New Syria envoy on ‘impossible mission’

Syrian forces pounded opposition hubs in the northern city of Aleppo and battled opposition fighters around Damascus yesterday, activists said, as the UN reported a surge in the number of people fleeing.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, meanwhile, called for President Bashar Assad’s regime to be “smashed fast” as he visited Turkey’s largest refugee camp near the border.
“After hearing the refugees and their account of the massacres of the regime, Assad doesn’t deserve to be on this earth,” he said.
Violence was also reported in other towns and villages across Syria, with the bloodletting showing no signs of any let-up a day after the UN formally called time on its observer mission.
Despite the imminent departure of the observers, the UN announced that veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi will take over as international envoy from Kofi Annan, who quit earlier this month.
Brahimi, who hesitated for days to accept a job that France’s UN envoy Gerard Araud called an “impossible mission,” will have a new title, Joint Special Representative for Syria. Diplomats said the change was to distance himself from Kofi Annan.
UN aid agencies said Syrians are pouring across the borders to escape fighting in their homeland and diarrheal disease has broken out in rural areas near Damascus.
More than 170,000 Syrians have been registered in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, the UN refugee agency said.
Some 3,500 Syrians fleeing Aleppo, Azaz, Idlib and Latakia reached Turkey’s Hatay and Kilis provinces between Tuesday and Wednesday, spokesman Adrian Edwards of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said.
“There has been a further sharp rise in the number of Syrians fleeing to Turkey,” Edwards said. “There are now almost 65,000 Syrians in nine camps in Turkey, though not all yet formally registered. To put this in perspective, about 40 percent arrived in August.”
Some 1.2 million people are uprooted within the country, many staying in schools or other public buildings, UNHCR said.

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