Syrian ceasefire begins quietly, but leaders express doubts it will hold

A ceasefire between Syrian rebels and the regime of President Bashar Assad went into effect at 6 a.m. Thursday morning, a long-awaited step after over a year of fighting.

Syria promised to stop fighting in time for the deadline for a cease-fire brokered by special envoy Kofi Annan but reserved the right to respond to any aggression, a significant hedge against any end in the fighting that has convulsed the nation for more than a year.

Activists said the deadline passed without reports of major violence.

But there were only dim hopes for an abrupt end to the bloodshed. Syria has backtracked on previous peace plans and has characterized the uprising it’s facing as a terrorist plot.

The Britain-based Observatory of Human Rights, an activist group, says some shot were fired in a Damascus neighborhood after midnight Wednesday and that an explosion went off in a car in a Damascus suburb, causing no injuries.

US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke on the phone about the situation in Damascus, with both agreeing the UN security Council needed to take tougher action, according to a White House statement.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe called for a “robust observer force” to be sent to Syria to watch over the truce, according to Agence-France Presse.

Fares Mohammed, an activist in the Damascus suburb of Zabadani, said an army tank at a checkpoint fired three shells at a nearby open area between 5:50 a.m and 6:10 am. Thursday.

The rebel Free Syrian Army, a fighting force determined to bring down Assad, has said it will abide by the cease-fire. But the opposition is not well organized, and there are growing fears of groups looking to exploit the chaos.

A cease-fire could pose a major risk for the Assad regime.

Many activists predict that huge numbers of protesters would flood the streets if Assad fully complies with the agreement and pulls his forces back to barracks. But Syria has ways to maintain authority even without the military, in the form of pro-regime gunmen called “shabiha” and the fiercely loyal and pervasive security apparatus.

Over the course of the uprising, the military crackdown succeeded in preventing protesters from recreating the fervor of Egypt’s Tahrir Square, where hundreds of thousands of people camped out in a powerful show of dissent that drove longtime leader Hosni Mubarak from power.

The promise to stop fighting came Wednesday as Annan was in Tehran to seek support for his faltering plan to stop the country’s slide toward civil war. Iran is one of Syria’s most powerful allies.

Many world leaders see Annan’s plan — which called for Syria to pull its tanks back to barracks on Tuesday, followed by a full cease-fire by both sides by 6 a.m. Thursday — as the best hope to calm a year-old conflict that has killed 9,000 people.

But Washington expressed doubts late Wednesday over Assad’s commitment to still his forces’ guns.

US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice told reporters that the pledge to stick to the ceasefire was not credible, Reuters reported.

“The caveats in the letter are worrying and yet again cast into doubt the credibility of any such commitments but nothing casts more doubt on the credibility of the commitments than the fact that commitments have been made and made and made and broken and broken and broken,” she said.

Another 26 Syrians — including three children — were killed on Wednesday by Assad forces, the Local Coordination Committees reported.

Syria disregarded the Tuesday deadline, and was still attacking its opponents Wednesday with rockets and mortar fire.

In a statement carried on the state-run SANA news agency, a defense official said Syria’s army successfully fought off “armed terrorist groups,” which is the term Damascus uses to describe those behind the country’s year-old uprising.

“A decision has been taken to stop these missions as of the morning of Thursday, April 12, 2012,” the unnamed official said, adding: “Our armed forces are ready to repulse any aggression carried out by the armed terrorist groups against civilians or troops.”

The UN has ruled out any military intervention of the type that helped bring down Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, and several rounds of sanctions and other attempts to isolate Assad have done little to stop the bloodshed.

The Syrian uprising is among the most explosive of the Arab Spring, and the UN estimates 9,000 people have been killed in the conflict since March of last year.

The presence of Syrian tanks, along with security forces and snipers, have largely succeeded in preventing protesters from recreating the fervor of Egypt’s Tahrir Square, where hundreds of thousands of people camped out in a powerful show of dissent that ultimately drove longtime leader Hosni Mubarak from power.

It’s not clear how Syria can fully abide by Annan’s plan without risking an embarrassing — and potentially dangerous — Tahrir-style sit-in, or losing control over territory that government forces recently recovered from rebels.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.