Syrian arms ship ‘heads home to Russia’

The UK National Maritime Information Centre is tracking the vessel’s
movements, reporting that the ship had avoided British and EU territorial
waters at all times.

On Tuesday night, the centre said the ship appeared to be heading north east
and was showing its next port of call as Murmansk.

Russia is the Assad regime’s last remaining international ally, and Western
governments are seeking to increase the pressure on Moscow over its military
support for Syria.

Western officials have said the ship was carrying military cargo including
Hind-D Mi-25 helicopter gunships.

The helicopters Hillary Clinton was referring to are believed to be part of a 36-strong consignment ordered by the Syrian government at the end of the Soviet era, some of which were transferred back to Russia recently for routine maintenance

Security sources said there could be no legitimate reason for the Syrian
regime to seek the helicopters.

The Hind is “a truly diabolical device, a fiendish contraption whose only
purpose is killing,” said a source.

As well as making public the intervention over what some diplomats dubbed “the
ship of death”, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office also disclosed that Mr
Hague has told his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, that Russian military
supplies to Syria must stop.

“We are working closely with international partners to ensure that we are
doing all we can to stop the Syrian regime’s ability to slaughter civilians
being reinforced through assistance from other countries,” the FCO
said.

The developments in the North Sea as world powers faced a moment of reckoning
over Syria in New York at the United Nations Security Council.

The council was due to convene to decide the future of the UN’s ill-fated
observer mission to Syria.

Lt-Gen Robert Mood, the chief monitor in Syria, briefed Council members in
private days after he was forced to suspend all patrols by his 300-strong
team in response to the rapidly deteriorating situation in the country.

His assessment came as Britain and the United States sent the strongest signal
yet that they were preparing to abandon the mission altogether by officially
declaring the failure of a ceasefire plan brokered by Kofi Annan, the
international peace envoy to Syria.

The observer mission set up by Mr Annan expires on July 20th, but Mark Lyall
Grant, Britain’s ambassador to the UN, indicated that the monitors could be
withdrawn even sooner.

“I think there will be a lot of member states of the council, including us,
who will be questioning now what the future is for the mission and,
therefore, by extension, the Annan plan, in light of these recent
developments on the ground,” he said.

Critics of the mission have long predicted that it was unlikely to work,
claiming that it did little other than to provide Bashar al-Assad, the
Syrian president, diplomatic cover ruthlessly to pursue his goal of crushing
the uprising against him.

More than 3,300 people are estimated to have been killed since the observers
first arrived in mid-April, with the scale of the fighting escalating
sharply this month following two civilian massacres blamed on pro-Assad
militiamen.

The fighting continued to rage, with regime forces once again shelling
opposition strongholds in the city of Homs, the most fiercely contested
battlefield of the 15-month uprising. More than 1,000 families are believed
to be trapped in the city’s nearly deserted Sunni districts.

The Syrian government claimed that it had tied to coordinate their evacuation
with the UN, but had been prevented from doing so by the rebels.

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