Turkish PM urges world to 'hear screams' of Syria

The world must urgently "hear the screams" from Syria and do something to stop the bloodshed, Turkey's prime minister said Thursday, as Turkey said it was seeking new transport routes to the Middle East that would bypass the increasingly politically isolated country.          

Recep Tayyip Erdogan said measures must be taken for the safety of energy supplies as well as global peace. Erdogan, speaking at an international energy conference in Istanbul, did not specify any possible actions over Syrian President Bashar Assad's brutal repression of the country's 8-month-old uprising.         

However, he called on the international community to be sensitive to the plight of Syrian people as much as they were to the uprising in oil-rich Libya, saying "the lack of reaction to massacres in Syria was causing irreparable wounds in the conscience of humanity." Erdogan said: "Syria may not be attracting attention as much as Libya because it has not enough oil."         

"But I want to stress that those killed in Syria are as human as those killed in Libya," Erdogan said.    

-AP