UN plans mission to enforce Syria ceasefire

The United Nations was drawing up plans for a 200-strong monitoring mission to Syria on Thursday after its envoy, Kofi Annan, declared that the Assad regime had failed to implement his peace plan by withdrawing troops from the streets.

Residents of Syria's major cities reported a decrease in violence as a ceasefire came into effect yesterday, though there were sporadic outbreaks which both sides blamed on each other.

But Annan backed the major activist groups who claimed the regime had failed to honour its promise to withdraw troops and tanks from towns and cities.

He told the UN Security Council by video from Geneva that he wanted it to authorise its own monitoring mission to supervise the ceasefire. He also challenged the council, including Russia and China, the regime's key allies, to issue a formal demand that it withdraws troops.

Russia said it would back the monitoring mission, which has also been agreed by Syria and is likely to be approved by a Security Council resolution today. The first team of observers might leave by the weekend, according to reports.

But it may be significant whether the resolution contains any reference to President Bashar al-Assad having broken the peace plan's terms, a rebuke that the two powers have vetoed twice already.

In Geneva, both Annan and Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, said the ceasefire was encouraging but fragile.

"The world is watching, however, with sceptical eyes, since many promises previously made by the government of Syria had not been kept," said Ban. Rami Jarrah, a Cairo-based activist whose group is in regular contact with cities throughout the country, said, "There have been a number of shellings and gunfire reports, but generally it has been relatively quiet." There were incidents in Idlib province, Zabadani, and Aleppo, he said. An outbreak of shooting in Aleppo was followed by a government statement which said there had been a terrorist bomb attack on an army vehicle which killed an officer and injured 24 soldiers.

An activist in Zabadani said overnight shelling had continued after the deadline. "I think he [Assad] did this to threaten us," he said by a video call on Skype.

Waleed Fares, an activist in Khalidiya, one of the worst-hit suburbs of Homs, said the city had been peaceful but that the army had not been withdrawn. "I can move around inside Khalidiya, but I cannot leave the neighbourhood," he said. "There are tanks in the street and snipers on the rooftops."

The real test will come today, the main day of protest during the Arab Spring. Some demonstrations were allowed to take place in Damascus yesterday without the live fire that has regularly followed in the past year, though Jarrah and Maher, a resident of the city, told The Daily Telegraph that others had been broken up. Maher said one protest had been ended by security forces shooting into the air, while Jarrah said demonstrators had been arrested.

A UN monitoring mission would put far more pressure on the regime than the only previous such effort, organised by a badly split Arab League in December.

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, said G8 foreign ministers, meeting in Washington, had welcomed Annan's report, but said that it must lead to a political transition. William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary, and presidents Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy, all said that the Syrian regime had failed to honour its commitments.

Syria: Turkey threatens to invoke Nato's self-defence article

Turkey has resurrected the prospect of Western military intervention in the Syrian crisis, threatening to invoke Nato's self-defence mechanisms over violations of its territory by Assad's forces.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, repeated calls for UN action against Syria, and went on to refer to Article 5 of the Nato treaty, which defines an attack on one Nato member as an attack on all members.

Invoking the treaty would allow Nato members to take military action against Syria legally without a UN Security Council resolution. Article 5 has only been invoked on one previous occasion: in the action taken against Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks. "Options are plentiful," Erdogan said, referring to incidents on the Turkish-Syrian border that sent gunfire into refugee camps on three consecutive days earlier this week and killed four Syrians.

"Nato also has duties regarding Turkey's borders," he added.