BEIRUT/AMMAN/WASHINGTON: The United States urged Syrians Friday not to trust their government’s offer of a weapons amnesty as more deaths further tested the authority’s commitment to an Arab League plan aimed at ending months of bloodshed.

The Syrian government offered amnesty to anyone with weapons if they reported to police within a week, “as long as they did not commit any crimes of killing,” state television reported.

“The Interior Ministry calls on citizens who carried weapons, sold them, delivered them, transported them or funded buying them, and did not commit crimes, to hand themselves into the nearest police station,” it said.

“The Interior Ministry stresses that those who turn themselves in will then be freed immediately and it will be considered as a general amnesty,” it said.
The U.S. State Department advised Syrians Friday against turning themselves in to police.

“I wouldn’t advise anybody to turn themselves in to regime authorities at the moment,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters amid apparent concerns for the welfare of those who might do so.
Nuland, who said the Syrian government has so far failed to live up to a deal struck Wednesday with the Arab League to stop nearly eight months of violence, underlined her skepticism about the amnesty offer.

“This would be about the fourth amnesty that they’ve offered since I took this job about five months ago,” she told reporters.
“So we’ll see if it has any more traction than it’s had in the past.”

The gesture did not appear to be part of the Arab League plan, accepted by Syria Wednesday, under which security forces must leave the streets, political prisoners be released and dialogue with the opposition begin within two weeks.

Violence has, if anything, intensified since the agreement was announced, amid reports of sectarian killings.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 17 people were killed across Syria Friday, six of them in Homs.
Further north in Hama, four civilians were shot, while four people were killed in the town of Kanaker, outside the capital, and a protester was shot dead by security forces in Damascus.

Two more people were killed, one of them an army deserter, when troops opened fire on a group of people trying to slip across the border into Jordan, the Britain-based Observatory said.

Four policemen were also wounded, two critically, in clashes with an “armed terrorist group” in Kanaker, the state-run SANA news agency reported, adding that one of the gunmen was killed in the fighting. The agency also denied reports that dozens of people were arrested in Banias, quoting the governor of Tartus where the Mediterranean coastal city is located.

Syrian state television aired footage it said were from areas where protests were reported, showing crowds calmly leaving mosques after prayers.

But YouTube footage, purportedly from many towns and cities, showed thousands of people waving flags, with some shouting: “Mother do not cry, Bashar’s days are numbered.”

One clip, from the town of Taybet al-Imam, near Hama, showed crowds marching along a main street where huge Syrian flags from the pre-Baathist era were draped over buildings, along with the Libyan flag adopted by those who overthrew Moammar Gadhafi.

Homs has emerged as a protest flashpoint and a center for emerging armed resistance to government forces. Activists said tank and sniper fire killed at least 22 people in the central city Thursday, mainly in the old Bab Amro quarter.

The violence in Homs, where tanks were bombarding for the second straight day, illustrates the difficulties in implementing the Arab League plan in a country locked in a deadly struggle between Assad and foes of his 11-year rule.

Analysts have also pointed to the prevalent use of shabiha, or government-backed militiamen to target protesters, along with the regular army.

Asked where the army is still deployed in areas outside of Homs, Local Coordinating Committees spokesman Omar Idlibi told The Daily Star Friday that the army was still deployed in Hama, Idlib, Homs, and other areas.
“Nothing changed since the Syrian regime approved the Arab plan. We have not seen the army pull out from any town,” he said.
“On the contrary, we are seeing enhanced deployment in many places,” he added.
France said Friday that Syria was breaking its commitments to the Arab League peace plan by continuing a deadly crackdown on protesters and cast doubt on Assad’s dedication to the deal.

“The repression can only strengthen the international community’s doubts about the Syrian regime’s sincerity to implement the Arab League peace plan,” the French foreign ministry’s deputy spokesman, Romain Nadal, told journalists.

“We understand that at least 20 peaceful protesters were killed by security forces yesterday in Syria,” he said.
“The continuing repression is completely contrary to the commitments given by the Syrian regime to the Arab League.”

Fears that unrest is taking a sectarian turn have mounted this week amid reports of killings of members of Assad’s minority Alawite community and counter-killings of Sunni Muslims, who form a majority of Syria’s 20 million people.
State news agency SANA quoted several Homs residents describing attacks by gunmen on shared taxis Thursday.
One woman, named Ikhlas Ashour, said gunmen forced passengers out of the taxi and robbed them of their money and identity cards before killing all the men.

“It was an indescribably ugly scene, I felt like I was living a nightmare,” she was quoted as saying.
SANA also said the bodies of 13 soldiers killed by “armed gangs” in Homs, the city of Hama and the northwestern province of Idlib were returned to their families for burial Thursday.

The opposition has so far rejected talks with Assad as long as violence continues and has said that the only way to restore peace is for the president to step down immediately.

“We have already seen the regime’s bloody response to the Arab initiative today in the form of intensified shelling on Homs,” Ahmad Ramadan, spokesman for the opposition Syrian National Council, said Thursday.

Security forces arrested dozens of people in the early hours in some northern Damascus suburbs, activists said.
In Maarat al-Numaan, a town on the Damascus-Aleppo highway, one resident said troops manned roadblocks and snipers lurked on rooftops. Nevertheless, crowds were shouting “Freedom, freedom, despite you, Assad,” he said.
The United Nations says more than 3,000 people have been killed since the uprising began in March. The authorities accuse Islamist militants and foreign-backed armed gangs of killing 1,100 security forces.

The crisis in Syria has burned for nearly eight months despite widespread condemnation and international sanctions aimed at chipping away at the ailing economy and isolating Assad and his tight circle of relatives and advisers. The protesters have grown increasingly frustrated with the limits of their peaceful movement, and there are signs of a growing armed rebellion in some areas.
Some protesters even are calling for the kind of foreign military action that helped topple Gadhafi.