Assad says peace plan is a go if rebels back off

— Syria’s President Bashar Assad said Thursday that he will spare no effort to make U.N. envoy Kofi Annan’s peace plan a success but demanded that armed opponents battling his regime commit to halting violence.

Meanwhile, gunmen kidnapped a high-ranking military pilot outside the capital and assassinated two army colonels in the country’s business hub in what appeared to be part of a stepped-up campaign by the battered opposition against the symbols of Assad’s power.

The violence Thursday underlined the Syrian government’s predicament: Acceptance and implementation of the United Nations plan, which calls for a full ceasefire, risks spelling the end of an autocratic regime that has relied largely on brute force to stay in power over the past four decades.

Assad’s condition of an express promise from the opposition to stop attacks risks complicating Annan’s attempts to bring an end to more than a year of violence that the U.N. says has killed more than 9,000 people.

The opposition has cautiously welcomed Annan’s six-point plan, but it is also deeply skeptical Assad will carry it out, believing he has accepted it just to win time while his forces continue their bloody campaign to crush the uprising. Armed rebels are unlikely to stop fighting unless offensives by security forces halt. It is also difficult for rebel forces to uniformly stop fighting since there is no central command structure.

Last year, Assad agreed to an Arab-brokered peace plan similar to Annan’s, pledging to work with observers who traveled to Syria on a mission to end the crackdown. But the regime failed to pull out its tanks from towns and cities, saying the country was under attack from the armed groups, and the bloodshed has escalated sharply since the Arab League halted its observer mission Jan. 28.

In comments carried on Syria’s state news agency, Assad said “Syria will spare no effort to make [Annan’s] mission a success and hopes it would return security and stability to the country.”

But he added that the U.N. envoy must “deal with the elements of the crisis in a comprehensive way” and get a commitment from armed groups to cease their “terrorist acts” against the government.

“To make Annan’s mission a success, he should focus on drying up the sources that support terrorism against Syria,” Assad added.

Throughout the crisis, Assad’s regime has held that it faces not a popular uprising against his rule but a campaign of violence by terrorists.

In Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, gunmen Thursday fatally shot two army colonels in the downtown Bab al-Hadid traffic circle in broad daylight. The state news agency SANA said the four attackers belonged to an “armed terrorist group.” The officers, identified as Abdel-Karim al-Rai and Fuad Shaban, were on their way to work.

In eastern Ghouta, a suburb a few miles from Damascus, gunmen kidnapped pilot Mohammad Omar al-Dirbas, a brigadier, while on his way to work, SANA said. The agency did not say where the three worked or what their positions were.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Also Thursday, rebels ambushed an army truck and killed two soldiers in the central province of Hama, activists said. Fresh clashes also broke out between government troops and army defectors in the north and south.

Assad, in his comments Thursday, accused regional countries of funding and arming “terrorists” in Syria and cited the assassinations as proof that they did not want a peaceful settlement to the crisis.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least five civilians were killed in army raids on rebellious villages in Idlib province along Syria’s northern border with Turkey. The activist group also reported clashes in the southern town of Dael.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said security forces killed at least 16 civilians across Syria on Thursday, while another group, the Local Coordination Committees, put the day’s death toll at 31, including a child and two women.

Activist claims could not be independently verified. The Syrian government rarely comments on clashes and has barred most news media from working in the country.

Also Thursday, Britain said it was allocating the equivalent of $795,000 to supply nonlethal aid to Syria’s opposition, pledging assistance to groups inside the country for the first time ahead of international talks this weekend on how best to support the nation’s rebels.

In other developments, Iran’s top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Tehran strongly supports changes in Syria under Assad, but the visiting Turkish prime minister said the Syrian leader can’t be trusted and must go.

The sharp differences emerged on the second day of a state visit by Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan as leaders of the two countries discussed how to deal with the crisis in Syria.

Information for this article was contributed by Hamza Hendawi of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 03/30/2012

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