Beirut: Syrian forces loyal to President Bashar Al Assad fought rebels near the border with Turkey on Friday, activists said, the first clash since a UN-brokered ceasefire came into effect a day earlier.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the fighting broke out in the northwestern province of Idlib, close to the border with Turkey, after army troops deployed to try to clear rebels out of the area.
Some of the gunmen pulled out when the shooting started, the group's director Rami Abdul Rahman said. He said there were no immediate reports of casualties and the fighting appeared to have stopped.
The grassroots Local Coordination Committees said there had been heavy gunfire in the village of Kherbet Joz, close to the Turkish frontier. Dozens of tanks were deployed on the edge of the village, it said.
Abdul Rahman said that Thursday's ceasefire, brokered by international mediator Kofia Annan, appeared to be holding in the rest of the country, but there was still no sign of any army withdrawal from urban centres, as called for by Annan.
Meanwhile, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he did not expect truce to last as he questioned Al Assad's sincerity and appealed for observers to be deployed to report the situation.
Violence on Thursday killed at least 10 people, including seven civilians, and wounded dozens more.
Among the dead were two soldiers killed by rebels after forces loyal to Assad attempted to break up a demonstration in the central province of Hama.
Even so, the toll is markedly lower than it has been in recent weeks, when there have often been scores of people killed.
After the ceasefire came into force at dawn Thursday, peace envoy Kofi Annan declared he was "encouraged by reports that the situation in Syria is relatively calm and that the cessation of hostilities appears to be holding."
But as Al Assad's government and the rebels traded accusations of trying to wreck the ceasefire, Annan insisted "all parties have obligations to implement fully the six-point plan."
The UN-Arab League envoy's plan calls for the withdrawal of forces from urban areas, the release of arbitrarily detained people, freedom of movement for journalists and the right to demonstrate.
Despite the regime's commitment to pull back, the spokeswoman for the opposition Syrian National Council, Basma Qoudmani, said "we have concrete proof that heavy weapons are still in population centres."
The SNC, the most widely recognised opposition group in exile, and Internet-based activists called for peaceful demonstrations across Syria to test the government's readiness to accept public shows of dissent.
"We call on the people to demonstrate and express themselves... The right to demonstrate is a principal point of the plan," Burhan Galioun, head of the Syrian National Council, told AFP.
Qoudmani said: "The real test [of the ceasefire] will be if there is shooting or not when people demonstrate."
The Syrian Revolution 2011 activist group also called on its Facebook page for protests on Friday when the demonstrations have been the largest after noon prayers - under the rallying cry "A revolution for all Syrians."
But Syria's interior ministry insists people wanting to demonstrate must have permits.
"The right to demonstrate peacefully is guaranteed by law. We call on citizens to apply the law by requesting a permit before demonstrating," said a statement carried by the official Sana news agency.
The ministry said the measure is aimed at "securing the safety of citizens and to practise this right in a civilised manner."
On Friday, the UN Security Council could vote on a resolution authorising the deployment of observers to monitor both sides to the conflict in Syria, which monitors say has cost more than 10,000 lives since March 2011.
Sarkozy called for them to be promptly dispatched.
"I do not believe in Bashar Al Assad's sincerity, nor unfortunately in the ceasefire. I think... we must absolutely deploy observers so that at the very least we know what is happening," he told French television I-Tele.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon said plans were being drawn up to send observers to Syria, starting with the dispatch of a UN peacekeeping general as early as Friday.
An advanced mission of 20-30 observers could be in place early next week, diplomats said. The full mission would be at least 200 monitors.
Ban said "the world is watching however with sceptical eyes," adding that previous promises made by the regime "have not been kept."
In a statement after two days of talks in Washington, foreign ministers from the Group of Eight major economies, which include Western powers and Syria's main supporter Russia, urged "immediate" action to send in observers.
Syria's government urged tens of thousands of people who fled the violence both inside and outside the country to return home and offered an amnesty to opposition gunmen without "blood on their hands."
The rebel Free Syrian Army, for its part, insisted it was sticking to the ceasefire.
"The regime is being elusive. We are 100 percent committed to the ceasefire, but the regime is not abiding by it," said FSA spokesman Colonel Qassim Sa'ad Al Deen.
