CAIRO: The Arab League said it agreed on Sunday to open contacts with Syria's opposition and to ask the United Nations to form a joint peacekeeping force to the unrest-swept country.
Arab diplomats “will open channels of communication with the Syrian opposition and offer full political and financial support, urging (the opposition) to unify its ranks,” it said in a statement obtained by AFP.
They would also “ask the UN Security Council to issue a decision on the formation of a joint UN-Arab peacekeeping force to oversee the implementation of a ceasefire,” it said.
After marathon talks in Cairo, the 22-member bloc also announced it had formally ended its own observer mission to Syria, which was suspended last month because of an upsurge in violence.
On the ground, activists reported that 14 people were killed in a relentless assault by forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on the central protest city of Homs.
All but one of them died in Baba Amr, a rebel stronghold in the city which armed forces have targeted for more than a week, killing at least 500 people, according to activists.
It also reported fierce clashes on the northern edge of nearby Rastan, where a woman was killed when a rocket hit her home. Elsewhere, snipers shot dead a child in Daraa, cradle of the 11-month uprising against Assad's regime.
“Tank and mortar fire intensified on Sunday afternoon,” the Observatory's Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP, adding the humanitarian situation was worsening.
“There is a shortage of bread in some areas.”The Local Coordination Committees, an activist network on the ground, provided a link to a YouTube video showing crowds gathered outside the only bakery in one part of Homs.
As the military pressed its onslaught on Homs, refugees who fled to Lebanon from the flashpoint city recounted the horrors they had witnessed.
“The army of Bashar al-Assad destroyed our homes,” one of them, Abu Ibrahim, told AFP. “Before, we were bombarded by mortars or rocket-propelled grenades, but now they are using tanks and helicopters.”Ibrahim said that his 10-year-old daughter Nada has refused to eat since seeing dead bodies littering the streets of the besieged city.
But the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and International Committee of the Red Cross said their “volunteers are distributing food, medical supplies, blankets, and hygiene consumables to thousands of people” in Homs.
“We are greatly concerned about the consequences of the unrest from a humanitarian viewpoint and about the current deterioration of the situation,”said the ICRC's Marianne Gasser.
“The population, particularly the wounded and sick, are bearing the brunt of the violence,” she said in the statement.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon had broached the idea of a joint Arab-UN mission this month as he bemoaned the Security Council's failure to agree a resolution on the crisis in the face of Chinese and Russian opposition.
The pan-Arab bloc has already put forward a plan for Assad to transfer power to his deputy and for a government of national unity to be formed ahead of elections.
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