Fighting spikes in Syria as peace talks stall

A spike in fighting between the Syrian government and opposition forces has sent the country’s death toll soaring, just as UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi struggles to prevent peace talks in Geneva from collapsing.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights yesterday reported that at least 51 people were killed a day earlier in Aleppo alone — mostly civilians in air raids targeting opposition-controlled areas. Dozens more were killed in the south.

The Observatory has reported an average of 236 people killed daily since the so-called Geneva 2 peace talks began in late January, bringing regime and opposition representatives to the negotiating table but producing no concrete results.

In Switzerland, the opposition National Coalition laid out a transition plan, including evicting foreign fighters and a process towards elections, the Agence France-Presse news agency reported.

But the government refused to discuss it, saying the first item on the agenda was the battle against rebel “terrorism”.

Meanwhile, Syrian ally Russia has presented draft UN Security Council resolutions on humanitarian aid access and the fight against “terrorism” in Syria, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said yesterday.

Moscow’s calls for a resolution are in tune with rhetoric from Damascus, which uses the term to describe all those fighting to oust President Bashar al-Assad.

“Terrorism is certainly no less acute a problem [than the humanitarian crisis],” Lavrov told a news conference after talks with his Egyptian counterpart.

Moscow earlier this week confirmed it would reject a Western-Arab draft resolution on humanitarian aid access in Syria in its existing form, saying it was biased against the government of Assad.

The latest daily death tolls in Syria have been the highest since the civil war began nearly three years ago, while hundreds of thousands more people have been displaced by the violence.

While the Syrian government and rebels have been at peace talks in Geneva, Syrians have been killed at the fastest rate since the country slid into conflict in 2011, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Wednesday.

At least 4,959 people died in the three-week period between January 22, when the first round of ‘Geneva 2’ peace talks began, and February 11, the pro-opposition monitoring group said.

“After reaching the highest death toll since the revolution started, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights calls for the Geneva 2 talks to be suspended if [the talks do] not include an immediate halt to all military operations”, said the British-based group, which uses a network of sources across Syria.

Rami Abdelrahman, the head of the Observatory, said an average of 236 people had died each day in that time period.

“This is the highest average we have had. At other periods of time, we might have had a day with an extremely high toll, but the next day would be lower”, he told Reuters by telephone.

The Observatory estimated that nearly a third of those killed were civilians, at least 515 of those were women and children killed in air raids and artillery strikes.

Syria’s nearly three-year conflict began as peaceful protests against President Bashar Assad’s rule but turned into an armed insurgency under a security force crackdown.