All eyes on Annan as he tries to save Syria peace plan

Beirut: International mediator Kofi Annan is due to fly to Damascus on Monday and will hold talks with President Bashar al-Assad on Tuesday, Syria’s Ikhbariya television station said. It gave no further details, and U.N. officials in Damascus were not immediately able to confirm the trip. The report came a day after the United Nations Security Council condemned the killing of at least 108 people, including many children, in the Syrian town of Houla on Friday. Meanwhile international reactions to the massacre kept pouring in. [caption id=“attachment_323571” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Annan is on his way to Syria to try and save the peace plan: Reuters”] [/caption] Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday that Moscow was deeply alarmed by the massacre in the Syrian town of Houla but that it was clear both President Bashar al-Assad’s government and rebels were to blame. “We are dealing with a situation in which both sides evidently had a hand in the deaths of innocent people,” Lavrov said at a joint news conference with visiting British Foreign Secretary William Hague. Hague said Russia and Britain agreed Kofi Annan’s peace plan was “at the moment the only hope” for resolving Syria’s crisis and that Russia had an important role to play. Meanwhile China also condemned what it called the “cruel killings” of civilians, while insisting that peace mediator Kofi Annan’s efforts remained the most viable way to end the violence in Syria. The comments from the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin marked an intensification of Beijing’s condemnation of the surging bloodshed in Syria, but Liu stopped short of directly condemning the government of President Bashar al-Assad. “China feels deeply shocked by the large number of civilian casualties in Houla, and condemns in the strongest terms the cruel killings of ordinary citizens, especially women and children,” Liu told a daily news briefing. Iran said meanwhile that the killings had been carried out in order to spread chaos and instability in Syria and block peace efforts. “We are certain that foreign interference, terrorist and suspicious measures which have targeted the resilient Syrian people are doomed to fail,” the website of the state television network, Press TV, quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast as saying. Reuters