Four more high-ranking officers have defected from the Syrian armed forces and joined the year-old uprising against president Bashar al-Assad's rule, two rebel groups said today.
The men fled over the past three days to a camp for Syrian army deserters in southern Turkey, according to Lieutenant Khaled al-Hamoud, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army (FSA). He told Reuters by telephone from Turkey the desertions bring to seven the number of brigadier generals who have defected.
The seven are the highest-ranking officers to abandon Mr Assad, and the rank is the fifth highest in the Syrian armed forces. Mustafa Sheikh was the first brigadier general to announce his defection.
"We have six brigadier generals who are now in Turkey and another, who has stayed to lead some battalions inside Syria,"
Mr Hamoud said. "We plan to form an advisory council to absorb these and any other high-ranking defections and this group will plan operations for the FSA."
A Paris-based spokesman for Sheikh's Supreme Syrian Military Council, Fahad al-Masri, said the four recent defectors were still under the observation of Turkish authorities and their names could not yet be released.The rebels are also concerned for the safety of the men's families, who have not left Syria, the two spokesmen said.
They said Syrian forces had arrested the family of Brigadier General Faez Amro, who fled to Turkey last month. There have been several reports of defecting officers' relatives being killed.
The new defections also highlight tensions over the rebel command. Mr Hamoud said the defecting officers would be advisers to the FSA, headed by its founder, Colonel Riad al-Asaad. But the other spokesman, Fahad al-Masri, said they would join Sheikh's Military Council.
In-fighting could weaken the defectors, now a lightly armed force of 20,000 opposing the government's almost 300,000 strong military equipped with tanks and heavy artillery. The uprising in Syria, which began as peaceful protests last March, has turned increasingly bloody as army deserters and armed rebels began using weapons to resist the security forces' crackdown.
Mr Assad says foreign-backed militants are behind the violence.
The senior rebel officer remaining in Syria is Brigadier General Adnan Farzat, who announced his defection in a YouTube video on Tuesday, saying he objected to the intensified shelling in his home town.He will operate in the battered Homs province, parts of which have been severely damaged during the Syrian forces'
crackdown on centres of rebellion against four decades of Assad family rule.
UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos saw a scene of devastation and near desertion yesterday when she visited the Baba Amr district of the city of Homs that was shelled by the military for nearly a month after becoming a rebel holdout.
Ms Amos is hoping to secure access for humanitarian organisations, which have been barred from the zones of heaviest conflict.
Syria had initially failed to grant Amos access to the country but relented after Damascus's allies Russia and China joined the rest of the UN security council in a rare rebuke of Syria for not allowing her in.
"It was like a closed-down city and there were very few people around," Amanda Pitt, a spokeswoman for the UN office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs said of Ms Amos's visit to Baba Amr, adding it "looked like it was devastated from the fighting and shelling".
Ms Amos went in with a team of Red Crescent aid workers, who entered Baba Amr for the first time in 10 days, before heading back to Damascus where she held talks with Syrian foreign minister Walid al-Moualem earlier in the day.
He told her Syria was trying to meet the needs of all citizens despite the burdens imposed by "unfair" western and Arab sanctions, the state news agency Sana said.
A convoy from the International Committee of the Red Cross has been unable to enter Baba Amr since arriving in Homs last Friday, a day after the district fell to the Syrian military.
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said delays in aid were unacceptable and called on Syria to respect a pledge last November to withdraw its forces, release political prisoners and allow peaceful protests.
"The regime's refusal to allow humanitarian workers to help feed the hungry, tend to the injured, bury the dead, marks a new low," Mrs Clinton said after meeting Poland's visiting foreign minister.
Mrs Clinton said she planned to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday during a special UN meeting on the Arab Spring revolts.
Russia, one of Mr Assad's few remaining allies, has, with China, blocked UN resolutions calling for him to step aside. Its UN envoy yesterday accused Libya's new rulers of running a training centre for Syrian rebels and arming the fighters in their battle to overthrow Mr Assad.
"This is completely unacceptable ... This activity is undermining stability in the Middle East," said Vitaly Churkin, who also questioned whether "the export of revolution" was "turning into the export of terrorism".
Mr Assad's government says the uprising is a campaign by foreign-backed Islamist insurgents that has killed 2,000 police and soldiers since the protests erupted.
President Barack Obama said on Tuesday it was only a matter of time before Assad left office, but has shown no enthusiasm for US participation in an election-year military mission to force him out.
He said it was a mistake to think there was a simple solution to the year long crackdown on the Syrian opposition or that the US could act unilaterally.
Reuters