Arab League Aims to Increase Pressure on Syria
Energized by an overwhelming vote of support at the United Nations General Assembly, backers of an Arab League peace plan for Syria said Friday that they were seeking new ways to aid opponents of President Bashar al-Assad and to ensure that an international conference in Tunisia next week puts additional pressure on him to give up power.
The diplomatic momentum, seen in high-level meetings in Washington and Paris, came as thousands of anti-Assad Syrians, perhaps also emboldened by news of the General Assembly vote on Thursday, were reported to have demonstrated in the cities of Dara’a, Aleppo, Idlib, Hama and the suburbs of Damascus after Friday Prayer.
The Local Coordination Committees, an activist group in Syria, reported that pro-Assad forces in those cities as well as the embattled central city of Homs fired on some demonstrators and killed at least 56 people around the country, including 12 deserters from the military. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, another activist group, said 26 people had been killed.
The information from the groups could not be corroborated because of the government’s restriction on outside information-gathering in the increasingly violent conflict, which has taken on the trappings of a civil war with a fractious and disorganized opposition.
Mr. Assad, who has belittled his opponents by characterizing them as foreign-backed armed terrorist gangs, sharply escalated the repression on Feb. 4 when Russia and China vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning his crackdown and calling on him to step aside under an Arab League plan. The plan calls for new elections and a new government.
Exasperated by the veto, Arab diplomats, with wide support in the West and elsewhere, then moved to put the same plan to a vote on Thursday, over Syria’s objections, in a resolution at the General Assembly. It won, 137 to 12, and amounts to the strongest global rebuke Mr. Assad has faced so far.