U.N.-Arab League peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said Wednesday he hoped China would play an active role in helping to end violence in Syria as he met Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi for talks in Beijing.
As many as 163 people have been killed by the fire of Syrian forces across the country on Tuesday, activists at the Local Coordination Committees said. They said that the deaths include 13 children and seven women, mostly in Idlib and Damascus.
Greeting Yang at the foreign ministry in front of reporters, he said he hoped “China can play an active role in solving the events in Syria” without elaborating further.
China is generally suspicious of intervention in the internal affairs of other nations, with state media last month accusing Western powers of hampering efforts to end the conflict.
Both China and Russia have exercised their veto in the U.N. Security Council to block resolutions aimed at putting more pressure on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Meeting Brahimi on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York last month, Yang reaffirmed this stance, saying that “political dialogue is the only correct way to tackle this issue,” according to AFP.
Any political transition must be led by the people of Syria and not imposed by outside forces, he said.
Brahimi, who succeeded former United Nations chief Kofi Annan after he quit over what he called a lack of international support, is due to present new proposals for resolving the conflict to the U.N. Security Council next month.
His two-day visit to China, which ends Wednesday, came after he met Russia’s foreign minister in Moscow and described the conflict, now in its 19th month after a failed four-day truce last week, as going from bad to worse.
Meanwhile, activists added that the Free Syrian Army seized the Syrian Co. for Oil in Aleppo.
Airstrikes by Syrian jets and shells from tanks leveled a neighborhood in a restive city near the capital of Damascus on Tuesday, The Associated Press reported.
The airstrikes on the city of Duma, northeast of the capital, left residents scampering over a huge expanse of rubble and using their hands to dig up mangled bodies, according to activist videos posted online.
Scenes of vast destruction like those from Duma on Tuesday have grown more common as rebels seeking to topple President Assad have made gains on the ground, and Assad’s forces have responded with overwhelming air power.
In the past weeks, anti-regime activists say about 150 people have been killed a day in fighting. Since the uprising against Assad began in March 2011, they say 35,000 have died.
Tuesday’s airstrikes came a day after what activists called the heaviest and most widespread bombing campaign nationwide, on what was to be the final day of an internationally sanctioned truce that never took hold.
The death toll for what was supposed to be a four-day cease-fire ending Monday exceeded 500.
Activists speculated that the government’s heavy reliance on air power reflected its inability to roll back rebel gains, especially in the north of the country near the border with Turkey, where rebels have control of swathes of territory.
The international community remains at a loss about how to stop the Syria violence. The U.S. and other Western and Arab nations have called on Assad to step down, while Russia, China and Iran continue to back him.
Amateur videos posted online showed a deep, rubble-filled crater in the middle of what appeared to be a poor neighborhood, with many walls collapsed in the blast.
Men were seen chanting “God is great!” while pulling a mangled body from the rubble in one video. They used their hands to dig through cinder blocks and cement dust in another to uncover another dead body.
In yet another video, a man standing in the destruction yells at the camera, “These are the accomplishments of Lakhdar Brahimi,” referring to the international envoy who proposed the recent, failed cease-fire.
Regime airstrikes also collapsed buildings in the rebel-held northern city of Maaret al-Numan, which straddles a key supply route from the capital to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and a main front in the civil war.
Assad’s regime has been hammering away at Maaret al-Numan, 80 kilometers (50 miles) southwest of Aleppo, with heavy airstrikes since it fell to rebels on Oct. 10.
One amateur video purporting to show the aftermath of an airstrike on Tuesday showed a man holding up the dead body of a small girl in a red and white shirt and baby blue pants. Other videos showed men carrying bloodied women and children from destroyed buildings.
One video showed the bodies of three girls wrapped in white shrouds. Nearby, a man dripped water on the face of a dead older man with a white beard, saying: “Go to heaven, dad. May God take revenge.”
Activist claims and videos could not be independently verified because of restrictions on reporting in Syria, but the videos appeared genuine and corresponded with other AP reporting on the events depicted.
Violence also flared elsewhere in and around Damascus. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said missiles fired from a fighter jet struck the capital’s Jobar neighborhood -- a rare hit in the capital’s municipal area. Most of the fighting around Damascus for the past few months has been in suburbs and outskirts, where rebels have managed to challenge the regime.
Syria’s state news agency said an “armed terrorist group” assassinated a high-ranking air force general. Maj. Gen. Abdullah Mahmoud al-Khalidi was gunned down while getting out of his car in the mostly Kurdish neighborhood of Rukn Eddine in Damascus.
The government views the rebels as terrorists and accuses them of being foot soldiers in a foreign plot to destroy Syria.
In Turkey, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu expressed “great sadness” that the cease-fire had failed and said government was done talking to Assad’s regime.
“Unfortunately the attacks continued, and the Syrian people spent the holidays suffering great pain,” Davutoglu told reporters in Ankara. “There would be no meaning to forging a dialogue with a regime that pressed ahead with such a massacre even during the holidays.”
Comments »