Arab League announces Syria reforms | Bangkok Post: breakingnews

Syrian forces killed seven people Saturday to crush anti-regime dissent, activists said, as the Arab League rejected foreign interference in Syria and announced an agreement on reforms.

Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi met President Bashar al-Assad with a 13-point document outlining Arab proposals to broker an end to the bloodshed in Syria, hold elections and push for reforms in the League member state.During his talks with Assad, Arabi said the League and other Arab countries ``reject any form of foreign interference in Syrian domestic affairs,'' the official news agency SANA reported.Arabi said upon returning to Cairo that they had reached an ``agreement on steps to carry out the reforms, (and) the elements will be submitted to the council of the Arab League,'' which meets in Cairo on Monday.SANA reported that Assad said that there was a need ``to not get caught in campaigns of disinformation against Syria.''It said Assad denounced the campaign of spreading ``wrong facts'' aimed in his opinion ``to harm the image of Syria and destabilise'' the country.Arabi's remarks come as the United States is set to ramp up work on a UN Security Council resolution targeting Syria.``We're looking at accelerating that work next week,'' US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in reference to a draft resolution likely to include sanctions.Arabi's mission came three days later than originally planned and as activists reported seven new deaths.Activists said security forces killed seven people in northwestern and central Syria on Saturday.``Five civilians were killed during a military and security operation to track down wanted people in the Al-Basateen neighbourhood of Homs,'' in central Syria, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.In the northwestern province of Idlib a 45-year-old man was killed when security forces manning a checkpoint opened fire, said the Observatory, while the Local Coordination Committees said a woman was killed at dawn in Saraqeb.Meanwhile, the Observatory reported that troops and security forces raided the village of Hit bordering Lebanon, arresting nine and damaging houses.The United Nations says more than 2,200 people _ mostly civilians _ have been killed in a crackdown on almost daily protests by pro-democracy and anti-regime demonstrators in Syria since mid-March.But Radwan Ziadeh, head of the Washington-based Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies in Syria, said in Tunis that ``more than 3,000 people have been killed, the majority of them civilians, have been killed in 112 Syrian towns and cities.''These included 123 aged under 18, he added.Damascus insists that it is battling ``armed terrorist gangs.''Arabi's trip came after...