Russia contributing to potential Syria civil war - US
Hillary Clinton: "The Syrians are not going to
listen to us. They will listen maybe to the Russians, so we have to keep
pushing them"
The US Secretary of State says Russian policy will contribute to a potential civil war in Syria.
Hillary Clinton's comments came after Russia and China renewed opposition to tougher UN Security Council action.UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has repeated a warning that Syria could be moving towards "catastrophic" civil war, in the wake of the Houla massacre.
Rebel commanders are split on whether to abandon a ceasefire if Syrian forces do not withdraw to barracks.
The FSA's Colonel Qassim Saadeddine in Homs said that if there was no government response by Friday lunchtime the FSA would consider itself "no longer bound" by the plan.
But the FSA head, General Riyad Asaad, later denied the deadline existed.
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Analysis
The ceasefire exists in name only. Most people within Syria
don't think that the UN plan will work anyway. I think the threat to
lift the ceasefire by the Free Syrian Army will just mean business as
usual.
The Free Syrian Army, from what I could see, are under
enormous pressure. They're having to sell their furniture to buy
bullets. A few more serious weapons are trickling through: we believe
some anti-tank weapons reached the main holdout, the town of Rastan.
But these people are barely surviivng, and although they are
getting a trickle of defections I don't think they're in a position to
really cause the government serious trouble.
What we may get is a sectarian civil war, of village against village, and that is what is threatened by the Friday deadline.
Instead, he urged peace envoy Kofi Annan to issue a statement declaring his peace plan to have failed.
The BBC's Paul Wood, who has just returned from three weeks inside Syria, says there is no ceasefire holding on the ground.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has come under intensified
pressure to adhere to the ceasefire plan since the Houla massacre, in
which more than 100 people - many of them children - died.
Mrs Clinton, speaking on a visit to Denmark, said the case for military intervention was growing stronger every day.
"[The Russians] are telling me they don't want to see a civil
war. I have been telling them their policy is going to help to
contribute to a civil war," she told an audience in Copenhagen.
Mr Ban, speaking at a conference in Turkey, said UN monitors
had not been sent to Syria "just to bear witness to the slaughter of
innocents".
"We are not there to play the role of passive observer to unspeakable atrocities," he said.
"The massacre of civilians of the sort seen last weekend
could plunge Syria into catastrophic civil war - a civil war from which
the country would never recover."
Commander's ultimatum
Col Saadeddine's ultimatum, citing the Houla massacre, was
given in a video released online, in which he said the government had to
"implement an immediate ceasefire, withdraw its troops, tanks and
artillery from Syrian cities and villages".
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Taldou, Houla region
- The region of Houla, in the west of Syria, comprises several villages and small towns
- The village of Taldou lies around 2km south-west of the main town, also called Houla
- The area is in the province of Homs, which has seen heavy fighting in recent months
- Houla's villages are predominantly Sunni Muslim, but the region is ringed by a number of Alawite villages - the sect of the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad
"It should also allow immediate
humanitarian aid to all affected areas and free all detainees... The
regime should also enter into a real and serious negotiation through the
United Nations to hand over power to the Syrian people," he went on.
But Colonel Asaad, speaking to al-Jazeera by phone from Turkey, insisted the FSA was "committed to the Kofi Annan plan and committed to international resolutions and implementing this plan".
"There is no deadline; however, we hope that Kofi Annan will issue a statement to announce the failure of this plan," he said.
The UN Human Rights Council will hold a special session on Syria on Friday looking into the killings, officials said.
As many as 15,000 people have been killed since the revolt against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad began in March of last year.
COPIED FROM http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18278931
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