Syrian military extends crackdown, refugees flee

Syria's military pursued a crackdown on rebels on several fronts on Monday, days after eliminating an opposition bastion in the central city of Homs following a 26-day siege, activists said. Troops kept the Red Cross out of the wrecked Homs district of Baba Amr for a fourth day and foreign mediators sought to end year-long violence as more civilians fled to nearby Lebanon.
Braving army patrols and winter weather, hundreds of Syrians crossed into Lebanon in the last 24 hours to escape the heaviest shelling of their border towns since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began last March. In the hillside town of Arsal in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, residents said 100 to 150 families arrived from Syria on Sunday - one of the biggest refugee influxes so far.
Families trekked on foot through snow-capped hills to safety, but many others were caught, one refugee told Reuters. "My house was bombed and a giant hole was left in one side of the house," said a 21-year-old man in a black leather jacket and black-and-white scarf from the Syrian town of Qusair.
Syria has so far brushed off international pressure to halt its violent response to an uprising that was inspired by revolts that have toppled four Arab autocrats in the past 12 months. The UN-Arab League special envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, will travel to Damascus on Saturday for what would be his first visit since he was named to the post last month.
The Syrian state news agency SANA said the government welcomed his visit and had accepted one by UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos, who was denied entry to Syria last week. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he hoped a meeting with Arab counterparts in Cairo on Saturday would bring the world closer to agreement on how to end the bloodshed, but gave no sign Moscow would stop protecting its old ally Assad.
Moscow, along with China, has been widely condemned in the West for vetoing a UN Security Council resolution that would have backed an Arab League call for Assad to step down as part of a political transition. Some Western powers expressed hope that Vladimir Putin's election as Russian president on Sunday might provide an opening for a change in policy.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said he would urge Putin to support a UN Security Council resolution calling for humanitarian access to Syria and an end to the violence.
"I will be speaking to President Putin later today and I will be saying that it is very important that we have a unified UN Security Council resolution about humanitarian aid, about humanitarian access, that puts a stop to the appalling killing that is taking place," Cameron said.
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said Moscow had isolated itself with regard to the Arab world and the international community following its stance on Syria. "We can understand that during the election period the moment wasn't right to make the Russian position evolve," Juppe said. Juppe said he did not think it was impossible to get a UN Security Council resolution and that this was something that Paris would be working on in the coming days.
Initial signals from Russia, though, were that diplomacy still has some way to go before a resolution will pass muster. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said on Monday that a new US-drafted resolution on Syria is only slightly different from a draft Russia vetoed last month and needs to be more balanced.
Western envoys at the United Nations said last week that the United States had drafted an outline for a new resolution demanding access for humanitarian aid workers in besieged Syrian towns and an end to the violence there. "The new US draft UN Security Council resolution on Syria is a slightly renewed version of the previous vetoed document. It needs to be significantly balanced," Gatilov said on Twitter.
Assad has said his political reforms will ensure a multi-party election within three months based on a new constitution, but the opposition says the bloodshed makes a mockery of such plans. While European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton urged Russia to help get humanitarian aid to Homs, she asked Moscow to recognise the need for "a new leadership" in Syria. China, which has twice joined Russia in blocking UN Security Council action against Syria, said it would send its envoy, Li Huaxin, to Damascus on Tuesday.