Syria says it will respect Kofi Annan's ceasefire plan

Assad regime appears to bow to international pressure by announcing it will halt fighting on Thursday

guardian.co.uk, Ian Black, Nicholas Watt, Sam Jones and agencies, Wednesday 11 April 2012

Kofi Annan, the UN and Arab League joint special envoy for Syria, who said
 he was cautiously optimistic about the ceasefire. Photograph: Ahmad Halabisaz/
Xinhua Press/Corbis

Syria has announced it will cease military operations from Thursday morning in line with plans by Kofi Annan for a ceasefire after political negotiations to end the bloodiest crisis of the Arab spring.

On a day that saw intense international diplomatic activity and more bloodshed across the country, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad appeared to have bowed to mounting pressure to comply with the demand for an end to violence.

Sana, the official news agency, quoted a "responsible source" in the defence ministry as saying the mission to combat criminal and terrorist activity by armed groups had been successful and would end on the morning of 12 April.

The Syrian Revolution General Commission reported at least 16 people had been killed on Tuesday, most of them in Deraa, Homs and the Damascus area. Five of those died under torture, it said.

The Syrian statement said the "heroic armed forces" would remain ready to respond to any attack by armed terrorist groups against civilians and members of the security forces.

Earlier, the British prime minister, David Cameron, warned Assad that he would face a day of reckoning for his savagery as Britain intensified the diplomatic pressure for a fresh UN security council resolution on Syria.

In some of his strongest criticism of Assad, the prime minister accused the Syrian leader of using Kofi Annan's peace plan to conduct rolling military operations against heavily populated areas.

"Far from fulfilling their commitments, the regime is cynically exploiting the window of diplomatic negotiations to crack down even harder on its own people," Cameron said in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, on the second leg of his Asian tour.

He called for the security council to throw all its weight behind the Annan plan and added: "Together we must ensure that there is a day of reckoning for Assad's crimes."

Annan, who is in Iran to enlist Tehran's help in ending the violence in Syria, said he was cautiously optimistic the situation could improve as early as Thursday morning if Damascus stuck to its word and respected the deadline. However, he also warned that "any further militarisation of the conflict would be disastrous".

The envoy has been pushing Damascus to withdraw its troops from cities and halt all violence by 6am on Thursday morning to salvage his peace plan.

Speaking to reporters in Tehran, Annan said he and his host agreed on the need to "find a peaceful solution to the crisis".

"I have received government assurances they will respect the ceasefire," he said. "If everyone respects it, I think by six in the morning on Thursday we shall see improved conditions on the ground."

Despite reports from the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) that 1,000 people have died in the past eight days, Annan has refused to give up on his plan.

"We still have time between now and 12 April to stop the violence," he said on Tuesday after visiting a refugee camp on the Turkish border.

"It's a plan we're all fighting to implement … It's a plan the Syrians have endorsed, and from the comments made by the opposition, they are also prepared to go along with it if the government meets its commitments to pull the troops out."

Rebutting claims that his plan had failed, Annan asked: "If you want to take it off the table, what would you replace it with?"

Western governments signalled continuing support for his efforts but used harsh language to condemn Assad. France called it a "flagrant and unacceptable lie" for Syria to claim it had already withdrawn its forces from populated areas, as required.

William Hague, the UK foreign secretary, said: "There is no evidence so far that the Assad regime has any intention of adhering to any agreement it makes." If efforts failed, Hague warned, Britain was ready to return to the UN security council to call again for a united international response "to this clear threat to international peace and security".

In Moscow, Syria's foreign minister, Walid al-Muallim, said his country was committed to the plan, and for the first time appeared to imply that Damascus would accept UN monitors as it had accepted Arab League monitors for an ultimately abortive mission last December. An advance UN party is due to deploy by 18 April.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, appeared to administer a rebuke to Muallim, saying the Syrian government "could have been more decisive" in implementing the plan, but he also called on opposition forces to halt violence.

Syrian opposition activists have scorned Annan as naive for appearing to believe that Assad would act in good faith. But independent commentators insisted he was being realistic. "The object of the exercise is to manoeuvre the Russians into a position where they have to go along with the international consensus," a former UN aide said.

In the absence of international readiness to intervene in Syria along the lines of Nato's role in Libya last year, no government is prepared to admit that diplomatic efforts have been exhausted, even if the prospects for success are privately rated as slender to nonexistent.

The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, accused Syrian forces of violating his country's border in an incident on Monday and said the Turkish government was considering its response, including measures "we do not want to think about".

Ahmet Davutoglu, his foreign minister, spent the day consulting security council colleagues but diplomats made clear that Ankara would not act unilaterally.

The SNC and the Free Syrian Army, the opposition's principal armed wing, accepted Annan's plan but rejected a last-minute demand by Assad to provide written guarantees that they would lay down their arms.

Annan told the UN he had been advised by Lavrov after his Moscow meeting with Muallim "that the Syrian government is no longer insisting on written guarantees, but would need me to assure that the other parties and governments also accept the plan".