BEIRUT/GENEVA (Reuters) - 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.
U.N. 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 U.N. 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 U.N. 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.
U.N. 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.
Annan himself warned the U.N. Security Council that the crisis could soon fly out of control, diplomats said. Annan, Ban's predecessor as U.N. secretary-general, called for "substantial pressure" on Damascus to stop the violence.
Given the failure of Annan's six-point plan, which called for talks on a political transition as well as a ceasefire and humanitarian access, there is little to check the violence, now often sectarian in nature, pitting Assad's minority Alawites against the Sunni Muslim majority.
DEADLY VIOLENCE
Protests and strife erupted across Syria on Friday, a day after 31 people were killed and the state news agency announced the burials of 29 soldiers and security men killed by rebels.
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