Kofi Annan, the UN-Arab League envoy to Syria, arrived in the capital Damascus following Friday's massacre in Houla in which 108 people – including 49 children and 34 women – were killed.
He called on "every individual with a gun" to lay down their arms before Syria collapsed into full-scale civil war.
But his words went apparently unheeded as scores more civilians and regime troops lost their lives, with fresh clashes erupting all over the country between two sides that were supposed to have agreed a ceasefire six weeks ago.
At least 36 people were said to have been killed, with fighting everywhere from Idlib, to Dera'a to Damascus. Another 30 people died overnight on Sunday as regime troops shelled residential areas of Hama in retaliation for attacks by the Free Syrian Army. Rebels said there was open discussion of retaliatory attacks against regime forces and minority Alawite villages in revenge for Houla, while the country's main opposition group said its fighters should "be prepared to liberate Syria from the hands of Assad's gangs".
The danger of the outside world being dragged into a protracted and bloody struggle was highlighted when an Iranian general confirmed for the first time, in an interview with a state news agency subsequently withdrawn from its website, that Iran had sent its own forces to Syria.
"If the Islamic republic was not present in Syria, the massacre of people would have happened on a much larger scale." Ismail Gha'ani, the deputy head of the Revolutionary Guard's Quds force, was quoted as saying.
The last two weeks have seen a clear escalation in violence, which had lessened but never disappeared with the start of the ceasefire brokered by Mr Annan on April 12. Regime forces have attacked a number of towns where rebels used the lull in fighting to re-establish control, but they are now responding to attacks with indiscriminate force.
At least 30 people died on Sunday afternoon and Monday morning as regime troops shelled residential areas of the city of Hama, north of Houla, into which FSA troops had fled after attacking government check-points.
Video footage showed rooms filled with casualties. The mutilated bodies of men, women and children lay on blood-stained floors, some dead, some still alive, as doctors looked on helplessly. "They can only do basic first aid and try to stop the bleeding. There is almost no equipment, or medicines," said an activist calling himself Abu Adnan al-Hamwi.
The Syrian regime has denied responsibility for the Houla massacre, blaming Islamist militants in a letter to the UN Security Council last night. But UN observers described wounds compatible only with heavy artillery and tank fire available only to regime forces.
Others died at close quarters, by gunfire and, it is alleged, by knife wounds - killed afterwards, survivors said, by "Shabiha" militia from neighbouring villages inhabited by Alawites, member of the minority sect to which the Assad family belongs.
"People were so angry, so shocked. Some started to say why don't we attack a whole Alawite village?" Yasser al-Homsi, a local activist said. "We believe the Shabiha do not have any morals or any religious ethics."
Mr Annan, who met Syria's foreign minister, Walid Muallem, in Damascus, said he was "shocked and horrified" by events in Houla. "I urge the government to take bold steps to signal that it is serious in its intention to resolve this crisis peacefully, and for everyone involved to help create the right context for a credible political process," he said. "And this message of peace is not only for the government, but for everyone with a gun."
Video of one group of the 49 children killed suggested some of them had been tied up beforehand. Their wrists were bound with blue ties, a common substitute for handcuffs. Although it was not possible to verify whether this had been done before or after death, the Syrian Network for Human Rights cited a witness saying the militia was punishing the father of some of the children.
"One eye witness, who is a lady in her late 50s from Houla, confirmed that the Shabiha handcuffed the children of Abbara family, and told the father to look at their children, how they will be killed in front of his eyes before they killed him," a spokesman said.
Activists say that the majority of the 108 people who died lived in eight houses belonging to an extended family called Abdulrazzaq, to whom the Abbaras were related by marriage.
Human Rights Watch said it had interviewed one 10-year-old boy from the Abdulrazzaq family who survived by hiding in a barn.
“Across the street I saw my friend Shafiq, 13 years old, outside standing alone,” he said. “An armed man in military uniform grabbed him and put him at the corner of a house. He took his own weapon and shot him in the head.
“His mother and big sister — I think she was 14 years old — went outside and started shouting and crying. The same man shot at both of them more than once.”
Syria’s main opposition coalition called last night for countries that support the anti-regime uprising to honour their promises by helping Syrians defend themselves.
“The Syrian National Council calls (on) brothers and friends of the Syrian people to help before it’s too late,” the exiled group said.
The Telegraph
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