Syrian tanks move to bombard defector hideouts in Rastan

The most recent death toll for Syrian protestors has been pegged at 33 Arab foreign ministers gathered in Cairo on Thursday to discuss imposing sanctions on Syria for failing to implement an Arab League plan to end a crackdown on protests against President Bashar al-Assad.
The League, which for decades has spurned ordering action against a member state, has suspended Syria and threatened unspecified sanctions for ignoring the deal it had signed up to.
Syria has turned its tanks and troops on civilian protesters, as well as on armed insurgents challenging Assad’s 11-year rule. The United Nations says more than 3,500 people have been killed.
“Syria has not offered anything to move the situation forward,” said a senior Arab diplomat at the League, adding that it was considering what kind of sanctions to impose.
“The position of the Arab states is almost unified. We all agree ... that the situation does not lead to civil war and that no foreign intervention takes place,” he said.
On the November 12 agreement to suspend Syria was backed by 18 of the pan-Arab organisation’s 22 members. Lebanon, where Syria for many years had a military presence, and Yemen, battling its own uprising, opposed it. Iraq, whose Shi'ite-led government is wary of offending Syria's main ally Iran, abstained.
Arab ministers were meeting in a Cairo suburb instead of the League's headquarters in Tahrir Square, occupied by protesters after days of clashes with police in nearby streets.
The death toll from a new surge of violence in Syrian flashpoints has risen to at least 33, activists said Wednesday, adding that among the dead are six children and teenagers and five army defectors.
Syrian activists claimed eleven people, including a child, have been killed by the security forces on Wednesday alone.
The United Nations says more than 3,500 people, most of them civilians, have been killed since the protests first broke out in mid-March.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, Syrian tanks bombarded hideouts of army defectors near the central town of Rastan, a resident and activists said, two months after the authorities said they had regained control of the important region on the Damascus-Aleppo highway.
Activists said around 50 tanks and armored vehicles fired anti-aircraft guns and machineguns into farmland on the edge of Rastan, 20 km (12 miles) north of the restive city of Homs.
The town was scene at the end of October of the first major fighting between troops loyal to the president and army defectors in the eight-month uprising against his rule.
In related news, France renewed its support for humanitarian corridors in Syria on Thursday but said such a move would have to either be agreed by Damascus or come under an international mandate.
Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Wednesday that France would ask its EU partners to consider the idea of setting up protected escape routes for Syrian civilians fleeing the Syrian regime.
He told France Inter radio on Thursday that there were two different scenarios for such a move.
“The first is that the international community, the United Nations, the Arab League, can obtain authorisation from the regime for the humanitarian corridors,” he said.
“If that wasn’t the case, we would have to consider other solutions. It is possible to protect convoys, but we are not there yet,” he said.
“For us no humanitarian intervention is possible without an international mandate,” he said, adding that an international military intervention in Syria was not yet being considered.
Juppe met Wednesday in Paris with the opposition Syrian National Council leader Burhan Ghaliun.
There have been reports that Turkey and NATO allies such as France are considering imposing a no-fly zone and a buffer zone on Syrian territory to give the opposition breathing space while it organises its revolt.
No official has gone this far, however, and Juppe’s statement was the first sign that something of the sort might be envisaged.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday became the second leader of a neighbouring country to call on Assad to step down, following a similar call by Jordan's King Abdullah II last week.
Later, the U.N. General Assembly’s human rights committee condemned Syria for its eight-month crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in a vote backed by Western nations and a number of Arab states.
The resolution was passed by 122 votes to 13 with 41 abstentions at the U.N. General Assembly’s human rights committee. Syria’s U.N. envoy accused the European backers of the resolution – Britain, France and Germany – of “inciting civil war.”
The resolution “strongly condemns the continued grave and systematic human rights violations by the Syrian authorities,” highlighting the “arbitrary executions” and “persecution” of protesters and human rights defenders.
It also condemns “arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, torture and ill treatment of detainees, including children” and demands an immediate end to all such violations.
Arab nations Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco and Qatar were among more than 60 countries to co-sponsor the resolution.
Russia and China, which vetoed a European-drafted resolution that would have condemned Syria in the U.N. Security Council last month, voted against it.
Syrian U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari said the resolution had no meaning for Damascus and portrayed it as a U.S.-inspired political move.
“This draft resolution has no relevance to human rights, other than it is part of an adversarial American policy against my country,” he  said.