Syrian cities bombed as truce deadline nears

Rebel fighters also kept up their attacks, killing three soldiers in separate actions in northern Syria, activists said.
Assad has agreed to a ceasefire negotiated by international peace envoy Kofi Annan from 10 April, the latest effort to end a year of bloodshed stemming from an uprising against his rule.

An advance team from the United Nations’ peacekeeping department will arrive in Damascus in the next two days to work out how observers can monitor the truce, Annan’s spokesman said in Geneva.
But Syrian opposition figures as well as Western governments have already made it clear they are not convinced that Assad, who has failed to honour previous commitments, would keep his word this time.

“He is a liar,” said Waleed al-Fares, an opposition activist in Homs, a city which came to symbolise the anti-Assad struggle as opposition-held areas endured weeks of bombardments and sniper fire.
Fares said Assad was playing for time to gain the upper hand over poorly-armed rebel forces which have been driven from city strongholds in the past two months.
Targets in Homs were coming under shelling yesterday, he said. Another opposition activist, Mortadha al-Rashid, said from Damascus that the western border town of

Zabadani was also taking a pounding.
“The regime shows no signs of stopping. There are people being shelled in Zabadani right now,” Rashid said. “Where are Kofi Annan’s words? Because we have never seen them on the streets.”

In violence elsewhere, rebel fighters killed one soldier in a clash in northern Idlib province, according to the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitor which collates reports from inside Syria.
Armed men also attacked the home of a military director of logistics in Aleppo, killing two guards, the Observatory said.

The Syrian state news agency SANA said 10 soldiers and policemen were buried with honours on Monday.

Accounts of the violence can be difficult to verify because the Syrian government restricts access to Western journalists.
But the United Nations estimates Assad’s forces have killed more than     9 000 people in the past year, while the government says about 3 000 security personnel have been killed by what it describes as foreign-backed gangs of terrorists. — Sapa.