Brahimi calls it ‘mission impossible’

Government warplanes bombed a town in northern Syria on Monday, killing at least 19 people, activists said, while the new UN envoy to the country acknowledged that diplomatic attempts to end the conflict are “nearly impossible.” The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Co-ordination Committees (LCC) said the airstrikes targeted a residential area in the northern town of Al Bab, about 30 kilometres from the Turkish border. The Observatory said 19 people were killed in the air raid; the LCC put the death toll at 25. An amateur video posted online showed men frantically searching for bodies in the rubble of a white building smashed into a pile of debris. The authenticity of the video could not be independently verified. Syrian officials said a bomb attached to a taxi blew up on Monday in the Damascus suburb of Jaramana, killing five people and wounding 23. Diplomatic efforts, including a six-point peace plan by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, to solve the seemingly intractable conflict have failed so far. Annan quit his post as special UN envoy, and was replaced on Saturday by Lakhdar Brahimi, a 78-year-old former Algerian diplomat. “We discussed this several times and I can’t think of anything that I would have done differently from him,” Brahimi told the BBC in an interview. Brahimi, who also served as a UN envoy to Afghanistan and Iraq, commended Annan on his work, saying he did “everything possible.” Asked whether his task was “Mission Impossible,” Brahimi said: “I suppose it is.” “People are already saying ‘People are dying and what are you doing?’ And we are not doing much. That in itself is a terrible weight,” he told the BBC in an interview conducted in English. Brahimi said he felt like he was “standing in front of a brick wall,” looking for cracks that may yield a solution. “I’m coming into this job with my eyes open, and (with) no illusions,” he said. Activists, meanwhile, reported scattered violence in regions across the country, including the capital’s suburbs, the region of Deir Al Zour in the east, Daraa in the south and Idlib and Aleppo in the north. LCC and the Observatory said more than 100 people were killed on Monday. In Damascus, Information Minister Omran Al Zoebi reassured reporters that if any journalists are held by authorities “they will receive special treatment even though they violated Syrian laws.” He asked journalists at Monday’s news conference to give his office any names they have of reporters that they know with certainty are held by authorities. Western powers, however, have warned Assad against using chemical weapons in the conflict. On Monday, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said that if Syria uses such weapons, “our response ...would be massive and blistering.” Speaking to RMC radio, he said Western countries are monitoring the movement of the weapons in Syria to be ready to “step in” immediately. Fabius said “we are discussing this notably with our American and English partners.” Also on Monday, Bahrain said it plans to fund a “mobile school” for up to 4,000 Syrian refugee children at a camp in Jordan. In Madrid, meanwhile, the main opposition Syrian National Council appealed to the international community for weapons and urgent military intervention to defend civilians from such bombardments. “We need a humanitarian intervention and we are asking for military intervention for the Syrian civilians,” SNC chairman Abdel Basset Sayda said after meeting Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo. “I have the duty of asking for weapons that will allow us to defend against the Syrian armour and weapons that are killing civilians all the time,” he told a joint news conference. The plight of refugees is expected to be among the top priorities of Peter Maurer, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross who was travelling to Damascus on Monday for a three-day visit.