They said the meeting be should held at foreign ministers’ level and discuss the humanitarian situation in Syria, and study ways “to stop the bloodshed and machine of violence,” they said.

Meanwhile, the Syrian army met armed resistance in two towns on Thursday, with activists reporting 19 killed in clashes, as the EU decided on a new set of sanctions on President Bashar Assad’s regime.

In an attempt by the regime to show it still had the upper hand, the government took journalists on a tour of a central town where the most serious insurrection in recent weeks drew a crushing response. Many buildings in Rastan were burned, shops were shuttered and soldiers manned military checkpoints.

Several residents told of gunmen who they said terrorized the area. And government escorts displayed rifles and other light weapons they insisted had been seized from gangs or terrorists, rather than army defectors.

Despite the spiraling violence and continuing protests, Assad said Syria has “passed the most difficult period” and is now working to become “a model to be followed in the region.”

In the latest clashes, troops stormed the northwestern town of Binnish with more than 50 vehicles on Thursday. The sound of explosions and gunfire could be heard. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and another activist group, the Local Coordination Committees, said five people were killed.

Rami Abdul-Rahman, who heads the observatory, said six soldiers and two defectors were also killed Thursday in the southern village of Harra in Daraa province, where the uprising began. He said an army force appears to have been ambushed in Harra’s main square.

Britain’s foreign ministry, meanwhile, summoned Syria’s ambassador to London on Thursday to protest alleged intimidation of Syrian dissidents in Britain, Foreign Secretary William Hague said.

Ambassador Sami Khiyami was told “any harassment or intimidation of Syrians in our country is unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” Hague told Parliament.

The US embassy in Damascus has hit back at apparent glee in the Syrian state media over the Occupy Wall Street movement sweeping the United States, posting a Facebook lesson on democracy. On its official Facebook page, the embassy took a thinly veiled jibe at the regime of Assad, saying that, while there is dissatisfaction in America over the economy, that did not translate into police shooting “thousands of protesters” or demonstrators being tortured. The message referred to the fierce government crackdown against pro-democracy demonstrations that erupted in Syria in March.

“Some Occupy Wall Street organizers have been arrested for disturbing public order (blocking traffic) but they won’t be tortured, and no family will receive the body of a protester bearing torture marks,” read the embassy post that highlighted eight points differentiating how the US government reacts to protests as compared to Syria.

“Occupy Wall Street groups... can say whatever they want about the US government without being arrested or shot,” it said.