A UN humanitarian team was on Sunday in Syria to assess crisis needs as President Bashar al-Assad prepared to speak to the nation after Western leaders called for his resignation over his regime's brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.
Officials said the embattled president would appear on television in the evening after the ‘iftar’ meal that breaks the Ramadan fast, which has been a time of near-daily protests against Assad's regime.
"President Bashar al-Assad is to give the Syrian Arab TV on Sunday a comprehensive dialogue-interview about the current situation in Syria, the ongoing reform process, and about the implications of US and Western pressures on Syria politically and economically," the state-run SANA news agency reported.
Assad's television appearance will be his first since June 20, and only his fourth since pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in mid-March.
A UN mission began its first full day in Damascus on Sunday, arriving the previous evening to assess humanitarian needs in the wake of the crackdowns, which have left more than 2,000 people dead.
"Most of the team is in place in Syria now," a UN humanitarian department spokeswoman, Amanda Pitt, said late on Saturday. It was not known when the experts would start their work in areas of concern across the country.
The team is led by the head of the Geneva bureau of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Rashid Khalikov, who is now in Damascus, the official said.
The visit comes after 34 anti-regime protesters were killed on Friday by security forces as anti-regime rallies gripped the country after weekly Muslim prayers.
Activists said that two more people were killed Sunday and several others wounded in Rastan, a town between Homs and the flashpoint city of Hama, when security forces opened fire to disperse a demonstration, an activist said.
Also on Saturday tanks rumbled into the central city of Homs, adding a sense of urgency to the UN team's mission.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the death toll from Friday's crackdown on anti-regime protests stood at 34, with most of the victims in the Homs area.
One person was also wounded in the Al-Herak district of southern Daraa province where relatives and parents staged a protest outside a hospital demanding the bodies of their loved ones, the Observatory said.
Security forces carried out arrests in the city of Latakia on Saturday, the Observatory said, adding that many of those picked up were minors.
And human rights activist Malak Mahmud Sayed was arrested in Aleppo in the north when she was applying for a passport and taken to military security, several rights groups said.
Meanwhile, opponents of Assad opened two days of talks in Istanbul to launch a ‘national council’ to coordinate the fight against his regime, organisers said.
The latest anti-government rallies put to the test assurances given by Assad to UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Thursday that his security forces had ended operations against civilians.
UN human rights chief Navi Pillay told the Security Council there was ‘reliable corroborative evidence’ that Syrian forces are deliberately shooting anti-regime demonstrators.
Pillay also said in an interview with France 24 television that her agency had drawn up a list of 50 Syrians in senior positions that she said were responsible for violent repression.
Another UN official, Undersecretary General B. Lynn Pascoe, told the council that the death toll from the Syrian crackdown has now passed the 2,000 mark.
Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch urged the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to take action against member state Syria, saying it had violated its charter "by systematically and brutally suppressing peaceful civilian protests."
Frustrated that international calls for a halt to the bloodletting were being snubbed by Damascus, US President Barack Obama called on Thursday for Assad to quit.
That call was quickly echoed by the leaders of Britain, France and Germany, with Spain following suit on Friday.
But Russia and Turkey dismissed the calls for Assad's ouster.