Obama plans six TV interviews to talk Syria

President Barack Obama will make the television rounds on Monday to discuss the his plans for intervention in Syria in advance of  next week’s Congressional votes.

Obama will give interviews to ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, and Fox during the day on Monday, all of which will air during each station’s Monday evening news broadcasts. The White House announced the President’s media plans on Saturday.

Interviewers include Diane Sawyer for ABC, Brian Williams for NBC, Scott Pelley for CBS, Wolf Blitzer for CNN, Gwen Ifill for PBS, and Chris Wallace for Fox News. The President will also address the nation on Tuesday, Sept. 10.

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Syria welcomes Algerian Brahimi as Annan successor

BEIRUT (AP) — The Syrian government on Saturday welcomed the naming of a former Algerian diplomat as the U.N.'s new point-man in efforts to halt the country's escalating civil war. Activists reported more shelling by regime troops, including an air attack on a northern border town where scores died earlier this week.

In a statement, the office of Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa not only expressed support for Lakhdar Brahimi, it also denied reports circulating in Arab media that al-Sharaa had defected to the opposition.

Al-Sharaa "did not think, at any moment, of leaving the country," the statement said.

The vice president's cousin Yaroub, a colonel in the military defected to the opposition earlier this month, appearing on the pan-Arab Al-Arabiya TV. The regime of President Bashar Assad has suffered a string of prominent defections in recent months, though his inner circle and military have largely kept their cohesive stance behind him.

The highest-ranking political defector so far, Assad's former prime minister Riad Hijab, has gone to Qatar where he may reveal his future plans, according to Syrian rebels and a relative of Hijab. Qatar is among a group of Gulf Arab nations that have backed the rebellion against Assad.

The new U.N. envoy, Brahimi, takes over from former Secretary-General Kofi Annan who is stepping down on Aug. 31 after his attempts to broker a cease-fire failed. His appointment comes as U.N. observers have begun leaving Syria, with their mission officially over at the end of Sunday. Their deployment earlier this year had been one of the only concrete achievements in Annan's peace attempts. The observers had been intended to watch over a cease-fire, but no truce ever took hold.

Al-Sharaa's office said the vice president "supports Brahimi's demand to get united support from the Security Council to carry out his mission without obstacles."

In new violence Saturday, regime airstrikes and shelling his rebel areas across the country, including the southern province of Daraa, the northern region of Aleppo, Deir el-Zour to the east and the suburbs of the capital, Damascus, activists said. Activists said at least 15 people were killed in the Deir el-Zour area.

One air raid hit the northern town of Azaz, near the Turkish border, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. There was no immediate word on casualties. Earlier this week, an airstrike on Azaz killed more than 40 people and wounded at least 100, according to international watchdog Human Rights Watch, whose team visited the site.

Azaz, which is home to around 35,000 people, is also the town where rebels have been holding 11 Lebanese Shiites captured in May.

Also Saturday, 40 bodies were found piled on a street in the Damascus suburb of al-Tal, according to the Observatory and another activist group, the Local Coordination Committees. The suburb saw days of heavy fighting until regime forces largely took over the area earlier this week.

The 40 had all been killed by bullet wounds, but their identity was not known, nor was it known who had killed them, said Rami Abdul-Rahman, the head of the Observatory.

"It is not clear if they were civilians, army defectors or soldiers," he said. Also unclear was whether they had been killed at the place where the bodies were found or if residents had collected the bodies there.

In Damascus, a U.N. spokeswoman said the last of the organization's observers still in Syria have started to leave the country ahead of the official end of their mission at midnight Sunday. There are about 100 observers left in Syria — a third of the number at the peak of the mission earlier this year.

Most will leave within hours, though some could be delayed by logistics, Juliette Touma told The Associated Press.

The Security Council agreed this week to end the U.N. mission and back a small new liaison office that will support any future peace efforts.

Lt. Gen. Babacar Gaye, head of U.N. Supervision Mission in Syria, said that who stays and leaves is not important, but "what is important is that the United Nations will stay." He said the U.N. is committed to ending violence and triggering dialogue between the Parties.

Babacar urged Syrian parties to stop the violence "that is causing such suffering to the innocent people of Syria."

"Those parties have obligations under international humanitarian law to ensure that civilians are protected. These obligations have not been respected." Babacar told reporters in Damascus.

A series of hostage-takings by Syria's rebels has touched off retaliatory abductions of Syrians in neighboring Lebanon and raised worries Lebanon could be dragged deeper into unrest.

Lebanese security officials said Saturday that five more Syrians were abducted in Beirut's southern suburbs overnight. It was not clear who carried out the latest abductions, but earlier kidnappings were carried out by the al-Mikdad clan, a powerful Shiite Muslim family in Leabanon.

The al-Mikdad clan says it has snatched a number of Syrians and a Turk in Lebanon in retaliation for the abduction of their relative, Hassane Salim al-Mikdad, by rebels in Syria.

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Associated Press writers Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria and Jamal Halaby in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.

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Red Cross: Syria conflict now a civil war

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Syria's 16-month bloodbath crossed an important symbolic threshold Sunday as the international Red Cross formally declared the conflict a civil war, a status with implications for potential war crimes prosecutions.

The Red Cross statement came as United Nations observers gathered new details on what happened in a village where dozens were reported killed in a regime assault. After a second visit to Tremseh on Sunday, the team said Syrian troops went door-to-door in the small farming community, checking residents' IDs and then killing some and taking others away.

According to the U.N., the attack appeared to target army defectors and activists.

"Pools of blood and brain matter were observed in a number of homes," a U.N. statement said.

Syria denied U.N. claims that government forces had used heavy weapons such as tanks, artillery and helicopters during the attack Thursday.

Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi said the violence was not a massacre — as activists and many foreign leaders have alleged — but a military operation targeting armed fighters who had taken control of the village.

"What happened wasn't an attack on civilians," Makdissi told reporters Sunday in Damascus. He said 37 gunmen and two civilians were killed — a far lower death toll than the one put forward by anti-regime activists, some of whom estimated the dead at more than 100.

"What has been said about the use of heavy weapons is baseless," Makdissi added.

The U.N. has implicated President Bashar Assad's forces in the assault. The head of the U.N. observer mission said Friday that monitors stationed near Tremseh saw the army using heavy weaponry and attack helicopters.

The fighting was some of the latest in the uprising against Assad, which activists say has killed more than 17,000 people. Violence continued Sunday, with more clashes reported around the capital, Damascus.

The bloodshed appeared to be escalating. On Sunday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it now considers the Syrian conflict a civil war, meaning international humanitarian law applies throughout the country.

Also known as the rules of war, humanitarian law grants all parties in a conflict the right to use appropriate force to achieve their aims. The Geneva-based group's assessment is an important reference for determining how much and what type of force can be used, and it can form the basis for war crimes prosecutions, especially if civilians are attacked or detained enemies are abused or killed.

"We are now talking about a non-international armed conflict in the country," ICRC spokesman Hicham Hassan said.

War crimes prosecutions would have been possible even without the Red Cross statement. But Sunday's pronouncement adds weight to any prosecution argument that Syria is in a state of war — a prerequisite for a war crimes case.

Previously, the Red Cross committee had restricted its assessment of the scope of the conflict to the hotspots of Idlib, Homs and Hama. But Hassan said the organization concluded that the violence was widening.

"Hostilities have spread to other areas of the country," Hassan said. "International humanitarian law applies to all areas where hostilities are taking place."

Although the armed uprising in Syria began more than a year ago, the committee had hesitated to call it a civil war — though others, including United Nations officials, have done so.

That is because the rules of war override — and to some extent suspend — the laws that apply in peacetime, including the universal right to life, right to free speech and right to peaceful assembly.

When the Red Cross says something "it's always very persuasive," said Louise Doswald-Beck, a professor of international law at the Geneva Graduate Institute. In legal terms, that means a court would be unlikely to decide differently.

As an internal conflict officially becomes a civil war, the security environment shifts from regular law enforcement to a situation in which international law permits the government to attack rebel fighters, Doswald-Beck said.

"That's why this whole business of Tremseh is interesting," she said.

Stephen M. Saideman, professor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs in Ontario, Canada, doubted whether the Red Cross declaration would change anything significant on either side.

Assad and his supporters won't stop fighting or change their tactics because they have too much to lose, Saideman said. The opposition "can have their spirits lifted by this, but they have been fighting a civil war for quite a while. So it is not clear how this announcement improves much their ability to recruit or to reduce divisions among the many rebel groups."

On Saturday, U.N. observers entered Tremseh, a community of 6,000 to 10,000 people in a farming region along the Orontes River northwest of the city of Hama. They found pools of blood in homes, along with spent bullets, mortars and artillery shells. The evidence added to the emerging picture of what anti-regime activists have called one of the deadliest events of the uprising.

Dozens of bodies have already been buried in a mass grave or burned beyond recognition, and activists were struggling to determine the number of people killed. Estimates range from 100 to more than 150 dead.

Activists expect those figures to rise since hundreds of residents remain unaccounted for. Locals believe some bodies are still in nearby fields and others were probably dumped in the river.

Some of the evidence suggested that, rather than the outright shelling of civilians depicted by the opposition, the violence in Tremseh may have been a lopsided fight between the army pursuing the opposition and activists and locals trying to defend the village. Nearly all of the dead are men, including dozens of armed rebels.

Independent verification of the events is nearly impossible in Syria, one of the Middle East's strictest police states, which bars most media from working independently within its borders. The observers are in the country as part of a faltering peace plan by U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan, who has been trying for months to negotiate a solution to Syria's crisis.

Although much of the international community has turned on Assad, Damascus still has some key allies — including Russia and Iran. The Kremlin announced Sunday that Annan will meet President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday.

Also Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said Tehran is ready to invite Syrian opposition groups and government envoys for talks, the semiofficial ISNA news agency reported.

Any proposal from Iran is likely to be rebuffed by rebel groups, which have rejected negotiations with Assad's government and have criticized Tehran for standing by its allies in Damascus. But the offer suggested Iran is seeking a more active role in mediation efforts after Annan's visit last week to Tehran.

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Jordans reported from Berlin.

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Six die as violence mars Syria truce, protests muted

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad shot dead five protesters after Friday prayers, activists reported, while the government said an army officer was killed as violence marred a ceasefire brokered by international peace envoy Kofi Annan.

At the United Nations, Russia said it was not satisfied with a Western-Arab draft resolution authorizing an advance U.N. team to monitor the fragile ceasefire which aims to end 13 months of bloodshed during the uprising against Assad, an ally of Moscow.

The council is tentatively scheduled to vote on the draft on Saturday if Russia can be persuaded to support it.

Syrians took to the streets across the country in small demonstrations, trusting that the two-day-old truce that is meant to lead to political dialogue would protect them from the army bullets that have frightened off peaceful protesters for months.

Activists said security forces came out in strength in many cities to prevent protesters mounting major rallies against Assad, even though the plan of U.N.-Arab League envoy Annan says the government should have pulled its troops back.

Protesters questioned Assad's commitment to the peace plan that he has accepted. In the Qadam district of Damascus, they held up a placard saying: "Bashar may be able to laugh at the whole world - except for the Syrian people".

Another read: "The new comedy is the ceasefire".

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the anti-Assad Local Coordination Committees said two people were killed as marchers tried to converge on a central square in the city of Hama.

Soldiers also shot one person dead as worshippers left a mosque in Nawa in the southern province of Deraa, where the uprising began in March 2011. Security forces killed a fourth in the town of Salqeen in the northwestern province of Idlib, opposition activists said, and a fifth was killed in Deraya, Damascus province.

However, Syria's state news agency SANA blamed two of the deaths on the opposition, saying an "armed terrorist group" shot dead the man in Salqeen and attributing the death of one Hama protester to a shot fired by a fellow demonstrator.

SANA also said "terrorists" shot an army major dead as he drove to work. Armed groups were seeking to "destroy any effort to find a political solution to the crisis" in Syria, it said.

The United Nations estimates that Assad's forces have killed more than 9,000 people since the uprising began. Authorities blame the violence on foreign-backed militants who they say have killed more than 2,500 soldiers and police.

NO MASS RALLIES

Assad's opponents had called for mass rallies on Friday to test whether the authorities would tolerate a return to peaceful protests, as Annan's six-point plan said they should.

But rallies filmed by activists were far smaller than the huge, chanting crowds seen in major cities at the start of the uprising 13 months ago and on several occasions in 2011.

International pressure has grown for Syria to fulfill all its commitments to the former U.N. chief by withdrawing troops and heavy weapons, permitting humanitarian and media access, releasing prisoners and discussing a political transition.

At the Security Council, the U.S.-drafted resolution called for an initial deployment of up to 30 unarmed U.N. observers.

Russia's U.N. ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, told reporters after an inconclusive Security Council meeting on the draft resolution that "we need to cut off all the things which are not really necessary for this particular purpose."

In addition to authorizing U.N. observers, the draft criticizes Damascus for human rights violations and hints at the possibility of further action by the 15-nation council. The U.S. and European delegations will revise it later on Friday in the hope of securing Russian support, council diplomats said.

The council will reconvene on Saturday at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT). French Ambassador Gerard Araud told reporters "there will be a vote tomorrow in any case." Churkin, however, suggested that it was not certain there would be a vote.

U.N. diplomats say Russia supports Annan's peace efforts but is working hard to shield Damascus from what it fears is a Western push for Libyan-style "regime change" to dislodge Moscow from its only geo-strategic foothold in the Middle East.

Russia and China have vetoed two resolutions condemning Assad's assault on anti-government protesters.

HUMANITARIAN CORRIDORS

So many Syrians have fled the violence that neighboring Turkey has begun accepting international aid to help share the cost of the caring for the nearly 25,000 refugees, including rebel fighters, who have crossed the border.

Jordan is also housing almost 100,000 Syrian refugees, many more than the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR has registered, the foreign ministers of Turkey and Jordan told a joint news conference in Istanbul.

In Riyadh, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan discussed Syria with Saudi King Abdullah. Turkish officials said Erdogan had said the Annan plan "should not be allowed to become a means of buying time for the Damascus administration".

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Assad's ceasefire declaration was insincere and renewed a call for the creation of aid passages, without saying how these could be protected.

"I firmly believe the international community should live up to its responsibilities and create the conditions for humanitarian corridors so that these poor people who are being massacred can escape a dictator," he told TV channel i>tele.

Sarkozy said he had discussed Syria and the observer plan with U.S. President Barack Obama on Thursday.

Annan spokesman Ahmad Fawzi would not name countries that would contribute the observers, but said in Geneva many already had staff in the region who could move swiftly.

Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi said a U.N. technical team that was in Damascus last week would return to the capital on Friday for more talks on a protocol under which the observer mission could be deployed.

Fawzi called for action on the other points of Annan's plan, especially the withdrawal of Syrian armed forces from populated areas, a condition that Syria was supposed to meet in the 48 hours leading up to the ceasefire deadline.

"We are worried about the operational deployment of heavy armor in population centers," he said. "They didn't belong there in the first place and they don't belong there now.

"We are thankful that there's no heavy shelling, that the number of casualties are dropping, that the number of refugees crossing the border are also dropping."

Underlining the fragility of the truce, Fawzi confirmed there had been some clashes. "Sometimes in situations like this the parties test each other ... one shot, one bullet can plunge Syria back into the abyss," he said.

(Additional reporting by Douglas Hamilton in Beirut, Jonathan Burch in Ankara, Louis Charbonneau and Michelle Nichols at the United Nations; writing by David Stamp; editing by Mark Heinrich and Mohammad Zargham)

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Syria wants guarantees to pull troops from cities

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — The Syrian government on Sunday appeared to be backing out of a cease-fire deal aimed at ending the country's crisis, saying that it will not withdraw its troops from cities without written guarantees from armed groups that they also will lay down their weapons.

Last week, Syrian President Bashar Assad accepted a cease-fire agreement brokered by international envoy Kofi Annan calling for government forces to withdraw from towns and villages by Tuesday, and for the regime and rebels to lay down their arms by 6 a.m. Thursday. The truce is meant to pave the way for negotiations between the government and the opposition over Syria's political future.

But in a statement released Sunday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdessi said that earlier reports that Damascus would pull its troops from cities and their suburbs by Tuesday were "wrong."

Makdessi said that Annan has failed so far to submit to the Syrian government "written guarantees regarding the acceptance of armed terrorist groups to halt violence with all its forms and their readiness to lay down weapons."

He added that Syria will not allow a repeat of what had happened during the Arab League's observer mission in Syria in January, when the regime pulled back its armed forces from cities and their surroundings, only to see rebels flood the areas vacated by government troops.

"Armed terrorist groups used this to rearm its elements and spread its authority on entire districts," Makdessi said.

On Thursday, a U.N. presidential statement raised the possibility of "further steps" if Syria doesn't implement the six-point peace plan outlined by Annan, which Assad agreed to on March 25. The statement called on all parties, including the opposition, to stop armed violence in all forms in 48 hours after the Syrian government fully fulfills the measures.

The U.N. says at least 9,000 people have been killed in Syria since the crisis began 13 months ago.

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Mroue reported from Beirut.

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Syria demands written guarantee for troop pullback

(Reuters) - A gunman shot five people, killing three of them, in a black neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a shooting spree that left residents on edge and sparked an intensive manhunt on Saturday. Three men and one woman were shot within a mile of each other in north Tulsa at around 1 a.m. on Friday morning, police said. …

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Syria forces hit rebels, Russia scorns opposition

Syrian forces stormed several rebel bastions on Wednesday despite a truce pledge, as Russia predicted the opposition would never defeat President Bashar al-Assad's army even if "armed to the teeth."

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said troops stormed and shelled several towns or villages from early Wednesday, following fierce assaults and clashes the previous day which left at least 80 people dead.

"From the Turkish border in the northeast to Daraa in the south, military operations are ongoing," Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based group, told AFP.

"Tanks are still shelling or storming towns and villages before going back to their bases," he added. "That does not mean they are withdrawing."

The assaults were taking place despite President Bashar al-Assad's pledge to implement by April 10 a six-point peace plan brokered by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan.

The Observatory has charged that the army is torching and looting rebel houses across the country in a campaign that could amount to crimes against humanity.

It said that a total of 58 civilians were killed on Tuesday, including 20 who died in military assaults and in fighting between troops and rebels in Taftanaz region of restive northwestern Idlib province.

Another 15 civilians were killed when the army pounded rebel holdouts in the central city of Homs, while the remainder died in other flashpoints across the country, the Observatory said.

It added that 18 soldiers were killed in Homs, Idlib and the southern Daraa province, while four army deserters died in Idlib.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov predicted the under-equipped rebel force would never be able to defeat Syria's powerful military.

"It is clear as day that even if the Syrian opposition is armed to the teeth, it will not be able to defeat the government's army," the Interfax news agency quoted Lavrov as saying while on a visit to the ex-Soviet nation of Azerbaijan.

"Instead, there will be carnage that lasts many, many years -- mutual destruction."

Lavrov said that two groups of Syrian opposition representatives will be visiting Moscow in the coming days and that Russia will be using the meetings to convince them that it wants to help resolve the year-long crisis.

Annan on Monday told the UN Security Council that Assad had agreed to "immediately" start pulling troops out of protest cities and complete a troop and heavy weapon withdrawal by April 10.

The United States however Tuesday accused the Syrian leader of failing to honour his pledged troop withdrawal.

"The assertion to Kofi Annan was that Assad would start implementing his commitments immediately to withdraw from cities. I want to advise that we have seen no evidence today that he is implementing any of those commitments," US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.

With international concern at the situation growing, a draft UN Security Council statement was drawn up asking Syria to respect the April 10 deadline, according to a copy of the text seen by AFP.

The draft also urges the Syrian opposition to cease hostilities within 48 hours after Assad's regime makes good on its pledges.

It also calls on all parties to respect a two-hour daily humanitarian pause, as called for in Annan's plan.

Negotiations on the text -- distributed by Britain, France and the United States -- began on Tuesday. France's UN envoy Gerard Araud said he hoped it would be adopted late Wednesday or on Thursday.

Russia, Assad's veto-wielding ally in the Council, has rejected the idea of a deadline, with Lavrov saying "ultimatums and artificial deadlines rarely help matters."

Seeking to assuage some of the humanitarian concerns, foreign Minister Walid Muallem pledged Syria would do its utmost to ensure the success of a Red Cross mission as he on Tuesday met the organisation's head, Jakob Kellenberger, who was in Damascus to seek a daily ceasefire.

Kellenberger, on his third mission to Damascus since it launched a protest crackdown which the UN says has killed more than 9,000 people, said ahead of his latest trip that he would seek to secure a daily two-hour humanitarian ceasefire.

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