By AL ARABIYA, 21 March 2012 – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday sent out a warning to Syria’s embattled President Bashar al-Assad to carry out a U.N. plan to secure peace in the crisis-swept country or face “increasing pressure.”
“To President Assad and his regime, we say, along with the rest of the international community, take this path, commit to it, or face increasing pressure and isolation,” Clinton told reporters.
The U.S. official spoke after a United Nations statement was released a statement calling on “the Syrian government and opposition to work in good faith with the envoy towards a peaceful settlement of the Syrian crisis and to implement fully and immediately his initial six-point proposal.”
Clinton said that the long-divided UN Security Council has taken “a positive step” after it adopted a statement demanding that Syria immediately implement a peace plan proposed by former secretary general Kofi Annan.
Clinton called for the plan to be implemented by “all Syrians who love their country and respect its history and understand the tremendous potential that working together provides.”
Meanwhile, U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan also urged Syria on Wednesday to “respond positively” to the UN Security Council’s peace plan, which he had put to Assad earlier this month.
The special envoy also sought the release of people detained over the past year of the uprising against Assad in which the U.N. says well over 8,000 people have been killed.
On Wednesday, Local Coordinating Committees reported that 70 people had been killed by security force gunfire across Syria.
Syrian army troops rained shells on the Homs district of Khaldiyeh on Wednesday, as the casualty toll from two days of bombardment rose to at least 19 dead and dozens wounded, activists said.
“Khaldiyeh is being bombed, with shells and rockets, for a second day,” Hadi Abdullah of the Syrian Revolution General Commission told AFP, reached by telephone from Beirut.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said at least five civilians were killed and dozens wounded in Wednesday’s shelling, a day after 14 civilians were killed in the same district.
It said two children were among the latest deaths.
“Every five minutes from 8 am (0600 GMT), between three and seven shells have come crashing down,” said another witness, who added that casualties were dying in makeshift field clinics for lack of medical equipment.
Abdullah said he feared a repeat of the month-long battering that killed hundreds in the Baba Amr district of Homs before the army moved in on March 1 after a pullout by the Free Syrian Army (FSA), made up mostly of army deserters.
He said thousands of residents who fled Baba Amr and other neighbourhoods of the city in central Syria had taken refuge in Khaldiyeh, “the last front left” in Homs.
“Four or five families are crammed into each house. People are also sheltering in mosques and unfinished buildings,” he said.
Also in Homs, activists uncovered 39 bodies in the Rifai sector of town, said Abdullah. They had probably been killed at the same time as the 48 women and children whose mutilated bodies the FSA found in Homs on March 12.
At the time, the opposition charged it was a massacre carried out by government forces after their capture of Baba Amr, while Damascus said it was the work of “armed terrorist gangs,” which it blames for the year-long revolt.
Sixteen of the bodies in the latest find all came from the same family, said the activist on the ground.
The Observatory said four soldiers were killed on Wednesday in the Sultaniyeh district of the city, while four civilians had been also killed in the town of Talbisseh, in the province of Homs.