BEIRUT — Syrian soldiers battled anti-government rebels in half of the country’s 14 provinces on Monday, three days before a United Nations-backed cease-fire is to take effect, anti-government activists said. More than 100 people were killed across the country Monday,
BEIRUT — Syrian soldiers battled anti-government rebels in half of the country’s 14 provinces on Monday, three days before a United Nations-backed cease-fire is to take effect, anti-government activists said. More than 100 people were killed across the country Monday, according to the activists.
A spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, reached by phone in Damascus, said the surge in violence in recent days had worsened conditions for tens of thousands of civilians who are in desperate need of safe shelter and food.
“Humanitarian needs are growing because of the unrest,” said the spokeswoman, Rabab al-Rifai.
Activists in the central Syrian city of Hama reported 29 civilians killed by shelling in Latemneh, a village where activists reported more than 70 people were killed on Saturday. Twenty-five of the victims in Latemneh on Monday were women and children, activists said.
The Syrian government has largely prevented foreign reporters from entering Syria to cover the violence, and the activists’ claims could not be confirmed independently. But refugees fleeing to Turkey in recent days have described a stepped-up campaign ahead of the cease-fire against anti-government rebels and activists that has included the use of helicopter gunships and tanks.
Under the deal, brokered by the United Nations’ special envoy for Syria, former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the government is to begin withdrawing tanks and troops from restive cities on Tuesday, with rebel forces ceasing combat by Thursday. But doubts about whether the cease-fire actually would go into effect were raised Sunday when Syria said its commitment was contingent on a written guarantee from rebel groups that they would put down their weapons. Most analysts believe that condition is impossible to meet because of the decentralized nature of the rebellion.
The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Monday that 801 people had died in Syrian violence since President Bashar Assad agreed to the peace plan March 27. The report did not break down the full list of casualties, but it said the number included 22 members of the Syrian military and 100 women and children.
The Syrian state news agency SANA announced that funeral services took place Monday for 15 soldiers and 10 police officers who’d been killed in fighting with rebels outside Damascus, the capital, and in the provinces of Daraa, Lattakia, Aleppo, Idlib and Deir Ezzor. Separately, SANA reported that nine police officers and an army lieutenant had been killed by gunfire in the al-Sukkari region of Aleppo.
Since March 28, SANA has published the names of 90 police officers and soldiers who it said had died in combat with anti-government groups.
Also on Monday, New York-based Human Rights Watch released a report detailing more than 100 extrajudicial executions by Syrian government troops and pro-government militias known locally as “shabiha,” or “ghosts,” while International Committee of the Red Cross spokeswoman al-Rifai said the Syrian government has agreed to give the ICRC access to some of the 20,000 prisoners believed to have been swept up since anti-government unrest began a year ago.
Activists and former prisoners have said torture is routine in the prisons. Al-Rifai said the Syrian agreement to Red Cross visits had come last week. “We expect (the ICRC visits) will begin in late April or the beginning of May with visits to Aleppo Central Prison,” she said.
The victims of the executions described in the Human Rights Watch report were 85 civilians and 16 captured and or wounded members of the Free Syrian Army, the name taken by most of the lightly armed and highly localized groups of army defectors and volunteers who have taken up arms. Human Rights Watch said it focused only on cases where its researchers were able to directly interview eyewitnesses. Activists say the number of such executions is much larger.
“It’s definitely not exhaustive,” Nadim Houry, the director of Human Rights Watch’s Beirut office, said of the study, which included cases from around the central Syrian city of Homs and the northern city of Idlib. “It is probably happening in other places as well. There seems to be an ingrained culture of impunity amongst the army and the security forces.”
“You have to wait until people enter a neighboring country or get to somewhere it’s safe enough in Syria to speak with them,” he said.
Increasingly, no areas inside the country appear to be fully held by the rebels, a major reversal of anti-Assad fortunes since the beginning of February, when the government began its current campaign to drive rebel groups out of their strongholds.
The military, however, appears not to have been able fully to dislodge rebels from Homs, where it has been chasing now-smaller bands of rebels from one neighborhood to another and relying on heavy shelling rather than on-the-ground military operations.
Frequently since armed combat began last fall, government troops have raided areas and arrested or brutalized local populations, only to see the guerrillas move to the countryside or regroup elsewhere.
