Armed conflict in Syria
(ANSAmed) - BEIRUT - France has today talked explicitly about the possibility of intervening with force in Syria to stave off the spread of what is now a civil war in some of the country's key regions, referring to Chapter 7 of the UN Charter and has talked once more about setting up a no-fly zone.
The United States, meanwhile, has resumed its pressure on Russia. ''Assad must leave, it is wrong to continue to support him,'' the White House has said.
In a country tormented by repression and clashes between rebels and government forces, news arrived this morning of a new massacre, with the latest victims an entire family, a mother and five children aged between 6 and less than 1 year old. The massacre took place north of Aleppo, close to the town of Afrin, a majority Kurdish area.
Medical sources from the anti-regime Local Coordination Committees have identified the victims, whose bodies were brutally mutilated. Around a hundred kilometres to the south-west, in the coastal region of Latakia, the government army has taken control of Haffa, a town of 55,000 people, both Sunnis and Christians, which is surrounded by villages inhabited by the Alawite community, the branch of Shia Islam to which the ruling Assad family belongs. ''The area of Haffa has been cleared of armed terrorists who had entered from Turkey,'' official media in Damascus said. Local representatives of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA), meanwhile, said that 200 of their number had last night withdrawn from Haffa to prevent a new massacre of civilians.
''More than half of the inhabitants of Haffa, where the freshly resigned Interior Minister Muhammad Shaar is from, have fled,'' Nidal Haffawi, the pseudonym of a local activist, told ANSA through Skype. ''Assad's army has bombed the city for 8 days with heavy artillery and military helicopters,'' he added. In a clear attempt by the Damascus authorities to deny any responsibility for the incident and to deny its involvement in the partial destruction of the town (where 54 people have so far been killed, with dozens more missing), the Foreign Ministry has this evening officially invited observers ''to travel to Haffa to see what the situation is like''. The French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius, meanwhile, has said explicitly that there is a need to ''resort to Chapter 7 of the UN Charter to make Kofi Annan's plan obligatory''. As the Foreign Ministry in Paris has done repeatedly in recent months, Fabius also mooted the implementation of a no-fly zone. (ANSAmed).
