Arab team in Syria ahead of monitors, death toll on the rise

An advance team from the Arab League arrived in Syria on Thursday to prepare for the deployment of monitors who will assess whether Damascus is implementing a plan to end a nine-month crackdown on protests, a member of the team told Reuters. 

 "We arrived in Damascus safely," Waguih Hanafy, a senior aide to Arab League chief Nabil Elaraby, said by telephone from the Syrian capital. Elaraby has said the monitors could be sent before the end of December.  

Russia announced that a new meeting will be held on Thursday within the UN Security Council to discuss its draft law on Syria.

In light of the opposition’s rejection of the Arab League’s mission and its repeated calls to submit the Syrian issue to the UNSC, anti-regime rallies continued overnight in many regions, mainly Homs and Daraa. Pro-democracy activists called for demonstrations on Friday in Syria under the banner of “Death Protocol”.

They believe the regime used the ratification of the protocol to intensify violence against Syrian cities.

On the ground, the Syrian Human Rights Observatory announced that four civilians were killed by security forces gunfire in the neighborhood of Baba Amr in Homs. The observatory added that tanks stormed into the city of Khan Shaykhun in the province of Idlib.  

Syria was taken by the results of the local administrative councils’ elections. The Higher Committee for Elections said that elections were conducted in a free and democratic atmosphere despite the difficult and exceptional domestic circumstances.     

Reuter/LBCI