By msnbc.com staff and news services
Updated at?5:11 a.m. ET: Syrian troops shelled neighborhoods in the restive city of Homs on Monday, a day after President Bashar Assad’s government vowed to continue its deadly crackdown on the country’s uprising, activists said.
The bombardment comes two days after another attack on the central Syrian city that activists say killed 200 people, the highest death toll reported for a single day in the 11-month uprising.
The Local Coordination Committees activist group said Monday’s bombardment hit a makeshift hospital in the tense neighborhood of Baba Amr, causing casualties.
The Syrian National Council opposition group said a total of 50 people were killed Monday in the?sustained assault on several districts of the city.
“The regime is acting as if it were immune to international intervention and has a free hand to use violence against the people,” the?group’s Catherine al-Talli told Reuters
Activists say they fear that the Saturday decision by Russia and China to block a U.N Security Council resolution on Syria will embolden Assad’s regime. Some fear that Syria’s turmoil will move into even a more dangerous new phase that could degenerate into outright civil war.
Hillary Clinton lambastes ‘travesty’ of UN veto on Syria
Philippe Bolopion, U.N. director at Human Rights Watch, described the veto as “a betrayal of the Syrian people.”?
More than 200 people have been killed in Syria’s crackdown this weekend. NBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin reports.
Tim Marshall, foreign affairs editor of Britain’s Sky News, said that it was now “almost impossible to see” how the situation could be solved diplomatically.
“This will be settled by violence,” he said.
On Sunday, the commander of rebel soldiers said force was now the only way to oust Assad, while the regime vowed to press its military crackdown to bring back stability to the country.
“We did not sleep all night,” Majd Amer, an activist in Homs, said by telephone. Explosions could be heard in the background. “The regime is committing organized crimes.”
Amer said shelling of his neighborhood of Khaldiyeh started at 3 a.m., and most residents living on high floors either fled to shelters or to lower floors. He said electricity was also cut.
Homs has been an epicenter of Syria’s uprising.
‘Controlled demolition’ for Assad?
Meanwhile, Reuters reported that Russia may be seeking a “controlled demolition” of Assad’s rule to save its sole major foothold in the Arab world against Western rivals when its foreign minister and spy chief hold rare talks in Damascus this week.
Moscow announced the high-stakes mission hours on Saturday hours before Russia and China, in a move that outraged much of the world and Syria’s opposition, vetoed?the U.N. Security Council resolution.
President Barack Obama calls for Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down following a crackdown in Syria that lead to the deaths of over 200 people. NBC’s Mike Viqueira reports.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he would travel to Syria on Tuesday along with Foreign Intelligence Service Director Mikhail Fradkov for talks with Assad.
Lavrov revealed nothing about their purpose, but a Foreign Ministry statement on Sunday indicated he and Fradkov would at least press Assad, who has ruled out resigning and rejected his opponents as “terrorists,” to make compromises.
President Dmitry Medvedev ordered the mission, it said, because Russia “firmly intends to seek the swiftest stabilization of the situation in Syria on the basis of the swiftest implementation of democratic reforms whose time has come.”
After a veto that angered the West and deepened the resolve of Assad’s foes, Russia faces a daunting task: how to leverage longstanding ties with an embattled Syrian leader into traction firm enough to keep Russia from losing its most solid arena of influence in the Middle East.
Billions of dollars in arms contracts
Moscow could be tempted to play for time by seeking to shore up Assad, whose government has billions of dollars worth of contracts for Russian arms and hosts a naval maintenance and supply facility on its Mediterranean coast that is Russia’s only military base outside the former Soviet Union.
But many analysts say Moscow’s veto was driven less by love for Assad or hope of a return to Syria’s pre-conflict status quo than by Prime Minister Putin’s desire to show — as he seeks a six-year term in a March presidential vote — that he will defy Western efforts to impose political change on sovereign states in regions of big power competition.
“Russia’s overwhelming objective is to salvage something from the wreckage of the Assad regime and contain Western influence in its most important Arab ally,” said Shashank Joshi, an associate fellow at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, a military think-tank.
With Assad facing growing pressure from the West, Arab states and his opponents at home, Moscow’s best hope of maintaining influence may be “a controlled demolition, of sorts – a managed transition to a new regime, shorn of Bashar but built around the loyalists of the Assad dynasty,” Joshi said.
There are problems with that approach, however.
‘Influence’
By twice vetoing U.N. resolutions that would have condemned Assad, and resisting pleas from visiting Syrian opposition groups to join calls for his resignation, Moscow may have ruined any remaining chance it had of being accepted by the opposition. A superficial shakeup would do little to change that.
But Ghassan Ibrahim, a Syrian dissident who heads the London-based Global Arab Network, a web-based news and information service, said that if Russia could secure the exit of Assad and of senior military and security officers associated with torture, Syrians would judge Russia’s role as acceptable.
“The Russians think Assad’s days are over and they are thinking about how to safeguard their position in the region,” said Ibrahim. “Syria is their only door into the region and it gives them influence. They need to protect it. But do they have enough power to manipulate Assad (to step down)?”
The Associated Press, Reuters and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.
