Death toll rises in Syria despite Arab League deadline | Ya Libnan | World News Live from Lebanon

Death toll rises in Syria despite Arab League deadline | Ya Libnan | World News Live from Lebanon

clipped from article:
SYRIA SAYS STILL STRONG

Clinton said the international community was reluctant, however, to intervene the same way it did in Libya, where NATO forces backed rebel groups who toppled Muammar Gaddafi.

“There is no appetite for that kind of action vis-à-vis Syria,” she said, pointing to moves by the Arab League and Turkey, who have stepped up diplomatic pressure on Syria and threatened to follow the West in implementing sanctions.

French Foreign minister Alain Juppe, alongside the Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutoglu, said France was ready to work with the Syrian opposition and that tougher sanctions were needed. Britain also said it was increasing its contacts with Assad opponents.

But Syria’s ambassador to Lebanon, Ali Abdulkarim Ali, argued that large pro-government rallies, which have also been organised regularly in recent weeks, showed that foreign pressure would not succeed in weakening the government.

“There is great optimism that Syria has the stronger hand and that international pressure will tumble in the face of Syrian national unity and (Syria’s) balance and responsible policies that have confronted all these challenges,” Ali was cited as saying in the Lebanese daily, al-Safir, on Saturday.

Damascus on Friday sought changes to a planned Arab League mission to monitor its implementation of the organisation’s plan for ending violence, which Syria argues it has been unable to fully enforce due to armed resistance.

The league’s secretary general, Nabil Elaraby said the organisation was studying a letter from Syria which “included amendments to the draft protocol regarding the legal status and duties of the monitoring mission.”

OVERNIGHT VIOLENCE

Late night raids by security forces on Friday killed some five residents in Homs and Albukamal, near the Iraqi border. Both towns have seen pro-democracy protests and also play host to armed groups of army defectors.

In Homs, which has become a centre of armed uprising but has also seen escalating sectarian violence, gunmen attacked a bus transporting workers and killed at least eleven, an activist told Reuters.

“It is likely because some of those workers were Alawites,” he said, referring to the minority religious sect to which the Assad family belongs.

A resident in Homs, who declined to be named, also told Reuters that defected soldiers attacked a car they said was carrying members of Air Force Intelligence, killing four.

The attack comes two days after opposition sources said the Free Syrian Army said it killed or wounded 20 security police in an assault on an Air Force Intelligence complex on the outskirts of Damascus, the first assault of its kind in the uprising.

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