The Syrian National Council
accused Lebanese security and party figures of kidnapping and detaining Syrian
nationals on Tuesday , criticizing the authorities’ inaction towards "this campaign that violates human rights".
In turn, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned the West on Tuesday against any unilateral action on Syria after President Barack Obama said U.S. forces could act if the Syrian leader deployed chemical weapons against rebels trying to topple him.
Lavrov said he was interested in hearing "plans for further actions to shift the situation into the channel of a political dialogue in order for Syrians themselves to decide their fate without external interference", Itar-Tass reported.
Lavrov said the path to a solution in Syria lay in the halt to fighting by both the government and its foes and the implementation of an agreement reached by world powers in June on the need to establish a transitional government.
The Syrian government said on Tuesday foreign military intervention in Syria was "impossible" because it would lead to a conflict beyond the country's borders.
In turn, Deputy Syrian Prime Minister Qadri Jamil, rejected setting Assad’s resignation as pre-condition for dialogue with the opposition.
Jamil, speaking at a news conference in Moscow, appeared to be responding to Obama's threat that U.S. forces could act if Syria deployed chemical weapons against rebels.
"Direct military intervention in Syria is impossible because whoever thinks about it ... is heading towards a confrontation wider than Syria's borders," he said. He said Obama's threat was for media consumption.
On a separate note, French President Francois Hollande met in Paris with members of the opposition Syrian National Council, including its leader, Abdelbaset Sieda, a Swedish-based activist for Syria's minority Kurdish community.
On the field:
45-year-old Japanese journalist Mika
Yamamoto died of wounds sustained in a gunfight between Syrian forces
and
rebels in Aleppo on Monday, according to the Japanese Foreign Ministry.
The Ministry announced on Tuesday
that Yamamoto was an award-winning journalist working for Tokyo-based independent
news wire Japan Press and was fatally wounded while travelling with the Free
Syrian Army
Yamamoto is the first Japanese
killed in the current armed conflict in Syria, one of the ministry’s officials
said.
In a telephone interview with a
Japanese TV news program, fellow Japan Press reporter Kazutaka Sato, who was
travelling with Yamamoto, said it appeared she was shot by government forces.
"We saw a group of people in
camouflage fatigues coming toward us. They appeared to be government soldiers.
They started random shooting. They were just 20, 30 meters away or even
closer," said Sato.
The head of the Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights Rami Abdul Rahman told AFP that the Japanese
journalist was injured in the ongoing clashes in the Suleimaniya district of
Aleppo, adding that she was rushed to a hospital where she died of her wounds.
The Syrian activist group also
said that a Lebanese female journalist, a Turkish journalist and an Arab
journalist, whose nationality it did not identify, had disappeared in Aleppo.
Meanwhile,
Syrian soldiers backed by tanks entered the Damascus suburb of Mouadamiya on Tuesday, killing at least 20 young men and burning shops and houses before gradually withdrawing from the town, residents and opposition activists said.
The bodies of the men, mostly shot at point blank range, were found in basements and in shops and houses looted by military personnel, they said, bringing the death toll from the army's offensive on the Sunni Muslim suburb southwest of Damascus, which began on Monday, to 50 people.
With restrictions by Syrian authorities on non-state media, it was impossible to independently verify the reports by the activists and residents.
Earlier in the day, the Free
Syrian Army announced that it has gained control of about two-thirds of
Aleppo city.
-REUTERS/LBCI-
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