Riyadh: The Arab League suspended its observer mission in Syria as forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad pressed on with attacks against protesters strengthened by army defectors.
The 22-member group halted the mission due to “the grave deterioration of the situation in Syria, and the continuation of violence and exchange of shelling and shooting,” the group’s secretary-general, Nabil El-Arabi, said in a statement on Saturday.
“The Arab League decided to immediately stop the work of its observers’ mission in Syria until submitting the issue to the council of the Arab League for review.”
“The suspension helps guarantee that the Arab League will be able to successfully argue that a resolution needs to be passed and that the UN should start thinking about getting involved militarily,” according to Theodore Karasik, director of research at the Dubai-based Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis.
“The Syrian regime has little time left,” Paul Sullivan, a specialist in Middle East security at Georgetown University in Washington, said in an e-mail. “The clock is ticking. If it were not for Iranian and Russian help, Bashar would have been out already most likely.”
Assad’s government has blamed “terrorists” and foreign provocateurs for fomenting the protests. Syria said it was surprised by the Arab League decision after agreeing to allow the mission in the country for another month, the official Syrian Arab News Agency said, citing an unidentified government official.
Syrian soldiers killed 19 people in fighting to retake Damascus suburbs from rebels on Sunday, activists said. Around 2,000 soldiers in buses and armoured personnel carriers, along with at least 50 tanks and armoured vehicles, moved at dawn into the Ghouta area on the eastern edge of Damascus to reinforce an offensive in the suburbs of Saqba, Hammouriya and Kfar Batna, activists said. “It’s urban war. There are bodies in the street,” said an activist, speaking from Kfar Batna. Activists said 14 civilians and five insurgents from the rebel Free Syrian Army were killed in the suburbs.
Meanwhile, the Arab League is set to discuss the Syrian crisis on February 5.
