"The army should kill all of us to stop the anti-Assad uprising"

The Assad regime’s attempts to crush the Syrian resistance movement intensified this week.
Last Monday, some sixty to seventy defectors were gunned down by army troops near a military base in the Jebel Zawiyah area, near Idlib, in northwestern Syria, close to the Turkish border.
The next day, Syrian security forces continued their bloody assault,  targeting villages in the area, believed to be providing support and a haven to defectors and armed anti-government insurgents.
Scores took to the hills in order to flee the advancing troops…
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in London, 111 were killed, victims of bombardments and heavy machine gun fire…
As the troops were passing through all the cities and towns in the area, they were firing artillery and tank shells and heavy machine guns, randomly and continuously. Daily, we live with the voices of missiles and explosions. The word « massacre» seems like too small to describe what happened, an activist hiding in the woods told the LAT.
One victim in the village of Kfar Owaid was Ahmed al-Dhaher, an imam.
According to witnesses, he was decapitated, and his severed head hung on a mosque door…
Concomitantly, the Syrian army attacked a group of soldiers fleeing their barracks in Idlib.
Some one hundred deserters were killed or wounded.
Activists said the Syrian military, using helicopters, tanks and artillery, continued the assaults on Wednesday, wrote the NYT.
France referred to the killings as an unprecedented massacre.
Everything must be put in motion to end this murderous spiral into which Bashar al-Assad is dragging his people, Bernard Valero, the French foreign ministry spokesman said.
The US government also condemned the violence.
While Syrian security forces have also taken casualties, the overwhelming majority of the violence and loss of life in Syria stems from the actions of the Assad regime, and we call on all parties to put an end to the violence, the White House declared.
The Syrian National Council demanded that the United Nations Security Council be urgently convened and that safe zones be established under international supervision in order to protect the Syrian people.
The Assad regime’s escalation of violence occurred, non-coincidentally, mere days before the arrival of an Arab League delegation sent to Damascus in order to prepare the mission of some 150 Arab League monitors.
Due in Syria before the end of the year, their mission is to assess the Assad regime’s compliance with the Arab League plan its subscribed to last month.
According to this plan, the regime agreed to a cessation of all violence; the return of all Syrian troops to their barracks; the release of all prisoners arrested since the beginning of the uprising in March, and the launching of talks with the opposition.
Once the monitors are on the ground, the security forces should no longer have a free hand to crush the uprising. How much freedom and autonmy will the regime allow them?
That remains to be seen...
The latest onslaught however, clearly evinces the regime’s desire to avoid at all cost the creation of a buffer zone on the Syrian-Turkish border that could provide a safe haven to defectors and armed militants.
Such a base would then allow them to plan and launch attacks against Assad’s security apparatus.
It is unlikely that Assad’s latest campaign will succeed.
Bashar al-Assad should have no doubt that the world is watching, and neither the international community nor the Syrian people accept his legitimacy, a White House spokesman said.
And yet, it is about time that the world did more than simply watch Assad massacre his own people.
Earlier this month, Assad told ABC News the following:
We don’t kill our people. No government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person. There was no command to kill or be brutal.
Assad’s daily actions since last March have made a mockery of this feeble and preposterous attempt at self-justification.
His scurrilous regime is under siege, from both within and without.
It is high time that the UN Security Council muster the courage to condemn firmly and unequivocally the regime’s criminal behavior towards its own people…
(the title of this post is a quote of an activist, Abu Omar, and extracted from a NYT article;
the photograh above of Syrian demonstrators was found here))