Syrian activists: 18 dead in fresh violence

[December 03, 2011]  BEIRUT (AP) -- Fresh violence in Syria left 18 people dead on Saturday, most of them killed in a battle between security forces and anti-regime military defectors in a restive northwestern city, activists said.

The fighting came a day after the United Nations' human rights chief called on the international community to protect Syrian civilians.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the pre-dawn clashes in the city of Idlib killed seven soldiers and policemen, as well as five anti-government army defectors and three civilians.

Security forces also killed a civilian in the southern province of Daraa and two others in the central region of Homs, the activist group said.

The U.N.'s top human rights official said this week that Syria is in a state of civil war, and that more than 4,000 people have been killed since mid-March.

Until recently, most of the bloodshed in Syria was caused by security forces firing on mainly peaceful protesters, but there have been growing reports of army defectors and armed civilians fighting regime forces.

The clashes came as activists reported a grim milestone in the 8-month-old revolt against President Bashar Assad's regime: November was the deadliest month of the uprising, with at least 950 people killed in gunbattles, raids and other violence.

In the west of the country, Syrian troops detained at least 27 people in the village of Talkalakh on the border with Lebanon, and set on fire the homes of nine activists who were on the run, the observatory said.

Talkalakh is within walking distance from Lebanon, and at least two Lebanese civilians were struck by bullets on their side of the border on Friday. Witnesses said that they had heard hours of explosions and heavy machine-gun fire coming from the village.

The country's state-run news agency SANA confirmed the arrests in Talkalakh, saying that those detained were "terrorists" involved in smuggling weapons, drugs, and infiltrating fighters from Lebanon. The regime has consistently blamed armed gangs acting out a foreign conspiracy for Syria's troubles.

The reports of violence, and the activist groups' death toll for November, could not be independently confirmed. The regime has sealed the country off from foreign journalists and prevented independent reporting.

On Friday, Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told an emergency meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva that "in light of the manifest failure of the Syrian authorities to protect their citizens, the international community needs to take urgent and effective measures to protect the Syrian people,"

A day earlier, Pillay characterized the conflict in Syria as a civil war.

[Associated Press; By BASSEM MROUE]

Bassem Mroue can be reached on http://twitter.com/bmroue.

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