Chief Arab monitor says situation in Syria ‘reassuring’; protesters fired at

“Some places looked a bit of a mess but there was nothing frightening,” Sudanese General Mustafa Dabi,the chief of the monitoring contingent,said. “The situation seemed reassuring so far,” he said on Wednesday after his team’s short visit to the city of one million people,Syria’s third largest and epicentre of nine months of anti-Assad unrest. “Yesterday was quiet and there were no clashes. We did not see tanks but we did see some armoured vehicles. But remember this was only the first day and it will need investigation. We have 20 people who will be there for a long time.”

The first group of monitors including Dabi were escorted by Syrian authorities into Homs Tuesday and shown destruction in the restive district of Baba Amr,where Syrian tanks were filmed firing into residential areas the day before,according to amateur video.

Video reports,which cannot be independently verified,have shown parts of Homs looking like a war zone. Constant machinegun and sniper fire is audible and corpses are mangled by blasts.

The very choice of the Sudanese general to head the League mission has alarmed activists,who say Sudan’s own defiance of a war crimes tribunal means the monitors are unlikely to recommend strong action against Assad.

The Arab League says Dabi brings vital military and diplomatic expertise to its unprecedented intervention in the internal crisis of a member state. But international rights activists critical of Khartoum say it is all but impossible to imagine a Sudanese general involved in the Darfur conflict ever recommending strong outside intervention,much less an international tribunal,to respond to human rights abuses in a fellow Arab country.

Meanwhile,the Syrian government released Wednesday 755 prisoners detained over the past nine months in the regime’s crackdown. The prisoners’ release,reported by the state-run news agency SANA,followed accusations by Human Rights Watch that Syrian authorities were hiding hundreds of detainees from the observers now in the country.

Though Syria has made some concessions to the monitors since they began work Tuesday,government forces have at the same time been pressing ahead with attempts to put down peaceful protests in Hama,Homs and other parts of the country. Activists said at least 39 people have been killed by security forces in the two days since the observers arrived.

The monitors are expected to visit Hama,Idlib and Daraa on Thursday,all centres of the uprising. In Hama,several thousand protesters were trying to reach the city’s main Assi square to stage a sit-in amid a heavy security presence when troops opened fire with bullets and tear gas to disperse them,activists said. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees confirmed the protests and the shooting.