BEIRUT (AP) — The head of the U.N. observer mission in Syria on Sunday called on President Bashar Assad and the country’s opposition to stop fighting and allow a tenuous cease-fire to take hold.
Maj. Gen. Robert Mood spoke after arriving in the Syrian capital, Damascus, to take charge of an advance team of 16 U.N. monitors trying to salvage an international peace plan to end the country’s 13-month-old crisis. Under the plan, a cease-fire is supposed to lead to talks between Mr. Assad and the opposition on a political solution to a conflict that has killed more than 9,000 people.
Gen. Mood told reporters that the 300 observers the U.N. has authorized for the mission “cannot solve all the problems” in Syria, and he asked for cooperation from forces loyal to Mr. Assad as well as rebels seeking to end his rule.
“We want to have combined efforts focusing on the welfare of the Syrian people,” Gen. Mood said. “True cessation of violence in all its forms.”
The cease-fire began unraveling almost as soon as it went into effect April 12. The regime has kept up its attacks on opposition strongholds, while rebel fighters have continued to ambush government security forces. Defying a major truce provision, the Syrian military has failed to withdraw tanks and soldiers from the streets.
Despite the violence, the truce still enjoys the support of the international community, largely because it views the plan as the last chance to prevent the country from falling into civil war — in part because it does not want to intervene militarily.
Most analysts, however, say the plan has little chance of succeeding, though it could temporarily bring down the level of daily violence.
That has largely been the case in Homs, Syria’s third largest city, which has emerged as the heart of the uprising. Regime forces pounded parts of Homs for months, leaving large swaths of the city in ruins, before two U.N. monitors moved into an upscale hotel there last week.
Since then, the level of violence has dropped, although gunbattles still frequently break out. An amateur video posted online Saturday showed the observers walking through a heavily damaged neighborhood, where residents collected a body lying in the street and put it in the back of a pickup truck.
Gen. Mood, a Norwegian, was appointed head of the observer mission by U.N. Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon. One hundred monitors should be in the country by mid-May, said mission spokesman Neeraj Singh. It is unclear when or if the full contingent of 300 monitors authorized by the U.N. will deploy to Syria.
Gen. Mood brings a wealth of Middle East experience to the job, including stints with U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon in 1989-90 and as the head of a U.N. peacekeeping mission known as UNTSO in 2009-11. That mission was the U.N’s first-ever peacekeeping operation and began after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war to monitor a cease-fire. The United Nations now monitors cease-fires around the Middle East.
The Syrian state news agency said observers visited the embattled Homs neighborhood of Khaldiyeh on Sunday, but it provided no further information.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said government snipers shot dead two people in the neighborhood of Joret al-Shayah, which borders Khaldiyeh.
The group, which relies on a network of activist in Syria, also said one civilian was killed and four wounded in random gunfire by security forces in the village of al-Saliha in the central Hama province.
Mr. Ban has blamed the regime for widespread violations of the truce — prompting Syria to fire back that his comments were “outrageous” and to accuse him of bias.
The spat has further stoked concerns among the Syrian opposition and its Western supporters that Mr. Assad is merely playing for time to avoid compliance with a plan that — if fully implemented — likely would sweep him out of office.
Associated Press writer Albert Aji contributed reporting from Damascus.
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