tactical cooperation to stop the West from imposing its values on the global community is likely to persist, so long as Vladimir Putin retains power in Russia.

A rising great power like China taking on a proactive global role is, in principle, a positive development. But the world will not be a better place if China’s newfound assertiveness is focused – or, just as importantly, is perceived to be focused – almost exclusively on helping autocrats to stay in power through brutal repression of their citizens.

8.57am: “We don’t want monitors again, we want the UN to interfere with the army,” British-Syrian activist Danny Abdul Dayem says in his latest video appeal from Homs.

He was speaking as he toured the wreckage of house in the Baba Amr district of Homs where he claimed four civilians had been killed.

8.36am: (all times GMT) Welcome to Middle East Live. Syria remains the focus. The UN has offered to join the Arab League monitoring mission amid the continuing crackdown on opposition strongholds by president Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

Here’s a roundup of the latest developments:

• Activists say Syrian forces have renewed their assault on Homs in the heaviest bombardment the city has seen, AP reports. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says at least 12 people were killed Thursday morning but an exact death toll couldn’t immediately be determined because of the chaos in the city.

• The United Nations and the Arab League have proposed sending a joint observer mission to try to end the crisis in Syria, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has announced.

Ban also suggested that Russia and China’s veto of the draft resolution on Syria has been “disastrous for the people of Syria”. He said the failure to agree on collective action “has encouraged the Syrian Government to step up its war on its own people”.

• Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the international community needed to provide something more forceful than an observer mission. Speaking to Reuters before flying to Washington for talks on Syria, he said: “It is not enough being an observer. It is time now to send a strong message to the Syrian people that we are with them.”

• The west and the Arab world are scrambling to find a new diplomatic strategy without Russian and Chinese help. A “friends of Syria” conference is expected to be called in the next few days to agree joint measures, including new sanctions, anti-Assad resolutions at the UN general assembly, and diplomatic support for the opposition Syrian National Council with the aim of molding it into a credible alternative to the Assad regime. The next steps will be decided at meetings of the Gulf Co-operation Council on Saturday and the Arab League on Sunday.

• The Pentagon is drawing up contingency plans for intervention in Syria that include military action. The defence department has for several weeks been planning a range of US actions, from dealing with a flood of refugees and the provision of medical relief to a direct military assault on Syria. Included in the planning is intervention coordinated with allies such as Turkey and other countries in Nato. Administration officials said the “internal review” was at the initiative of the Pentagon, not the White House, in order to be able to present options to President Obama if he were to call for them.

• Residents in Homs said on Wednesday that the noose was tightening around their besieged city, with the Syrian army carrying out a ferocious bombardment against the helpless civilians trapped inside. At least 27 people were killed on Wednesday, with about 200 injured, 50 seriously, activists said, after unrelenting artillery attacks. Activist Waleed Farah told the Guardian, “It isn’t war between two armies. It’s between the army and civilians. You hear the rockets and explosions. You feel you are at the front. The situation for civilians is pitiful.”

• The foreign power most actively involved inside Syria is Iran, says Simon Tisdall.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz quoted Syrian sources saying Suleimani was, in effect, acting as chief regime adviser and strategist …

Iranian Revolutionary Guards are said to be present in Syria in numbers ranging into the hundreds, though exact figures cannot be confirmed. They act as trainers, advisers and intelligence-gatherers to regime forces, in much the same way as Iranian agents assisted extremist Shia and Sunni groups fighting US forces during the occupation of Iraq …

For Assad, Iran is a source of protection, security and funds.

• The Free Syrian Army should end their suicidal resistance and broker for peace, argues former UN diplomat Daniel Serwer in the Atlantic.

The Free Syria Army, an informal collection of anti-regime insurgents, is nowhere near able to protect the population. Their activities provoke the government and its unfree Army to even worse violence. It would be far better if defected soldiers worked for strictly defensive purposes, accompanying street demonstrators and rooting outagents provocateurs rather than suicidally contesting forces that are clearly stronger and better armed. A few automatic weapon rounds fired in the general direction of the artillery regiments bombarding Homs are going to help the artillery with targeting and do little else …

The opposition should ask for a ceasefire and the return of the Arab League observers, who clearly had a moderating influence on the activities of the regime. And, this time around, they should be beefed up with UN human rights observers. If the violence continues to spiral, the regime is going to win.

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