BEIRUT: A handful of soldiers in blue caps put a tentative United Nations presence at the heart of the Syrian crisis Monday, predicting success for their mission to stabilize a shaky four-day-old cease-fire even as shells were still falling.Charged with overseeing an end to 13 months of violence, the unarmed multinational squad of six professed their optimism.
 
“We are going to organize ourselves in order to be ready to do our task as soon as possible,” the leader of the advance guard, Colonel Ahmad Himmiche of Morocco, told reporters at a Damascus hotel before meeting Syrian officials in the capital.
 
“All peacekeepers are optimistic,” he added when asked if he was hopeful an observer mission that should be expanded to 250 could cement a truce marked by persistent, sporadic violence.
 
U.N. human rights investigators said Monday they had received reports of shelling and arrests by President Bashar Assad’s forces since the cease-fire, as well as executions of soldiers captured by rebel forces, although the violence was generally less than before the U.N.-brokered truce came into effect Thursday.
 
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said Monday new attacks by government forces “call into question the wisdom and viability” of sending the full 200 international monitors.
 
“We are gravely concerned ... that the violence continues, that the government seems to continue, if not in recent days intensify, bombardment in Homs in particular,” Rice told reporters.
 
Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, told a news conference in Rome Monday that the chances of success for U.N. envoy Kofi Annan’s peace plans were “no higher than 3 percent.”
 
A previous monitoring mission, by the Arab League, which has suspended Syria’s membership and called for Assad to step aside, ended in failure in January after a just a month. Dozens of unarmed Arab observers complained that a government crackdown on protesters and rebels had made their mission too dangerous.
 
Activists trying to topple Assad reported four people killed by shelling in Homs and four killed in the city of Idlib Monday in a gunbattle between troops and army defectors. They said two people were killed in the central city of Hama when their car came under fire. Damascus said “terrorist groups” carried out that overnight attack.
 
The army shelled targets in Homs for the third day in a row, activists said, despite a promise to Annan to withdraw from cities and silence heavy weapons.
 
Amateur video posted on the Internet at the weekend showed an army mortar crew encamped in countryside with mortars of various calibers, calmly firing rounds at some unseen target.
 
Security forces in armored vehicles stormed the village of Khattab in Hama province and carried out raids Monday, the activist Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported, and dozens of people were detained.
 
Activists said the army once again shelled the Bayada and Khalidiyeh districts in Homs with heavy mortars. A video posted by them on YouTube showed explosions followed by clouds of smoke and dust.
 
The U.N. human rights team reported a “deteriorating humanitarian situation” and said it was “seriously concerned over ... the shelling of the [Khalidiyeh] neighborhood and other districts in Homs by government forces and the use of heavy weaponry, such as machineguns in other areas, including Idlib and some suburbs of Damascus.”
 
New arrests in Hama and Aleppo were also raising concern. As Homs was under fire Sunday, rebels attacked a police station in Aleppo province hours before the U.N. advance party arrived in Damascus. Activists said three people were killed by shelling Homs, which has become the emblem of the revolt.
 
“Early this morning we saw a helicopter and a spotter plane fly overhead. Ten minutes later, there was heavy shelling,” said Walid al-Fares in Homs. Another resident said government loyalists were using heavy machineguns to shoot into the area.
 
Himmiche is the second U.N. peacekeeping officer sent to Damascus to prepare the monitoring mission. Norwegian General Robert Mood took a team of 10 to Syria on April 5 and returned to Geneva on April 10 to brief Annan.
 
But Mood then went back to Oslo and has not been heard from in public since. The U.N. has denied there was any problem. But Russia’s U.N. ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, accused Mood of “sort of fleeing his position in the middle of action.”
 
Syria blames a year of escalating violence on “terrorists” seeking to topple Assad and restricts independent journalist’s access to the country, making it hard to verify reports.
 
The U.N. estimates Assad’s forces have killed more than 9,000 people in the uprising. Syrian authorities say foreign-backed militants have killed over 2,600 soldiers and police.
 
State news agency SANA Sunday said Syria “will prevent the armed terrorist groups from continuing their criminal aggressions against the army and law enforcement forces and citizens, which hysterically escalated” since the truce.
 
The 15-nation U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Saturday to authorize the initial deployment of up to 30 unarmed observers. Since the uprising erupted in March 2011, Russia and China had blocked previous Western attempts to pass Security Council resolutions on Syria, notably two resolutions condemning the Assad government.
 
Syrian officials said Monday Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem was headed to China for a two-day visit. Last week, Moallem met with his Russian counterpart in Moscow.
 
The advance mission will “try to make concrete proposals by the 18th of April for an official observer mission,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told U.N. radio in Geneva.
 
Asked why Annan was seeking only a force of 250 – much smaller than peacekeeping missions elsewhere – his spokesman, Ahmad Fawzi, said only that Annan believed this number would suffice for the time being.
 
The U.N. has had a peacekeeping mission on a slice of Syrian territory facing the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights since the 1970s. But the 1,040 troops of the U.N. Disengagement Force and a few score U.N. Truce Supervision Organization troops have no role in Syria’s internal crisis.