Worsening Syria war drives civilians from homes

BEIRUT/GENEVA (Reuters) - Many Syrian civilians are fleeing their homes to escape widening fighting between security forces and rebels, the Red Cross said on Friday, while major powers seemed unable to craft an alternative to envoy Kofi Annan's failing peace plan.

U.N. monitors tried again to reach the scene of a reported massacre that has underlined how little outside powers, divided and pursuing their own interests in the region, have been able to do to halt 15 months of carnage in Syria.

A day after one team was shot at and turned back, a member of the U.N. mission said another group of monitors was heading for the hamlet of Mazraat al-Qubeir, where opposition activists say 78 people were shot, stabbed or burned alive on Wednesday.

Some 300 U.N. observers are in Syria to monitor a truce between President Bashar al-Assad's forces and rebels that Annan declared on April 12 but was never implemented. Now reduced to observing the violence, they have already verified one massacre in Houla, a town where 108 men, women and children were slain on May 25.

The Syrian authorities have condemned the killings in Houla and Mazraat al-Qubeir, blaming them on "terrorists".

More and more civilians are fleeing their homes to escape fighting, while sick or wounded people are finding it hard to reach medical services or buy food, said a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva.

"The situation is rather tense in terms of fighting in many, many areas of Syria," Hicham Hassan added.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the General Assembly on Thursday a civil war was imminent and that "terrorists are exploiting the chaos" in Syria, adding that hopes of implementing Annan's plan were fading.

Annan himself warned the U.N. Security Council that the crisis could soon fly out of control, diplomats said. Annan, Ban's predecessor as U.N. secretary-general, called for "substantial pressure" on Damascus to stop the violence.

Given the failure of Annan's six-point plan, which called for talks on a political transition as well as a ceasefire and humanitarian access, there is little to check the violence, now often sectarian in nature, pitting Assad's minority Alawites against the Sunni Muslim majority.

DEADLY VIOLENCE

Protests and strife erupted across Syria on Friday, a day after 31 people were killed and the state news agency announced the burials of 29 soldiers and security men killed by rebels.

A car bomb aimed at a bus carrying security men exploded in a Damascus suburb, killing at least two, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights watchdog said.

Another car bomb hit a police branch in the northwestern city of Idlib, killing at least five people, it said.

Syrian forces shelled and then tried to storm the rebel-held district of Khalidiya in the central city of Homs, the heart of the revolt against Assad, the British-based Observatory said.

Activists said the shelling of Khalidiya was the fiercest yet to hit Homs, with up to ten rockets a minute striking the neighborhood. Videos uploaded to the internet showed columns of grey smoke rising into the air.

No death toll was available, but the Observatory said most residents had fled the area during previous bombardments.

In Deraa, the southern birthplace of the uprising, Syrian forces pounded rebel hideouts in the rugged Luja area, after many soldiers had defected, activists and residents said.

"The Syrian people are bleeding," Ban said at the United Nations. "The danger of a civil war is imminent and real."

There is little sign of the firm action he called for from a world divided between Assad's opponents and countries like China, Russia and Iran which are deeply suspicious of Western and Arab states determined to unseat the Syrian leader.

China urged both sides to comply with Annan's peace plan, which Assad and rebel forces had verbally accepted. "The support of all sides for the envoy Annan should strengthen, rather than weaken," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said.

Russia and China have twice vetoed Western-backed Security Council resolutions critical of Syria, whose security forces have killed at least 10,000 people, by a U.N. count, while losing more than 2,600 of their own, according to Damascus.

DIPLOMATIC DEADLOCK

Moscow and Beijing have decried the killings of civilians, but resist any plan for coerced political transition, let alone military intervention - not that the West is ready for this.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was to meet Annan in Washington later on Friday, has said the United States is willing to work with all Council members on a conference on Syria's political future, but made clear that Assad must go and his government be replaced with a democratic one.

She has criticized the idea, favored by Annan and Moscow, of a contact group that would bring together major powers as well as regional ones, including Iran, a strategic ally of Assad with much at stake in Syria and neighboring Lebanon.

A senior U.S. State Department official, Fred Hof, held talks with Russian Deputy Foreign Ministers Gennady Gatilov and Mikhail Bogdanov in Moscow, in what U.S. officials say is part of efforts to get Russia to agree to a political transition that would include Assad's departure from power.

Bogdanov has said Moscow would accept a Yemen-style power transition in Syria if it were decided by the people, referring to a deal under which Yemeni leader Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down in February after a year of unrest.

In Syria, the conflict is becoming much more sectarian than the one in Yemen. The shabbiha militiamen from Assad's Shi'ite-rooted Alawite sect appear to be off the leash, targeting Sunni civilians almost regardless of their part in the uprising.

Activists said those killed in Mazraat al-Qubeir had not previously been caught up in the conflict.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Syria was on the edge of "deep sectarian violence" pitting village against village, reminiscent of Bosnia in the 1990s - when the world also struggled to respond effectively to mass slaughter.

(Additional reporting by Dominic Evans in Beirut, Suleiman al-Khalidi and Khaled Yacoub Oweis in Amman, Steve Gutterman in Moscow, Arshad Mohammed in Istanbul; Peter Griffiths in London, Andrew Quinn at the United Nations and Chris Buckley in Beijing; Writing by Alistair Lyon, editing by Tim Pearce)

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