AMMAN: More than 2,400 Syrians have fled to Turkey to escape a feared army crackdown, officials said Thursday, in another sign that President Bashar Assad’s struggle with protesters is disturbing Syria’s neighbors.
With international concern growing over Syria’s repression of pro-democracy protests, Britain, France, Germany and Portugal have asked the U.N. Security Council to condemn Assad.

However, veto-holding Russia has said it opposes any such council measure. World powers have shown no desire for any Libya-style military intervention in Syria, which has so far shrugged off sanctions and verbal reprimands.
Residents said about 40 tanks and troop carriers had deployed about 7 km from Jisr al-Shughour, a northwestern town of 50,000 where authorities say “armed gangs” killed more than 120 security personnel earlier this week.
Other accounts described a mutiny among troops who refused to fire on civilians after a pro-democracy rally in the town Friday. Loyalist military units then attacked the mutineers, according to the reports.

Syria has barred most independent media from the country, making it difficult to verify accounts of the violence.
“Jisr al-Shughour is practically empty. People were not going to sit and be slaughtered like lambs,” said one refugee who had crossed into Turkey, giving his name as Mohammad.
“Demonstrations in the villages are still on. Women and children are carrying flowers and shouting ‘people want the downfall of the regime,’” he said.

A man who stayed behind in Jisr al-Shughour said the town was all but empty and people in a nearby village had warned that hundreds of soldiers were massing along with 27 tanks and 50 armored personnel carriers.
“It seems they are ready to launch the attack,” he said, asking that his name not be used for fear of reprisals.
Rami Abdulrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 15,000 troops had deployed near Jisr al-Shughour.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the number of Syrian refugees crossing the border this week had reached 2,400.

He told reporters at a summit in Abu Dhabi it was time for Syria to act “more decisively” on political reforms proposed by its leader Bashar Assad.
“Syria is causing concern for us,” Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Turkish radio. “We will always keep our doors open to our Syrian brothers and sisters.”

Also in Abu Dhabi, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she discussed developments in Syria “President Assad may try to delay the changes under way in Syria but he cannot reverse them,” Clinton said.
Assad, 45, has promised reforms, even while cracking down on unrest that has become the gravest threat to his 11-year rule.

“Syria is committed to the missions of reform under the leadership of President Bashar Assad and affirms it does not permit any foreign intervention in this regard,” the state news agency quoted a Foreign Ministry official as saying in response to critical statements by French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe.

Among the Syrians in Turkey was a 23-year-old with a bullet wound to the leg.
Asking not to be identified, he said he was shot by militiamen, known as shabbiha, from Assad’s minority Alawite sect that has dominated the Sunni majority for four decades. “We were leaving the mosque after Friday prayers to start protesting and then the shabbiha … attacked us,” he said.

Turkish police barred reporters from the camp in a shady valley, but women could be seen hanging washing, while children played between tents and older men wandered around.
The draft U.N. resolution proposed by Britain, France, Germany and Portugal condemns the repression and demands humanitarian access.

“The world cannot be silent when every day people in Syria, who are doing nothing but standing up for their legitimate human and civil rights, are being killed and tortured,” German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said.
But Russia, an old ally of Syria since Cold War times, has made clear it dislikes the idea of Council involvement, saying it could help to destabilize a strategic Middle Eastern country.
“Russia is against any U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said, without saying if Moscow would veto the measure.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) decided to report Syria to the Security Council for covert atomic work, a U.S.-led move coinciding with condemnation of Damascus’ crackdown on protests.
Russia and China voted against the proposal, probably ruling out any follow-up punitive measures.
Syria’s IAEA envoy Bassam al-Sabbagh called the referral vote “regrettable” but said it would not affect his country’s relations with the agency.

Syrian activists say more than 1,300 people have died in the crackdown on the 11-week uprising, most of them unarmed civilians; a government spokeswoman countered that 500 security forces had died in the uprising, including 120 who died in the Jisr al-Shughour area this week.

“The only instance where security forces have fired is when they have been fired at,” Reem Haddad told Britain’s Sky News. “How have these people been killed for goodness sake if no one is firing at them?”
Activists say the lack of effective international action to stop the killings has prompted some protesters to consider using weapons to defend themselves. In Jisr al-Shughour, people recall a massacre in 1980, under Assad’s father, Hafez Assad.

Two years after that, many thousands were killed in the city of Hama when the elder Assad crushed an armed Islamist revolt.
Speaking of the readiness of some opposition groups to take up arms, one activist who spoke anonymously said: “This thinking is especially prevalent in Hama. People are saying we are not going to let them massacre us as they did in 1982.”

Erdogan has said Turkey, a regional power that had developed close ties with Syria, cannot accept “another Hama.”
The Turkish leader said he had talked to Assad Wednesday, “He told me very different things. We receive contradictory intelligence information on the killing of policemen.”
Although the world attention is focused on Jisr al-Shughour, disturbances have continued elsewhere.
Troops patrolled the central city of Homs, a day after security forces shot dead a civilian in a crowd of 5,000 showing solidarity with Jisr al-Shughour, an activist group said.

In Hama, where 70 people were reported killed in protests Friday, demonstrators carried banners reading “We will continue to respond to your bullets with flowers.”
In the eastern city of Deir al-Zor, protesters angered by the killings burned two buildings used by Assad’s Baath Party.

In the Vatican, Pope Benedict urged Syria to listen to demonstrators calling for political and economic reform and said it should not respond with violence.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay called on Syria to halt its “assault on its own people” and let a fact-finding mission investigate all allegations of killings on both sides.
A new video circulating among Syrians shows a 15-year-old boy, identified as Tamer Mohammed al-Sharei who was said to have been tortured by security forces. The dark skinned body was placed in a wooden coffin, with a piece of paper marked “12” placed on his chest. “He is my son,” a woman screams.
The boy had been missing since April 29 when he was last seen in the village of Saida in the southern province of Daraa on the same day and location where Hamza al-Khatib, 13, went missing.

The younger boy became a symbol of Syria’s uprising after his body was returned to his family late last month with marks of torture, bullet wounds and a severed penis. 
France TV network: Duped by phony Syria interview
PARIS: A French TV network has conceded it was duped when it aired a phony interview with a woman claiming she was the Syrian ambassador and has filed a legal complaint with prosecutors.

France 24 said Thursday it “did not doubt” that Syrian Ambassador Lamia Shakkour was a “victim” of the hoax and hoped she would cooperate with an investigation. The station aired an interview Tuesday with a woman claiming she was Shakkour – who announced she was quitting over a government crackdown on protesters in Syria.
Shakkour later appeared on France’s BFM TV and accused France 24 of “impersonating the Syrian ambassador.” She denied she had quit.

The network’s statement said the phony interview was conducted on a telephone number provided by the Syrian Embassy in Paris. “France 24 has no option but to take Ms Shakkur’s denials seriously,” the channel said. It “commissioned comparative analyses which show that the voice heard during the interview conducted on France 24 Tuesday evening is different from the voice which later issued the denial on BFM TV,” another channel.