Fresh violence in Syria as UN monitors due

Government forces in Syria shelled the city of Homs and rebels attacked a police station in Aleppo province, according to people on the ground.

“Early this morning we saw a helicopter and a spotter plane fly overhead. Ten minutes later, there was heavy shelling,” said Walid al-Fares, an activist living in Khalidiya, one of the neighbourhoods where mortar bombs have landed.

Another resident said government loyalists were using heavy machine guns to shoot into the area.

Rami Abdelrahman, head of the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said shells were being fired at a rate of one a minute. He said there had also been overnight clashes in rural Aleppo.

“People said they heard explosions and shooting after rebels attacked a police station and then clashed with police,” he said.

Syria blames the violence on “terrorists” seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad and has repeatedly denied journalists access to the country, making it impossible to independently verify the reports.

Although violence has persisted throughout the ceasefire, there has been a significant drop in the daily death toll in fighting which has often killed more than 100 people a day.

On Saturday, 14 people were killed in the violence, Abdelrahman said and the state news agency SANA said “armed terrorists” killed five people in ambushes around the country.

Read more: Inside 'free' Syria

UN deployment

The United Nations Security Council voted on Saturday to authorise the deployment of up to 30 unarmed observers in the first resolution on Syria the 15-nation council has managed to approve unanimously since the uprising erupted in March 2011.

Russia and China have previously blocked Western attempts to pass Security Council resolutions on Syria.

A spokesman for UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan said on Saturday an advance team of six monitors would arrive in Syria within 24 hours and deploy within 36 hours, with more to follow within days.

“I will make sure that this advance observer mission will be dispatched as soon as possible and try to make concrete proposals by the 18 April for an official observer mission,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told United Nations radio separately in Geneva.

France’s foreign ministry, while welcoming the U.N. vote, said it was now up to Syria to respect its commitments by withdrawing troops and heavy arms from populated areas.

“If this is not the case, it will be the responsibility of all the Security Council members to reflect on the measure that should be taken,” it said in a statement.

The Security Council resolution condemned the “widespread violations of human rights by the Syrian authorities, as well as any human rights abuses by armed groups”.

The UN estimates Assad’s forces have killed more than 9,000 people in the uprising. Syrian authorities say foreign-backed militants have killed more than 2,500 soldiers and police.