France Press

DAMASCUS: U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon warned Monday that the search for peace in Syria was at a “pivotal moment” and expressed strong concerns of an all-out civil war, as a five-week-old truce was broken yet again.
 
The violence across Syria claimed at least 38 lives Monday, an activist group said, as bloodshed related to the Syrian crisis also spread to the Lebanese capital Beirut for the first time since the upheaval erupted in March 2011.
 
As NATO ruled out military action against the regime of President Bashar Assad, a spokesman for U.N. leader Ban said at a Chicago summit of the alliance that he was increasingly worried about the situation in Syria.
 
“The secretary-general said we were at a pivotal moment in the search for a peaceful settlement to the crisis and that he remained extremely troubled about the risk of an all-out civil war,” Ban’s spokesman said.
 
On the ground, fierce fighting in an area between Aleppo and neighboring Idlib province, in northwestern Syria, killed at least 18 soldiers and two army deserters, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
 
The Britain-based group said nine army deserters were killed overnight as they retreated under cover of darkness from Jisr al-Ab village near the Damascus suburb of Douma.
 
Also in the Damascus area, troops fired on people at a funeral, the Observatory said.
 
Elsewhere five civilians were killed, including two in a bombing and military raid in central Hama province, one by unidentified gunmen in the nearby region of Homs, and two more in fighting between the army and rebels in coastal Banias.
 
The latest violence comes after a rocket-propelled grenade exploded Sunday near U.N. observers in Douma, and at least 48 people were killed elsewhere in the country.
 
No one was hurt in the Douma blast, which came as U.N. mission head Maj. Gen. Robert Mood and peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous were leading observers around the trouble spot.
 
NATO, which undertook a major air war in Libya to back rebels who fought Moammar Gadhafi’s forces last year, said that it has “no intention” of taking military action against Assad’s regime.
 
“We strongly condemn the behavior of the Syrian security forces and their crackdowns on the Syrian population,” NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said at a Chicago summit Sunday.
 
“But again NATO has no intention to intervene in Syria.”
 
NATO states have come under criticism for backing the air war in Libya but ruling out military intervention in Syria, where opposition demonstrators and badly outgunned rebels have been hammered by heavily armed regime forces.
 
Sunday’s blast followed several other close calls for the U.N. monitors since they deployed in Syria, where 266 observers are now on the ground according to Mood.
 
On May 16, a homemade bomb struck a convoy of U.N. observers in the flashpoint central city of Homs, damaging three vehicles but causing no casualties.
 
The regime and its opponents trade accusations after such attacks.
 
An Islamist group, the Al-Nusra Front, claimed responsibility Monday for a weekend suicide car bomb attack in Syria’s main eastern city of Deir al-Zour that killed at least nine people and wounded 100 others.
 
The Al-Nusra Front said “a suicide bomber rammed a car bomb against buildings of military security, and aviation information, causing deaths and injuries among members of the regime.”