SYRIAN REBEL fighters said yesterday they were holding UN monitors for their own safety in the central Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun after their car was damaged in what one of the monitors said was an explosion.
The seven-strong team, part of a UN monitoring mission overseeing a ceasefire agreement in Syria, was visiting the rebel stronghold at midday local time when violence broke out at a funeral.
Rebels said Syrian forces at a nearby checkpoint fired at the funeral, either with rocket-propelled grenades or from armoured personnel carriers, killing at least 21 people and damaging one of the four UN cars.
Syria’s Addounia television blamed the violence on gunmen who it said then kidnapped the observers.
The United Nations office in Damascus declined to comment on the incident, but one of the observers in Khan Sheikhoun said none of the team members were hurt and said they were with Free Syrian Army rebels.
Meanwhile, the splintered opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) re-elected liberal Burhan Ghalioun as president, in an apparent move to build on his reputation as a consensus-builder with some international support.
Ghalioun, a secular academic living in Paris, has led the opposition in exile since the SNC’s creation in August 2011. Some fellow activists have accused him of being out of touch with dissidents inside Syria and of failing to unify the movement.
Infighting and a lack of political coherence within the SNC have made it struggle to win formal international recognition as the legitimate representative of the anti-Assad movement.
But the 67-year-old Ghalioun enjoys the backing of the Gulf States and France and is seen as a consensus figure in a group where Islamists, divided into different factions, hold sway.
Aware that he is an acceptable figure to the international community, the Islamists opted to support him.
“Ghalioun was re-elected for another three-month term,” according to sources speaking after the meeting in Rome of the council’s general secretariat, which chooses the president every three months.
“He won 66 per cent of the vote.”
– (Reuters)