Red Cross: Syria in state of civil war

The International Red Cross has declared Syria’s 16-month bloodbath a civil war, a status with implications for potential war crimes prosecutions.

The Red Cross statement came as United Nations observers gathered details on what happened in a village where dozens were reported killed in a regime assault. After a second visit to Tremseh yesterday, the team said Syrian troops went door-to-door in the small farming community, checking residents’ IDs and then killing some and taking others away.

According to the UN, the attack appeared to target army defectors and activists.

Syria denied UN claims that government forces had used heavy weapons such as tanks, artillery and helicopters during the attack on Thursday.

Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi said the violence was not a massacre — as activists and many foreign leaders have alleged — but a military operation targeting armed fighters who had taken control of the village.

He said 37 gunmen and two civilians were killed, a far lower death toll than the one put forward by anti-regime activists.

The UN has implicated President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in the assault. The fighting was some of the latest in the uprising against Assad, which activists say has killed 17,000 people.

The Geneva-based group’s assessment is an important reference for determining how much and what type of force can be used, and it can form the basis for war crimes prosecutions, especially if civilians are attacked or detained enemies are abused or killed.

“We are now talking about a non-international armed conflict in the country,” ICRC spokesman Hicham Hassan said.

War crimes prosecutions would have been possible even without the Red Cross statement.

But yesterday’s pronouncement adds weight to any prosecution argument that Syria is in a state of war — a prerequisite for a war crimes case.

Previously, the Red Cross committee had restricted its assessment of the scope of the conflict to the hotspots of Idlib, Homs and Hama. But Hassan said the organisation concluded that the violence was widening.

Meanwhile, Syria’s army blasted rebel strongholds in Damascus with mortars yesterday, sparking the “most intense” fighting in the capital since the revolt erupted 16 months ago, a monitoring group said.