BEIRUT/DAMASCUS/ISTANBUL: Syrian opposition activists say government forces are pounding rebellious areas in the central province of Homs and that the shelling there has so far killed 38 people.
The activists say nine people have been killed in Homs yesterday alone. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and other activists say six people died in the shelling of the province's town of Qusair, near the border with Lebanon.
Three others were killed in the town of Talbiseh, north of Homs city. On Saturday, 29 people died in violence across Homs, according to activists.
Syrian troops have been shelling opposition strongholds in a renewed push to regain control of those areas as the rebels grow bolder in their attacks on the Syrian military.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague said yesterday the situation in Syria resembles that of Bosnia in the 1990s.
He said Syria seemed on the edge of collapse into sectarian civil war, as he refused to rule out the option of military intervention.
"We don't know how things are going to develop. Syria is on the edge of a collapse or of a sectarian civil war, and so I don't think we can rule anything out," Hague told Sky News television.
"But it is not so much like Libya last year, where we had, of course, a successful intervention to save lives.
"It is looking more like Bosnia in the 1990s, of being on the edge of a sectarian conflict in which neighboring villages are attacking and killing each other," Hague said. The Syrian opposition's new leader said yesterday that President Bashar Assad's regime was on its "last legs," even as Russia warned it would block any move at the UN to use force against its ally. Britain declined to rule out military intervention, despite the strong opposition of China and Russia, as the death toll from the more than 15-month uprising topped 14,100, according to a human rights watchdog. "We are entering a sensitive phase. The regime is on its last legs," Kurdish activist Abdel Basset Sayda said shortly after he was named as the new leader of the opposition Syrian National Council. The new leader exiled opposition called yesterday on all members of the Damascus regime to defect amid raging violence that has claimed thousands of lives. "We call upon all officials in the regime and in the institutions to defect from the regime," Sayda told a news conference in Istanbul. Sayda also reached out to minority groups in Syria, following criticism of the SNC for failing to represent the country's full array of ethnic and religious groups including Arabs, Kurds, Sunni Muslims, Alawites, Christians, Druze and others.
"We would like to reassure all sects and groups, especially Alawites and Christians, that the future of Syria will be for the all of us," he said. "There will be no discrimination based on gender or sects. The new Syria will be a democratic state."
Sayda, a Kurdish activist, was elected as the SNC's new leader at a conference here, replacing the opposition's first leader, Paris-based academic Burhan Ghalioun, who stepped down last month in the face of mounting splits that were undermining the group's credibility.
Separately, gunmen abducted yesterday four Syrian Alawites and a Shiite along the border with Syria after a Lebanese was kidnapped in the same region, a security official and witnesses said.
