AFP/Cairo


Protesters hold a placard reading “Get out” as they take part in a demonstration in solidarity with the Syrian people yesterday in Tunis
Opposition Syrian National Council leaders yesterday pressed the Arab League to turn the Syria crisis over to the UN, but the League looked set to extend its own observer mission, criticised for its failure to stem 10 months of killing.
SNC chief Burhan Ghaliun met Arab League head Nabil al-Arabi in Cairo and lobbied against an extension of the monitoring mission, SNC spokeswoman Basma Qadmani said.
The SNC wants “the transfer of the Syria file to the UN Security Council”, spokesman Mohamed Sermini told AFP in Cairo, accusing the Damascus regime of “committing genocide and crimes against humanity”.
But the Arab League is expected to extend its mission, even boosting the number of observers deployed, after foreign ministers today hear a report on the mission’s first month of work.
An official of the observer mission, on condition of anonymity, said its numbers would be almost doubled to 300.
The report will be delivered by the mission’s chief, General Mohamed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi of Sudan, who believes his mandate needs to be strengthened, not scrapped, a League official said.
Deputy chief of operations Ali Jarush said Dabi is satisfied with its achievements so far and that “everything indicates the observer mission in Syria will be extended by a month”.
“Dabi sees that in the last phase the necessary thrust (of the operation) was achieved after more monitors were deployed and fanned across 20 areas and after they were provided with equipment and logistics which they previously lacked,” he said.
But the SNC charged that Dabi’s report will not be credible.
Addressing journalists, Ghaliun said he told Arabi that the conditions under which the observers were forced to work “do not allow it to present an objective report, reflecting the actual situation in Syria”.
The League’s staff were escorted around Syria by government troops.
Ahead of today’s Cairo meetings, the killings in Syria continued.
A roadside bomb yesterday killed 15 detainees being transported in a prison truck in Idlib province in the northwest, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The Britain-based group said members of the security forces were also wounded in the blast, which Syria’s official Sana news agency blamed on an “armed terrorist group”.
Separately, nine government troops were killed during clashes with dissident soldiers near a military roadblock in the central city of Maaret Numan, the Observatory reported, citing a dissident source.
One deserter was also killed in the clash, according to the group, which also said a member of the security forces died while fighting dissidents at Kfarnebel in Idlib’s Zawiya mountains.
The Observatory said security forces shot dead four civilians near Damascus as they opened fire on a crowd attending a funeral.
Security forces also killed three members of a “terrorist group” on Friday night as they tried to infiltrate the Tal Kala area from neighbouring Lebanon, Sana said.
The rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA), trying to boost co-ordination between disparate groups of dissident fighters, said yesterday it feared the government would attack Zabadani, a rebel-held town northeast of Damascus.
Major Maher Nueimi, an FSA spokesman, said the rebel force does not have the necessary arsenal to confront the regime’s troops directly, and that it was concerned about defending Zabadani’s residents.
On Syria’s maritime border with Lebanon, a 14-year-old Lebanese boy was shot and fatally wounded after gunmen opened fire on a fishing boat, his father and a local official said.
The incident, condemned by Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, sparked a protest where demonstrators burned tyres and sealed off a Syrian border post in northern Lebanon.
The UN estimates that more than 5,400 people have been killed in Syria since anti-regime demonstrations erupted in March.
A key Syrian opposition activist, Suhair al-Atassi, meanwhile, said she left her homeland last November having spent seven months in hiding, and has been living in France, the website Mediapart reported.