BEIRUT/GENEVA - Many Syrian civilians are fleeing their homes to escape widening fighting between security forces and rebels, the Red Cross said on Friday, while major powers seemed unable to craft an alternative to envoy Kofi Annan's failing peace plan. UN monitors tried again to reach the scene of a reported massacre that has underlined how little outside powers, divided and pursuing their own interests in the region, have been able to do to halt 15 months of carnage in Syria. A day after one team was shot at and turned back, a member of the UN mission said another group of monitors was heading for the hamlet of Mazraat al Qubeir, where opposition activists say 78 people were shot, stabbed or burned alive on Wednesday. Some 300 UN observers are in Syria to monitor a truce between President Bashar al-Assad's forces and rebels that Annan declared on April 12 but was never implemented. Now reduced to observing the violence, they have already verified one massacre in Houla, a town where 108 men, women and children were slain on May 25. The Syrian authorities have condemned the killings in Houla and Mazraat al-Qubeir, blaming them on "terrorists". More and more civilians are fleeing their homes to escape fighting, while sick or wounded people are finding it hard to reach medical services or buy food, said a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva. "The situation is rather tense in terms of fighting in many, many areas of Syria," Hicham Hassan added. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the General Assembly on Thursday a civil war was imminent and that "terrorists are exploiting the chaos" in Syria, adding that hopes of implementing Annan's plan were fading.
