Syrian Refugee surge to Turkey 'as troops mass'

Growing numbers of Syrians are escaping over the border into Turkey ahead of a feared government assault on the northern town of Jisr al-Shughour.

About 1,000 Syrians crossed the border overnight, a Turkish official said, bringing the total number of refugees in Turkey to about 1,600.

The UN's human rights chief has urged Syria not to "bludgeon" its own people.

It comes after the UK and France proposed a UN resolution condemning Syria's suppression of protests.

The draft stops short of authorising concrete action, but even so it is not clear when or if it might be put to a vote, correspondents say.

Russia and China have now said they strongly oppose the draft resolution, with Moscow saying Syria must settle its internal conflict without any foreign interference.

"The situation in this country, in our opinion, does not pose a threat to international peace and security," a Russian foreign ministry spokesman is quoted as saying by Russian state media.

The anticipated crackdown on Jisr al-Shughour is in response to claims by Damascus that armed gangs killed 120 members of the security forces there.

It says local residents have requested the army's intervention to restore peace and quiet.

But dissenting accounts say the violence was sparked by deserting soldiers, and that loyal troops have massacred peaceful civilians.

Local Turkish officials seem unsure how to handle the influx. Police are preventing journalists from talking to the refugees, many of whom are being housed in a fenced and tightly guarded Red Crescent camp in the town of Yayladagi.
In the Turkish village of Guvecci, less than a kilometre from the border, trucks have been moving along the road that runs inside Turkey along the border to pick up people who had just got out of Syria. The same road occasionally has Turkish ambulances taking injured refugees for medical attention in Turkey
Local Turkish residents, many of them relatives of the Syrians, know when and where people are trying to cross the border because they are able to communicate by mobile phones fitted with Turkish SIM cards.
The Syrian authorities have disrupted local mobile phone networks.

Human rights groups say more than 1,000 people have been killed since protests began in February against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad, and it now appears several hundred security forces may also have died.(bbc)