Russia backs UN probe of alleged chemical attack

Syrian activists said they are smuggling out body tissue samples from victims of an alleged chemical weapons attack outside Damascus and are trying to get them to a team of United Nations inspectors staying in a hotel a few miles away.                     

"The UN team spoke with us and since then we prepared samples of hair, skin and blood and smuggled them back into Damascus with trusted couriers," said activist Abu Nidal, speaking from the town of Arbin.                              

Several activists in the area who spoke to Reuters said they had prepared samples to smuggle into the capital but were unable to find a way to access the monitors inside their hotel.                           

Activists said that in addition to tissue samples they have taken photographs of bomb sites, soil samples, and written witness accounts.  
                                                                      
Syria's government has offered no public response to U.N. calls for its team to inspect the site of the attack, which opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said killed from 500 to well over 1,000 people.                             

UN-Refugees:         

On another note, two UN agencies said the number of registered child refugees fleeing Syria's violence has topped the 1 million mark in another grim milestone of the deepening conflict.                                                   

Roughly half of all the nearly 2 million registered refugees from Syria are children, and some 740,000 of those are under the age of 11, according to the U.N. refugee and children's agencies.                                         

The children's ordeals are not over once they escape Syria, said Antonio Guterres, the head of the Office for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, known as UNHCR.                                                 

The agencies said some 7,000 children are among the more than 100,000 killed in the unrest in Syria, which began in March 2011 and later exploded into a civil war.                                  

Most of the refugees fleeing Syria have arrived in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt. However, U.N. officials say that increasingly Syrians are fleeing to North Africa and Europe.                                 

International positions:                                           

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon renewed his push for Syria to allow UN inspectors’ immediate access to investigate allegations that the government carried out a deadly chemical attack on the outskirts of Damascus.                     

Ban said he would send a top U.N. disarmament official, Angela Kane, to lobby the Syrian government in person and expected a swift, positive answer.
                                           
Meanwhile, Arab League-United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi believes that the alleged chemical weapon attack in Syria this week should speed up work towards an international peace conference, his spokeswoman said on Friday.                                     

Brahimi has stepped up contacts with senior US and Russian officials due to meet in The Hague next Wednesday and may hold talks with them subsequently, probably in Geneva, the spokeswoman said.                                 

Earlier, the administration of US President Barack Obama said it was "appalled" by the death reports.                                                        

A US official familiar with initial intelligence assessments said the attack appeared to be the work of the Assad government. It was "the regime acting as a regime", the official said. But the Obama administration made clear that any response would await confirmation of a chemical attack and its origin. 
                                       
In turn, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said world powers must respond with force if allegations that Syria's government was responsible for the deadliest chemical attack on civilians in a quarter-century prove true.                                

For its part, Moscow said rebels may have released gas to discredit Assad and urged him to agree to a UN inspection. On Wednesday, Russian objections to Western pressure on Syria saw the Security Council merely call in vague terms for "clarity" - a position increasingly frustrated Syrian rebels described as "shameful".                   

This as Russian Foreign Ministry called for an independent probe by United Nations experts into what Syrian rebels alleged was a chemical weapons attack by government forces on the outskirts of Damascus.                      

The statement released on Friday said that Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had discussed the situation by telephone on Thursday, and concluded that they had a "mutual interest" in calling for the U.N. investigation.                                                

This as China said on Friday that no side should rush to pre-judge the results of any probe by UN chemical weapons experts in Syria, after Syria's opposition accused government forces of using such weapons in an attack on civilians.                      


REUTERS/AP