Middle East

Syria's four day-old truce appeared to be crumbling hours after the arrival of the first team of United Nations monitors, with Syrian government forces firing dozens of tank shells and mortar rounds at neighbourhoods in the opposition stronghold of Homs.  The amateur video uploaded to a social media website purports to show heavy shelling in the battered districts of Juret al-Shayah and al-Karabees targeting apartments and residential buildings.

A draft UN Security Council resolution has outlined plans to send monitors to Syria to oversee compliance with a UN and Arab League-backed peace plan.  The draft, prepared by the US, is expected to be voted on at the Security Council on Friday, with a monitoring team arriving by early next week.  A ceasefire at the core of the peace plan is largely holding.  But at least three people were reportedly killed on Friday, as large protests were held in several places.

BEIRUT (AP) — A fragile cease-fire brokered by the U.N. took hold in Syria on Thursday with regime forces apparently halting widespread attacks on the opposition but still defying demands by international envoy Kofi Annan to pull troops back to barracks.  If the truce holds, it would be the first time the regime has observed an internationally brokered cease-fire since Bashar Assad's regime launched a brutal crackdown 13 months ago on mass protests calling for his ouster. The opposition called for peaceful protests on Friday to test the government's commitment to the accord.

A cease-fire deal between the Syrian government and the Free Syrian Army appears to be all but dead after the rebels refused to provide a written guarantee to end attacks.  NPR's Grant Clark reports that the Syrian government said it would not withdraw its troops from towns and cities by a Tuesday cease-fire deadline without a written guarantee that armed dissidents would stop fighting if they do.

Syrian forces have fired across the border into Turkey and hit a refugee camp in the latest incident to fuel international concern about escalating violence hours before a UN deadline aimed at ending the crisis.  In the first such incident since Turkey began sheltering thousands of Syrians last summer, five people – three Syrians, one Turkish translator and one Turkish policeman – were wounded inside the camp near the town of Kilis, in south-western Gaziantep province, governor Yusuf Odabas told the Associated Press

A United Nations peacekeeping team is heading to Syria to discuss a potential mission overseeing a cease-fire deal, while rights activists say government troops clashed with rebels in several towns across the country.  The activists reported shelling and heavy gunfire Thursday in the Damascus suburb of Douma and additional fighting in northern Aleppo province near the Turkish border.  A Turkish official said Thursday that as many as 1,000 Syrians fled into Turkey in the past day.

KABUL – Near a busy intersection where burqa-clad women beg for spare change at car windows, Mahmoud Saikal, Afghanistan's former deputy foreign minister, sat under a photo of this capital city's crowded hillside neighborhoods in the stately living room of his compound.  "If you are from Kabul," he says, "you can find your place of birth in this photo."  It's the only landscape not changing in Afghanistan.

A United Nations team headed to Damascus to discuss deploying unarmed peacekeepers after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad agreed to an April 10 cease-fire that Western nations say they doubt he will respect.  The planning team from the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations was going to the Syrian capital “to discuss the modalities of the eventual deployment of a UN supervision and monitoring mission,” UN spokesman Ahmad Fawzi said yesterday in an e-mail.

Syrian artillery hit parts of Homs city and at least 10 people were killed in clashes around the country on Friday, opposition activists said, as peace envoy Kofi Annan told President Bashar al-Assad his forces must be first to cease fire and withdraw.  "The deadline is now," Annan's spokesman Ahmad Fawzi said in Geneva. "We expect him to implement this plan immediately."