BEIRUT — International efforts to pressure Syria intensified Monday as U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan began negotiations in Damascus and the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that continued atrocities would make military intervention more likely.
Annan traveled to Syria seeking to salvage his peace plan days after the massacre of at least 108 villagers in the Houla area of central Syria. He urged the government to hold to its commitment in March to honor the six point plan, which included not only a cease-fire, but also political dialogue with the opposition and freedom for Syrians to demonstrate.
Annan said he was “personally shocked and horrified” by the deaths in Houla, which the U.N. Security Council blamed on the Syrian government in a sharply worded statement Sunday.
“I urge the government to take bold steps to signal that it is serious in its intention to resolve this crisis peacefully, and for everyone involved to help create the right context for a credible political process,” Annan said.
Creating the right climate for progress was the responsibility of not only the government but “everyone with a gun,” he added.
Questions about the viability of the plan were thrown into sharp contrast by the massacre in the villages that constitute Houla, near Homs, on Friday, where victims included 49 children and 34 women by the United Nations’ count. The U.N. Security Council on Sunday unanimously condemned the massacre and, while not assigning blame, censured the Syrian government for using heavy artillery against the civilian population.
The aftermath of the killings continued to reverberate inside Syria. Shops stayed shut as part of an opposition led call to observe three days of mourning, according to opposition activists and residents. Damascus has been a bastion of government support. They said government agents forced some stores to reopen.
Annan, the envoy of both the United Nations and the Arab League and a former U.N. secretary-general, arrived with a new mandate from the Security Council - including Russia, which had blocked action against its ally in Damascus - to implement his plan. He was scheduled to hold talks Monday with Walid al-Moallem, the Syrian foreign minister, and with President Bashar Assad today.
Annan said he expected to hold “serious and frank” discussions with Assad and called on him to “comprehensively” implement the six-point peace plan mandated by the United Nations in April.
Activists say as many as 12,000 people have been killed since the uprising began. The U.N. put the toll as of March, a year into the uprising, at 9,000, but hundreds more have died since.
In Washington, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the massacre in Houla “horrific” and “atrocious” and said he was prepared with military options in Syria should they be requested by the White House. But he otherwise spoke cautiously about any U.S. intervention by force.
“There is always a military option, but that military option should always be wielded carefully,” Dempsey said on Fox News. “Because one thing we’ve learned about war, I have learned personally about war, is that it has a dynamic all its own, it takes on a life of its own.”
Nonetheless, he said, “it may come to a point with Syria because of the atrocities.”
White House officials said Monday that Dempsey’s television appearances were not a coordinated administration response to Syria but had been previously planned as part of the administration’s commemoration of Memorial Day. In recent days, the Obama administration has come under intensified criticism by some in Congress and by Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, who accused President Barack Obama of not doing enough to help the Syrian opposition.
In Moscow, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, was slightly more expansive in holding the Syrian government responsible for the violence.
“Both sides have obviously had a hand in the deaths of innocent people, including several dozen women and children,” Lavrov said. “This area is controlled by the rebels, but it is also surrounded by the government troops.”
During comments after a meeting about Syria with his British counterpart, William Hague, he said he and Hague agreed that the main priority was to fully implement the peace plan.
Lavrov repeated Russia’s position that it was not tied to Assad staying in power, rather that the Syrians pilot their own political transition.
“For us, the main thing is to put an end to the violence among civilians and to provide for political dialogue under which the Syrians themselves decide on the sovereignty of their country,” he said.
Despite the increased Russian public pressure on the Syrian government, Lavrov did echo Syrian government claims that the violence was being fomented by imported terrorists working at the behest of foreign government - “a clear hand of al-Qaida and the threat of terrorism is growing.”
Later, the Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying that Russia’s special representative to the Middle East, Mikhail Bogdanov, had told Riyad Haddad, the Syrian ambassador, that violence against civilians was unacceptable and the six-point plan had to be implemented.
In Houla, where survivors buried their dead in a mass grave Monday, new accounts of the killings emerged, adding to earlier statements that some the attacks were by pro-government thugs who went house to house to find victims.
Human Rights Watch quoted one elderly woman from the Abdul Razzak clan as saying she survived by hiding in a back room while gunmen dressed in fatigues killed most of her family.
“I heard several gunshots,” she was quoted as saying, describing how she collapsed in terror until the soldiers left. “I looked outside the room and saw all of my family members shot.They were shot in their bodies and their head. I was terrified to approach to see if they were alive. I kept crawling until I reached the back door. I went outside, and I ran away.”
Meanwhile, activists reported fresh violence Monday, saying troops shelled several neighborhoods in Hama, killing at least 24 people.
YEMEN
A U.S. drone strike Monday aiming for an al-Qaida leader killed five militants in Yemen’s south as part of an offensive against the Islamist group, Yemeni officials said.
They said the airstrike targeted Qaid al-Dahab, a local leader of al-Qaida, in a convoy of three cars near the town of Radda, 100 miles south of the capital, Sana. Four militants were wounded. The officials said al-Dahab’s fate was not yet known.
Al-Dahab’s sister was the wife of Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born radical militant cleric killed by a U.S. drone strike last fall.
There was no immediate word from Washington on Monday’s strike.
BAHRAIN
Bahraini hunger striker Abdulhadi al-Khawaja planned to end his strike Monday, 110 days after he began refusing food, his lawyer said.
Attorney Mohamed al-Jishi said al-Khawaja decided to begin eating again because his strike succeeded in bringing attention to the cause of Bahraini protesters agitating for political change. The 51-year-old activist remains in prison.
He said al-Khawaja sought to highlight the detention of political prisoners and limits on freedom of expression in the Gulf nation.
Bahrain’s majority Shiites, emboldened by protests elsewhere, launched an uprising more than 15 months ago seeking to limit the wide ranging powers of the ruling Sunni dynasty. At least 50 people have been killed in the unrest in the island nation, which is home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet.
Information for this article was contributed by Neil MacFarquhar, Hwaida Saad, Elisabeth Bumiller and Ellen Barry of The New York Times; by Liz Sly of The Washington Post; and by Elizabeth A Kennedy, Lynn Berry, Bassem Mroue, Ahmed Al-Haj, Reem Khalifa and Vladimir Isachenkov of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/29/2012