Syrian cease-fire is just a start, U.S. says

BEIRUT – Syrian government forces appeared Thursday largely to have ended their attacks on anti-government strongholds, adhering to a United Nations-brokered cease-fire.

But the United States, France and others seeking the ouster of Syrian President Bashar Assad said the government has yet to implement a provision in the U.N. plan that called for the country’s military to return to its barracks, and the U.S. repeated calls for Assad to step down.

Anti-Assad activists reported at least three deaths at the hands of Syrian security forces on Thursday, along with a number of arrests.

The official Syrian government news service, SANA, reported at least two government sympathizers killed – a police officer who died when the bus he was in was bombed near the city of Aleppo, wounding 24 others, and a Baath party official in southern Daraa province who was shot eight times when he left his home to buy bread.

President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy held a video conference, after which the White House said the two leaders had “condemned the violence perpetrated by the (Assad) regime against its own people and noted that the regime had yet to fully implement the agreement.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton welcomed the “apparent halt in violence,” but she said it was not enough.

“If it holds, a cease-fire is an important step, but it represents just one element of the special envoy’s plan,” she said. “Assad will have to go and the Syrian people must be given the chance to chart their own future.”

U.N. Syria envoy Kofi Annan, the author of the cease-fire plan, made no public statement. In a private briefing to the Security Council, he reportedly called for approval of envoys to monitor the cease-fire’s progress. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in Geneva, said that without monitors “it was difficult to assess the situation on the ground.”