The new Syria
peace envoy from the United Nations and Arab League enlisted Iran’s help on
Monday in an effort to negotiate a cease-fire in observance of a three-day
holiday dear to all Muslims, hoping that such a religious reprieve could become
the basis for a dialogue.
The effort by the envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, a
veteran Algerian statesman, was his first specific proposal for a pause in
hostilities in Syria since he replaced Kofi Annan, the former United Nations
secretary general, who resigned the Syria diplomatic post in frustration at the
end of August.
Mr. Brahimi’s effort came as new signs emerged
from Syria that the 19-month-old conflict was deepening and that combatants on
both the government and insurgent sides were using increasingly sophisticated
and lethal conventional weaponry.
Eliot Higgins, a British blogger whose Brown
Moses blog is considered an authoritative source on arms used in the Syrian
conflict, reported new evidence that the Syrian Air Force was dropping cluster
bombs, which kill and damage indiscriminately. Newly posted videos on the
Internet also showed what arms experts called the first known use by insurgents
of heat-seeking shoulder-fired missile systems, designed to hit aircraft.
Mr. Brahimi’s spokesman, Ahmad Fawzi, said in
a statement that Mr. Brahimi made his appeal to Iran’s president, foreign
minister and top national security official during a trip to Tehran. Iran is
the only regional ally of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and is
believed to be supplying weapons and training, although Iran says it is
providing only humanitarian aid.
The statement quoted Mr. Brahimi as telling
the Iranians that the Syria conflict was worsening by the day and that a
cease-fire, timed to coincide with the forthcoming Id al-Adha holiday starting
Oct. 25, “would help create an environment that would allow a political process
to develop.”
Id al-Adha, or Festival of the Sacrifice, is
celebrated by Shiite and Sunni Muslims to commemorate the willingness of
Abraham to sacrifice his son Ishmael as proof of obedience to God.
Both Mr. Assad and the array of insurgents
seeking to topple him have shown no interest in negotiations to resolve the
conflict, which has evolved into a civil war that has left more than 20,000
people dead and sent at least 340,000 refugees into neighboring countries,
according to United Nations estimates. Prospects for a solution have also been
complicated by hard-line Islamic jihadist fighters who have been entering Syria
to fight Mr. Assad’s forces but do not share the main opposition’s goal of
replacing Mr. Assad with a representative democratic government.
Reports of fighting in Syria on Monday
centered mostly in and around Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, which has been a
battleground between insurgents and loyalists for nearly three months and is
home to some of the world’s oldest cultural treasures. The government’s Syrian
Arab News Agency reported Monday that President Assad had ordered the
restoration of the 13th-century Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo, a Unesco World
Heritage site, which amounted to an official confirmation of reports that it
had suffered damage.
But the government rejected as a lie the video
evidence in the Brown Moses blog on the use of cluster munitions by the Syrian
Air Force, which Human Rights Watch cited in a report on Sunday that said bomb
remnants seen in the videos “all show damage and wear patterns produced by
being mounted on and dropped from an aircraft.”
Syria, along with a number of other countries
including the United States and Israel, has not signed the Convention on
Cluster Munitions that bans such weapons. According to the Landmine & Cluster
Munition Monitor, an advocacy group, Syria has stockpiled cluster munitions,
and the first evidence it had used them surfaced last July in videos showing
cluster remnants and bomblets near the city of Hama.
On the rebel side, two new videos emerged showing
the first use of the heat-seeking shoulder-fired missiles, known as
Man-Portable Air Defense Systems, or Manpads, a far more effective weapon
against Syrian aircraft than the truck-mounted machine guns insurgents had been
using.
In one video, an insurgent armed with an older
Manpad system known as an SA-7 is seen hiding behind a building, apparently
awaiting a target. In the other, a weapon, apparently of the same class, is
fired at a passing jet. It is unclear whether the aircraft was hit, but the telltale
sign of a corkscrew-shaped trail of a Manpad missile is clearly visible.
“What we’re seeing here is Manpads in use,” said Matthew Schroeder, an
expert on missile proliferation and arms trade at the Federation of American
Scientists, a nonpartisan group in Washington. While occasional sightings of
Manpad components had been made in earlier Internet videos posted from Syria,
he said, “now we’re seeing them deployed, which isn’t surprising.”
C. J. Chivers contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the
following correction:
Correction: October 15, 2012
An earlier version of a picture caption with
this article referred imprecisely to the device used by some rebels to launch
explosives. It is a giant slingshot, not a catapult, which is a more
sophisticated version of a slingshot and uses many of the same principles.
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