PARIS: The French foreign minister said yesterday there was no sign the Syrian crisis was going to be resolved anytime soon, in contrast to his prediction last month that the end was near for Bashar Assad.
"Things are not moving. The solution that we had hoped for, and by that I mean the fall of Bashar and the arrival of the coalition to power, has not happened," Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said in his annual New Year's address to the press.
Meanwhile, Syrian troops shelled besieged districts of Homs yesterday as clashes raged for a fifth straight day in western areas of the “capital of the revolution”.
Thirty-one soldiers, 16 fighters and 26 civilians have been killed since Sunday in Homs, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a network of activists and medics across the country for its information.
Among those killed yesterday in the province of the same name were two children and a woman, the Britain-based monitoring group added.
The Syrian Revolution General Authority, a network of opposition activists on the ground, said regime troops used heavy artillery and clashed with Free Syrian Army (FSA) in a bid to storm the west side of the city.
The regime has “escalated its attack on Homs city and its environs in order to disperse the people on sectarian lines and achieve what it believes will be a final victory,” said the Syrian National Council, a key opposition group.
It “uses the most heinous criminal methods against human beings... shelling with heavy weaponry, blocking off areas to prevent the bare necessities — food, medicine — from entering, sending in sectarian militia,” the SNC charged.
It called for the “FSA all over Syria to aid their comrades in Homs with equipment and men” and for aid agencies to give priority to the trapped and displaced residents of Homs.
Elsewhere yesterday, a day after 109 people died in violence across Syria, air raids struck the embattled town of Daraya near Mazzeh airbase, southwest of Damascus, and fighter-held Yabrud to the northeast, the Observatory said.
More than 60,000 people have since been killed, according to the United Nations.
Meanwhile, embattled Bashar Assad attended prayers at a mosque in the capital yesterday, making a rare public appearance.
Assad joined prayers at Al-Afram mosque in a northern district of Damascus.
Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad, Hassan Danaie-Far, told AFP that Syria was unlikely to see peace this year. “I believe it is far-fetched,” he said.
However, “we have also noted there were some signals in the past one to two months,” he added of remarks by UN-Arab League peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi that he said Iran interpreted as marking the “end of the process of military options.”
Danaie-Far said he believed that not all men fighting Assad’s forces could be called “terrorists,” a term broadly used by the Syrian regime for its opponents.
