OIC suspends Syria as divided UN debates mission

AAZAZ, Syria: The Organization of Islamic Cooperation ( OIC) suspended Syria on Thursday, saying that the Muslim world can no longer accept a government that “massacres its people”, further isolating the embattled regime.

The move by the world’s biggest Muslim grouping came after dozens of people, including women and children, were reported killed in an air strike on a rebel bastion in northern Syria, while a bomb attack and a firefight rocked Damascus.

United Nations (UN) investigators also said that Syrian forces had committed crimes against humanity, including the Houla massacre in May that shocked the world, during an escalating conflict that has killed thousands and sent many more fleeing.

Violence continues to rage in many parts of the country, including the northern battleground of Aleppo, with bitterly divided world powers in dead- lock over how to end a conflict that could threaten the entire region.

The UN Security Council meets on Thursday to formally end its observer mission in Syria, as UN chief Ban Ki-moon struggles to persuade Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi to become the new international envoy on the conflict.

An emergency OIC summit in the Saudi holy city of Mecca said that it had agreed to suspend Syria because of “deep concern at the massacres and inhuman acts suffered by the Syrian people”.

OIC chief Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu said the decision sent “a strong message from the Muslim world to the Syrian regime” of President Bashar al-Assad.

The United States and the opposition Syrian National Council welcomed the move.

On Wednesday a damning report by the UN Commission of Inquiry said that government forces and their militia allies committed crimes against humanity including murder and torture, while the rebels had also carried out war crimes, but on a lesser scale.

It said that they were responsible for the massacre in the central city of Houla in May when 108 civilians, including 49 children, were killed in a grisly attack. Rebel fighters were however not spared in the probe, which found them guilty of war crimes, including murder, extrajudicial execution and torture.

The conflict erupted in March 2011 when regime forces cracked down on peaceful protests but has spiraled into an armed rebellion that activists say has killed 23,000 people while the UN puts the death toll at 17,000.

Assad has been hit by a wave of defections and a rebel bomb attack that took out four of his top security officials in July.

In the north of Syria, activists and residents reported another atrocity by the regime, with dozens killed in an air strike in Aazaz, a rebel bas- tion near the second city Aleppo.

Dozens of residents fled for nearby Turkey, many of them entire families carrying boxes of clothing and food on their heads.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that 31 people were killed, including women and children, and another 200 wounded, while Turkey, which took in many of the victims, said on Thursday that another 15 had died of their injuries.

Nationwide, at least 167 people were killed on Wednesday, the Observatory said.

UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos also warned that the situation in Syria was worsening, with the number of people in need possibly as high as 2.5 million.

And in a worrying development in neighboring Lebanon, rioters blocked roads and dozens of Syrians were kidnapped and their shops vandalized in violence that triggered orders from Gulf nations for citizens to leave immediately. AFP