BEIRUT/DAMASCUS/AMMAN: The Arab League came under mounting pressure Tuesday to act after the Syrian government failed to implement its peace blueprint and tightened a five-day siege on the flashpoint city of Homs.
The United Nations said meanwhile that the government’s repression has left more than 3,500 people dead since protests against the rule of President Bashar Assad erupted mid-March.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 13 people were killed across the country Tuesday, among them a girl who died in Homs, as soldiers pressed on a military campaign in the central industrial city.
“A civilian was killed during raids in the neighborhood of Bab Amro,” where soldiers were searching for people wanted by the security services, the Britain-based rights group said in a statement.

Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, described the situation in the embattled neighborhood as “appalling,” with residents deprived of food, water and medical supplies for a week.

However, Syria’s state-run media said the “terrible” situation in Bab Amro was the result of “armed terrorist gangs” besieging houses and planting mines in the area. Sheikh Abdul-Illah al-Sioufi, the Imam of al-Saman mosque in Bab Amro, told Syrian television Monday that reports of shelling houses in the neighborhood were “fabrications.”

In another Homs suburb, “a girl was killed by the explosion of a rocket that hit her home,” said the Observatory.
And in Qusayr, near Homs, overnight clashes pitted soldiers against gunmen presumed to be defectors.

As reports of increasing defections continue, defected Colonel Riad al-Asaad, the leader of the so-called “Free Syrian Army,” told the pan-Arab daily Ash-Sharq al-Awsat Saturday that his troops will resume operations against forces loyal to Assad. The Turkey-based colonel said he had ordered the suspension of operation to give the Arab League initiative a chance to succeed.

“We gave the Syrian regime an opportunity two days after it announced its agreement to the initiative. Now that we have uncovered its lies and maneuvers, we will return to qualitative operations,” he was quoted as saying.

Asaad denied being merely the armed wing of the opposition and promised to form a “military council as soon as possible,” reiterating his position that a peaceful solution was no longer possible.
Security forces, meanwhile, killed three civilians and “five people were wounded” when troops in armored vehicles opened fire on the highway linking Damascus with Aleppo.

In a letter, the opposition Syrian National Council urged the Arab League “to take a strong and effective position against the Syrian regime commensurate with the dangerous development of the situation in Syria, especially in … Homs.”

It wants the League to freeze Syria’s membership, impose economic and diplomatic sanctions, and seek the referral of allegations of genocide and other human rights violations by the regime to the International Criminal Court.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague joined the chorus demanding the Arab League respond quickly and decisively to Syria’s failure to abide by its commitments.

“It is deplorable that despite making a commitment to the Arab League to end the violence last week, the Syrian government has escalated the repression and many more people have died as a result,” said Hague.

Hague urged the Syrian government to end the siege of Homs and “allow in international and relief efforts [and] to withdraw all Syrian forces from the towns and cities of Syria in accordance with its agreement with the Arab League.”

The Syrian National Council, which groups the main opposition currents, has declared Homs a “humanitarian disaster area.”

Homs is the only major city to remain outside the government’s control after deadly military operations in Hama further north, Deir al-Zour in the east and the coastal cities of Latakia and Banias.

The United Nations said Syrian security forces have killed 60 people across the country since Assad signed up to the Arab League peace agreement Wednesday last week.

Shamdasani of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said that, nationwide, “the brutal crackdown on the dissent in Syria has so far claimed the lives of more than 3,500 Syrians.”

“There was a peace plan by the league of Arab states that the Syrian government had engaged to, but since the peace plan was signed, there have been further killings, further sieges of towns and really shocking reports coming out from the ground,” she noted.

The Arab roadmap calls for an end to violence, the release of detainees, the withdrawal of the army from urban areas and free movement for observers and the media, as well as talks between the government and opposition.
As a first step toward implementing the Arab League plan, Syria said Saturday it had released more than 550 people who were arrested during anti-government protests, to mark the Eid al-Adha Muslim feast.