US diplomacy in top gear amid new killings

Damascus: Sunni rebel fighters killed some 60 Shiites in a fresh outbreak of sectarian violence in the Syria conflict, which on Wednesday takes centre stage in US-British talks in Washington.

A week on from fierce battles between Syrian soldiers and rebel fighters near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, 378 Austrian peacekeepers deployed to monitor the ceasefire zone began to pull out from the area.

And in a new macabre episode of the war, Sunni Islamist rebels celebrated the killing of some 60 Shiites, mostly pro-regime fighters, according to amateur video distributed by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

France meanwhile urged the international community to stop the Al Assad regime.

“We need to re-balance things because over the past few weeks the troops of Bashar Al Assad and especially Hezbollah and the Iranians, along with Russian arms, have gained considerable ground,” said Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius.

But he did not expand on how Syrian troops, buoyed by military support from its Shiite allies Hezbollah and Iran, should be stopped.

A day earlier, Fabius said: “[Al] Bashar... used chemical weapons in an outrageous manner. We must stop him because, if there is no re-balancing on the ground, there will be no peace conference in Geneva as the opposition will refuse to come.”

A US-Russian peace initiative that would bring regime and rebel representatives to the negotiating table appears stalled amid the regime’s advances on the battlefield.

No date has been set for such a conference to take place, almost 27 months into a conflict that the Observatory says has killed more than 94,000 people.

In Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry was set to meet his British counterpart William Hague, a day after President Barack Obama asked his security team to “look at all options” to help the opposition.

The US State Department said there would be no American “boots on the ground”.

Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron announced staunch Al Assad backer Russian President Vladimir Putin would fly to London for talks on Syria next week.

The announcement comes a day after Putin said he believed Al Assad should have implemented political reforms that could have averted the current bloodbath.